Comment by stilesja

4 days ago

I burned though my weekly fable usage last night on the $200 plan. I had $200 in promotional usage credits and was in the middle of executing a moderate sized coding plan. Ran on usage credits for about 1h 15m and burned $120 in usage credits. I was astounded to see how fast the $ usage added up. One problem was that I was using sub-agent execution so multiple agents were running simultaneously and I realized at the end that claude had "Forgotten" my directive to use cheaper models as appropriate for sub-agent tasks so I was running multiple instances of Fable at once. Still hard to imagine paying per token. $200 a month is high, $200 per night is crazy.

I am too young (most of us on here are) to have lived through the paying for time on time-share machines in the 60s/70s, but this is giving me creepy memories of paying for sprintnet/telenet and tymnet... And I guess aol, compuserv, delphi. Are we really doing this computing model again?

  • If I remember well, visual studio/ msdn used to be like 5k-10k per year... Basically any IT tool cost a shit load of money.

    I have in mind 50k-100k ish for 3d studio max or was it softimage? (Well seems softimage https://www.awn.com/animationworld/siggraph-news-announcing-... ).

    So... Basically we are back to this era.

    • I think you were able to buy VS Pro perpetual licenses for one time 500-1000 at all times. Of course they had higher tiers and a subscription model which were more expensive but in reality for most people there was little to no added value.

      2 replies →

  • well spotted, I couldn't place the feeling, me it's like paying per minute phone costs when downloading on a modem. You know it will cost, but you do it anyway.

    The other weird thing about the subs is that if the agents aren't grinding if feels like I'm losing money.

I stopped using sub agents after they caused me to hit my limit to quickly. Had to create a separate account and pay for another max plan to unblock myself temporarily

  • Yeah sub-agents are a scam and the results are always worse since you lose all context, caching, etc.

I used fable to design a front-end, and damn! It's good! Frontend coding is dead. Design in a way also.

And it was damn cheap too! The main page cost was like 5 dollar.

You're good.

Dude that topped Meta's tokenmaxxxing board before it was shut down used 265 billion tokens in a month. I kid you not.