Comment by Gigachad
7 hours ago
It does make me wonder how the hosted stuff is so cheap. For pretty much everything else, hosted/rented is more expensive but offers better convenience and flexibility. But for AI, even if you consider the total lifetime cost and are utilizing it heavily. You never break even by buying.
They're not cheap at all. I did one xhigh Qwen 3.8 27B agentic coding task last week via OpenRouter and it cost me like $10.
99% of the cost was in input tokens, I only used like 100k ish output tokens. It was a one shot task asking the agent to implement proxy injection to Guice. It did a pretty amazing job.
If you were to use hosted LLMs for a lot of agentic coding, a maxed out M5 Ultra Mac Studio would pay for itself in under a year.
Qwen is weirdly expensive. Deepseek v4 flash is dirt cheap. You'd need at least 128gb of ram to run this model and in my experience, a days work with it costs around 80 cents.
So I ran the math, assuming the agent takes 75 turns per 200k context, with deepseek v4 flash it costs around $2.57 to reach 1M context in 375 turns. Cached input costs scale quadratically with # of agent turns.
Considering that I hit the 1M compaction multiple times per day with codex, it would definitely cost at least $5-8/day to use deepseek how I normally use codex.
It's a time sharing agreement, just like old-school mainframes and such. You're not getting a full machine to yourself, but a few cycles at a time.
There are economies of scale but there’s also a data center bubble (probably) so there might be some selling dollars for fifty cents going on.