> I tried the cheapest provider on openrouter and burned through $50 in a few days.
I wish I could observe how some of us are using these tools.
I still struggle to spend $50 in tokens per month, and I exclusively use prepaid API tokens. This is in support of personal projects and two clients. There are billing cycles where I might spend upward of $400, but this is maybe once a year. This is offset by months like August wherein I spent $12 in tokens.
The other advantage with prepaid is that it handles the other direction much better. I don't even know what a quota limit feels like. Being blocked for hours is way more expensive to me and my clients than even $500/m. Losing an entire business day over this wouldn't work out.
I've managed to convince some others to try the same thing. $200/m flat fee is a pretty extreme constant expense if you can be more clever on average.
I think a lot of people are getting pushed around by FOMO effects into spending money on pointless subsidized tokens and have (valid) fears that if they don't maintain the same apparent economic leverage as their peers that they will be left behind. This isn't actually the case, much like lines of code are a really poor indicator for the quality or productivity over a codebase.
I wish I could observe how some of us are using these tools.
I still struggle to spend $50 in tokens per month, and I exclusively use prepaid API tokens. This is in support of personal projects and two clients. There are billing cycles where I might spend upward of $400, but this is maybe once a year. This is offset by months like August wherein I spent $12 in tokens.
The other advantage with prepaid is that it handles the other direction much better. I don't even know what a quota limit feels like. Being blocked for hours is way more expensive to me and my clients than even $500/m. Losing an entire business day over this wouldn't work out.
I've managed to convince some others to try the same thing. $200/m flat fee is a pretty extreme constant expense if you can be more clever on average.
I think a lot of people are getting pushed around by FOMO effects into spending money on pointless subsidized tokens and have (valid) fears that if they don't maintain the same apparent economic leverage as their peers that they will be left behind. This isn't actually the case, much like lines of code are a really poor indicator for the quality or productivity over a codebase.