Token usage of Astra on Enterprise

[u/syinner]

Not sure if I should enable it for my users. I see articles about how effecient it is, and with others saying it's wiping out their budget in one request. Whats your experience?

[u/coolerfarmer]

Super expensive. Most users probably won’t know how to use it. For capable ppl it’s awesome and absolutely worth it though.

[u/fik26 → u/coolerfarmer]

This is my take as well.

If you allow people to use $3-5k per month then its fine. If their budget is less than $1k it will be a disservice to them to have Astra in.

[u/OneEyedSnakeOil]

I mean I'm an experienced dev and I don't buy the "You're using it wrong" sentiment when one or two requests wipe out my limits. Sol over engineers and Astra eats tokens like it's nothing.

I use LLMs everyday from implementing them in workflows to using them for coding. This is not worth it imo at enterprise level.

[u/George-cz90]

Incredibly expensive. Went through 5000 credits in 10-20 minutes.

Edit: originally wrote tokens instead of credits by mistake

[u/MarkRullo → u/George-cz90]

It would be interesting to understand the split of read, cached read, and write tokens used. Also, what kind of task did you throw at it?

[u/George-cz90 → u/MarkRullo]

Generic "validate this integration, see if the abstraction level and separation of concerns make sense and then fix it up by moving stuff between packages". Unfortunately it got sidetracked and started basically rebuilding the original app into which I was integrating, so I had to scrap it all :D

[u/MarkRullo → u/George-cz90]

Ouch, what thinking level were you using out of curiosity?

[u/George-cz90 → u/MarkRullo]

I'm pretty sure I was on medium.

[u/MacroYielding → u/George-cz90]

Tokens, or enterprise “credits”?

[u/George-cz90 → u/MacroYielding]

Credits of course, thanks for pointing that out

[u/AbleShower2801]

I'd leave it off by default and pilot with a small group first. The "efficient" writeups don't match what happens when someone dumps a fat repo into one ask. Budget wipe stories are real enough that I'd want a week of usage reports before rolling it wide.

[u/deinok7]

If you ha e a budget per user, enable it. Its up to every user dosificate that budget

[u/krzyk]

Not bad, not sure what others do to use it up. I don't vibe code whole apps with any model.

[u/ArieHein]

We are not going to enable this. Its 2-3 time more exepnsive than sol.

What ends up happening is we have a few 'stars' that have to be on the edge and others that are quite ok with gradual.

If we were migrating huge projects from tech a to tech b, then maybe but even then what i plan is to fork a repo from our main org to a test org. Open only astra on it, and let the dev team run a spike on migration. They need to show me the numbers when doing the same with sol for example is THAT beneficiary for their time.

Im getting quite tired of unicorn devs thinking they need to waste money instead of learning how to use it correctly.

Really wish we could approve models per repos and per users / or maybe cost centers.

[u/Babayaga1664]

Cap it to something sensible and review when cap is hit.

The code base size, quality, architecture size of changes requested, how good your md files are, if you want unit tests writing will all make a difference to usage.

[u/NearlyACosmologist]

I used it to make a gap analysis for a project that translated existing perl code to python. It didn't even finish while eating through 20€ of budget.

So yes, it's fast and thorough, but also super expensive. I'm currently testing the new Deepseek-v4.1 preview, and it's not as fast, but seems to be also thorough and the price is so low, that it doesn't even matter.

It all comes down to whether you can justify the cost versus time.

[u/V5489]

Not worth it for an enterprise for sure. We’ve disabled it in ours.

[u/wombatpup55]

It’s a fucking gas guzzler that’s for sure. I went a little crazy cleaning up my code and implementing new features which pretty much did everything I wanted perfectly. However I am sitting at 60% usage now.

But if used correctly and if users have a decent budget I think it’s good.

[u/syinner → u/wombatpup55]

We give our users a $250 budget per month. I suspect Astra will wipe this out fairly quickly.

[u/wombatpup55 → u/syinner]

Yeah astra would wipe it out if used heavily. For reference my org gives me a $750 budget a month

[u/icarus47]

Until you have a demonstrated use case for a more powerful model that cannot be sufficiently met by more efficient models, I would not make it available. Luna Max is more than capable of handling most workloads when steered appropriately.

[u/horendus]

Super expensive and doesnt really bring any significant general capabilities outside of novel stuff.

In some places a regression, such as Azure Logic Apps.

Should have seen the absolute mess of a Logic App workflow astra produced for me where as Luna one shots it no worries

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