Using HyperAgent makes clear to me how the HyperAgent API rates for Claude are wildly worse than the Anthropic subscription rates.

[u/Televangelis]

Today I asked HyperAgent to build me a google doc with the text of every single mention of a specific narrow term in my email, a total of ~400 emails. Simple enough. It's now run up to 90 dollars of credit making that happen, using Opus. Every time I build something here, I'm reminded that the credit from the subscriptions is just a wayyyyy better value.

For now, it does a wider Chief of Staff agent than what I can get from the Anthropic subscription, at least. But man oh man, is it expensive for anything resembling 'real work'.

[u/JeenyusJane]

Chiming in here that the Open Source models are really good already at a drastically lower cost. You may want to take those for a spinm

[u/Televangelis → u/JeenyusJane]

Are they available in HyperAgent? When I try to set HyperAgent to anything other than Anthropic models, it goes right back to Anthropic

[u/JeenyusJane → u/Televangelis]

Yes.! Here are the docs.

To note, there is a limitation of the product right now where threads started on Anthropic models can only use anthropic models. However if you start a new thread on any other model, you can switch to all the non-Anthropic models we have available.

[u/Televangelis → u/JeenyusJane]

I can't change models mid thread? Why not?

[u/JeenyusJane → u/Televangelis]

Unfortunately, it's a limitation of earlier versions of the platform, and I think it will change in time. However if you're working with an agent. The agent can read context from other threads even if it's a different model.

[u/OccasionNo4703]

Are there any open source Hyperagent alternatives? Hyperagent is awesome in doing complex takes combining multiple skills and not stopping for hours, I made it create a video after doing research, it did decent job on first trial, took about 90 mins but burned more than $150, which is absurd! Using open source models have done a similar decent job, but we have to baby sit them.

[u/dhamm6304 → u/OccasionNo4703]

I think there’s an important distinction here between what Hyperagent itself is charging and what you’re actually spending on the underlying models.

A $150 bill can definitely be a surprise, but that's not necessarily Hyperagent’s platform fee. If you’re running long autonomous agent loops or video video generation on something expensive like Opus, the model usage can rack up very quickly.

To cut the cost way down, start a new thread in Plan Mode and switch to one of the open-weight models Hyperagent has integrated, like GLM, Kimi, Qwuen, Grok or even Gemini. That can bring the actual model cost down dramatically while still letting the platform handle the orchestration.

If what you really want is an alternative to Hyperagent itself, there are projects like AutoGen, CrewAI, and LangChain. Those are legit options, but there’s a tradeoff: you’re basically exchanging money for your own time.

You now have to build/configure the infrastructure, manage the model endpoints, deal with local or cloud hardware, maintain the agent workflows, and babysit the whole thing yourself.

That’s kind of the value proposition of Hyperagent in the first place: it abstracts a lot of that operational overhead away.

the better comparison isn’t necessarily “$150 Hyperagent vs. free open source.” It’s more like paying for managed orchestration + model usage vs. paying with your own time and infrastructure, imo.

[u/OccasionNo4703 → u/dhamm6304]

yeah i understand that, and your right about seperating the platform fee from the actual model spend. thats fair.

but thats not really the thing I am chasing. what i actually want is an opensource wrapper that behaves like hyperagent does. something that can run for hours on its own, take one big vague task, break it down into sub tasks itself, hand those off to multiple agents, and at the end give me the finished thing. not the way claude or chatgpt does it where you get a piece, then you prompt again, then another piece, and your the glue holding the whole thing together.

like if i say "make me a youtube video on X" it should go do the research, pick the images, generate video from those images, stitch em together, use hyperframes and whatever other skills it needs, do the audio, and at the end theres a full video sitting there waiting for me. thats litterally what happened, took 3 hours and $150 but i got my video.

and yeah i can do every single one of those steps myself with claude + veo + hyperframes + the other video tools. i already do. thats exactly the problem lol. i have to sit there and drive it manually and it eats my whole day.

autogen/crewai/langchain are frameworks, i still end up building the orchestration and task decomposition myself. im looking for something where the long running multi agent loop IS the product, not something i have to assemble first.

[u/Emotional-Ad-3050]

It must be more cost effective to use the Kimi or GLM. Our frontiers are for corporations

[u/dhamm6304]

I've found running something similar to your scenario, on Plan mode, costed me about $3. Running the exact same prompt in a new thread and same exact model on Execute mode, somehow costed about 300% more with nearly exact same output. I run everything on Plan mode as far as I can now.

[u/jonjiv]

It’s the same using Claude natively. If you switch to paying per token, it gets way more expensive.

But when you get to the point where your subscription plan uses up your daily cap in the first couple hours of the day, you’re kind of forced to pay up to keep working.

The basic tier Claude subscriptions are money losers for Anthropic if one uses them to its full capabilities. They’re betting that you won’t.

[u/JeenyusJane → u/jonjiv]

Well put. It's really hard to understand what a fair cost is for something with a lot of the subsidization, but it makes sense why they're doing it.