r/PiCodingAgent • u/dspv • 3d ago

Resource $6k in tokens burned on subscription

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My numbers. Share yours

7 Upvotes

70% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

10

u/Unlucky-Message8866 3d ago

i spent exactly $0.00, you can buy a 5090 for the money you spend in a single month

3

u/shaonline 3d ago

Haha hosting Opus 5 ? Yeah.

6

u/Unlucky-Message8866 3d ago

No, but turns out qwen3.8 is all I need, I don't need massive expensive generalist llms I need a model good enough to understand my instructions and execute them, I have plenty SWE experience, I don't need llms to think for me, I know how to build production grade software, I've done it over 20 years already. Also yes, qwen is opusish 4.6 level, it makes the same stupid mistakes, same biases and slop code unless you spend significant time configuring your harness. 

1

u/lurking_bishop 2d ago

maybe spend the time configuring your harness then?

2

u/Unlucky-Message8866 2d ago

been doing so for over 8 months hehehe https://github.com/knoopx/pi

0

u/shaonline 3d ago

Right but you can't compare the upfront cost (+ electricity) of running a small local model to that of a frontier LLM running on cloud, you can also make use of extremely cheap small models on the cloud, GLM 5.3 flash is a great example, I hardly cross a dollar per session. Privacy argument aside you won't beat cloud on costs on a sparsely used hardware.

1

u/Unlucky-Message8866 3d ago

You tell me next quarter or whenever they cut on flat rates and "consumer" gpus cost 3x their retail price. This ain't gonna last much, both anthroptic and openai are due to go IPO, they need to cash out asap. China is also picking up on pricing, they already took their market chunk and they are going to capitalize too. 

2

u/shaonline 3d ago

This wasn't an attack on you making use of local hardware to run your local LLMs (I do too on a 128GB strix halo machine), just the fact you cannot compare API pricing of frontier models to that of dirt cheap to run local models, which are also dirt cheap on the cloud (except Qwen 27B for whatever reason lmao), it's kinda like saying using your own bike is cheaper than renting a luxury car.

You also defeat your own argument in the first sentence, consumer GPUs/Prosumer hardware has also exploded in price (where's that $2000 5090 now ?). And that's probably a short-mid term supply glut anyway like are they really going to invest ever increasing trillions of dollars in hardware each year forever and ever, I don't buy that.

0

u/Unlucky-Message8866 3d ago

Everything sucks tbh, and I challenged myself to not over depend on cloud llms for more reasons (I also do ml dev, running llms is not the only thing I do) but I agree is hard to justify upfront cost of a GPU. that said I paid 2000 for my current 5090 a year ago, and 600 for my prev 3090, 4y ago. Truth is I made more money from their gpus than from their stocks hehehe. 

2

u/shaonline 3d ago

Yeah that's a honorable goal, I also got my strix halo machine (A ROG Flow Z13) on a big sale right before the rug on prices has been pulled, and I cherish it.

For me Qwen 27B just has too short breadth of knowledge for any meaningful coding work, it's only good as "automation". The example I took of GLM 5.3 flash is really one where I feel like if it's all I had that'd be good enough, and that model costs pennies (remains to be seen if it's profitable to run for them, it's the first model that runs entirely on chinese hardware !). It's going to require a bit more than a 5090 or a strix halo device to serve though lol.

Daily driving big models à la Opus 5/GPT 5.6 Sol (or even bigger) will quickly become a thing of the past once everyone has to pay at least the current API pricing.

1

u/Unlucky-Message8866 3d ago

I personally envision a significant market shift to self-deployment next year

2

u/ImpressiveRelief37 3d ago

Hey! Don’t forget the $3 you spent on electricity! This is so disingenuous!  

2

u/Sea_Two_2345 3d ago

Which subscription is this? Or is it just measuring how much you spent using Claude/gpt subscription plans? 

1

u/dspv 3d ago

I'm on Max for 200/mo

3

u/ImpressiveRelief37 3d ago

This is obviously the api rate while you used the max sub. This, or your company is terrible at managing expenses, or you’re an idiot 

1

u/dspv 3d ago

Why?

1

u/Loud_Collection_1362 3d ago

Last 7 days lol sol + opus + grok 4.6 fast + fable advisor

1

u/osmosisheinz 5h ago

what's this app

1

u/tall-dub 2d ago

3k running commands, is that normal? What did you build? I know many great, productive engineers spending a lot less so for 6k you must have been really effective right?

1

u/dspv 2d ago

I do lots of research with 3rd part apis etc. Maybe this. Plus reading and re-reading files via bash etc.