Remember when AI was $$$ CHEAP?

[Bryan Xu]

Yeah, I’ve noticed the cost going up too.

At the same time, tools like Claude can do so much more than just conversations now.
Compared to 2-3 years ago, I can hand off much larger pieces of work and let it keep going while I focus on something else.

I still keep an eye on the spend, but for me the time saved and extra output have made it well worth it.

 

[carguyfiles]

Joe from the product side it's the opposite of the seat cost you're seeing. Unit prices keep falling. A background swap on a listing photo runs us about a penny all in, classify plus edit plus upscale. Video is the one that still costs real money per car so we meter that one.

Where the bill actually lives is the interactive work. The reasoning tokens for the agent that helps us build the product cost more per month than every image we generate for every dealer put together. Alex is right that Sonnet class handles most of the retail data work. We only run the big models on the parts that touch a customer or money and route everything else to the cheap ones. Model routing is most of the cost control at this point.

 

[joe.pistell]

Ugh. a $500 Fable 5 day. That's over the $200 base. I could have waited 36 hrs for the reset, but, time is more valuable. It's worth every penny, but it still is painful to a bootstrapper.