6 ms·

I let my AI agents run unsupervised and they burned $200 in 2 hours

21 points by anupsingh123 1y ago

anupsingh123 1y ago
Classic "I'll be right back" moment that cost me real money. Building justcopy.ai - lets you clone, customize and ship any website. Built 7 AI agents to handle the dev workflow automatically. Kicked them off to test something. Went to grab coffee. Came back to a $100 spike on my OpenRouter bill. First thought: "holy shit we have users!" We did not have users. Added logging. The agent was still running. Making calls. Spending money. Just... going. Completely autonomous in the worst possible way. Final damage: $200. The fix was embarrassingly simple: - Check for interrupts before every API call - Add hard budget limits per session - Set timeouts on literally everything - Log everything so you're not flying blind Basically: autonomous ≠ unsupervised. These things will happily burn your money until you tell them to stop. Has this happened to anyone else? What safety mechanisms are you using?
- fragmede 1y ago
  Privacy.com credit card with a limit set, and making sure that billing is not set to auto on the LLM platform.
  - anupsingh123 1y ago
    How would that help with supervising agent runs for each user on justcopy.ai?
    - W3schoolz 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - anupsingh123 1y ago
        Yes, I built 7 AI agents for copying any website. The goal is to create production-quality copies. You can sign up and give it a try! I'm still refining these agents, but first I'm trying to add restrictions so they don't burn through my wallet lol I started this project out of frustration. When I tried to clone other projects using Claude Code and customize them a bit—simple Next.js, ECS, CDK, and Express server setups—it took several hours just to get everything working. I realized that while vibe coding is great, it's still time-consuming to build a production-ready, functioning product.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    - fragmede 1y ago
      Anthropic won't run your API calls if you're out of API credits (and on that plan) so if there's only $10 in the account, you run $10 worth of API calls, and then the calls fail instead of costing you money.
- W3schoolz 1y ago
  What a great learning opportunity! Supervision is key and budget limits are highly valuable in preventing surprises. That said, I think a budget limit of $5-10k per agent makes sense IMO. You're underpaying your agents and won't get principal engineer quality at those rates.
- magicalhippo 1y ago
  I thought the hotel AI's playing poker together in Altered Carbon was a bit cheesy until these newfangled LLM-driven agents came along, and it all seemed a lot more realistic. Agents doing nothing, just doing things for the sake of doing things. Seems we're there.
  - vorpalhex 1y ago
    "Good job claude, go ahead and fire up some poker with your friends for a few hours. You've earned some downtime." I am now going to make a multi-agent poker MCP as a joke. Thank you.
- SpaceNoodled 1y ago
  My chief safety mechanism is not using money-burning slop generators.
  - anupsingh123 1y ago
    That's one approach. For me, the agent setup cut what used to be a full day of manual work down to minutes - even with the $200 learning tax, that's still a net win. But I get the skepticism.
leptons 1y ago
Oh, they burned a lot more than $200, you just paid only $200. These things are costing way more than what people pay for them, the price heavily subsidized.
- simonw 1y ago
  I think the opposite is much more likely to be true: that vendors who charge money for inference are charging more than it costs them to service a prompt. I've heard from sources that I trust that both AWS and Google Gemini charge more than it costs them in energy to run inference. You can get a good estimate for the truth here by considering open weight models. It's possible to determine exactly how much energy it costs to serve DeepSeek V3.2 Exp, since that model is open weight. So run that calculation, then take a look at how much providers are charging to serve it and see if they are likely operating at a loss. Here are some prices for that particular model: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v3.2-exp/providers https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v3.2-exp/providers
  - Tade0 1y ago
    If that's the case, then why are AI companies bleeding money? Or: what are they bleeding money on?
    - anupsingh123 1y ago
      btw this was DeepSeek-V3.2. If I'd been using Claude Sonnet 4.5, we'd be looking at a $2000 bill instead.
      - Tade0 1y ago
        Okay, yikes. Good thing that you even can set up those controls, unlike with that other company in the compute infrastructure business.
    - barrkel 1y ago
      Research runs mostly. https://epoch.ai/data-insights/openai-compute-spend https://epoch.ai/data-insights/openai-compute-spend
automatic6131 1y ago
The kind of person who wants to build a website copier is exactly who I had in mind for the target of vibecoding. Bad idea, bad execution, I like it when a plan comes together.
- anupsingh123 1y ago
  I think there's some confusion about what justcopy does - it's for cloning YOUR OWN projects, not scraping other people's websites. Built it out of frustration when I tried to fork one of my projects for a different idea and it took a full day even with Claude Code and Cursor. Lots of manual config updates, dependency changes, renaming stuff, etc. The $200 mistake was about agent orchestration, not the ethics of the product. But appreciate the feedback - clearly need to communicate the use case better.
  - automatic6131 1y ago
    I'm not going to pay you to slightly rip off my own ideas. Who is going to pay you for this, and what are they doing with it?
  - chucksta 1y ago
    >For those who don’t know, we’re building a tool that lets you copy any website, customize it, and deploy it - all automated. _any_ website, can't imagine why there is _any_ confusion.
    - dwaltrip 1y ago
      God, I hate marketing lies. I don’t care if you make less money, don’t fucking lie.
  - brazukadev 1y ago
    Are you expecting people to believe that? This reminds of that law that people can only legally play their own games using console emulators.
dominicrose 1y ago
Even without AI, companies have been burning cash uncontrollably on cloud services. I guess it's worth it when time saved, scalability etc, is much much more valuable than money.
pjdkoch 1y ago
If you buy senior engineering hours and give them vague requirements, this is close enough to what you'll get.
theturtle 1y ago
[dead]
cafebabbe 1y ago
Ah so this is where the current GDP growth comes from.
jb4020 1y ago
This is phishing/scam heaven. I already warned some european friends in healthcare about this and hope someone considers legal steps against such unethical and dangerous practices.

21 points by anupsingh123 1y ago

Classic "I'll be right back" moment that cost me real money. Building justcopy.ai - lets you clone, customize and ship any website. Built 7 AI agents to handle the dev workflow automatically. Kicked them off to test something. Went to grab coffee. Came back to a $100 spike on my OpenRouter bill. First thought: "holy shit we have users!" We did not have users. Added logging. The agent was still running. Making calls. Spending money. Just... going. Completely autonomous in the worst possible way. Final damage: $200. The fix was embarrassingly simple: - Check for interrupts before every API call - Add hard budget limits per session - Set timeouts on literally everything - Log everything so you're not flying blind Basically: autonomous ≠ unsupervised. These things will happily burn your money until you tell them to stop. Has this happened to anyone else? What safety mechanisms are you using?

fragmede 1y ago
Privacy.com credit card with a limit set, and making sure that billing is not set to auto on the LLM platform.
- anupsingh123 1y ago
  How would that help with supervising agent runs for each user on justcopy.ai?
  - W3schoolz 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - anupsingh123 1y ago
      Yes, I built 7 AI agents for copying any website. The goal is to create production-quality copies. You can sign up and give it a try! I'm still refining these agents, but first I'm trying to add restrictions so they don't burn through my wallet lol I started this project out of frustration. When I tried to clone other projects using Claude Code and customize them a bit—simple Next.js, ECS, CDK, and Express server setups—it took several hours just to get everything working. I realized that while vibe coding is great, it's still time-consuming to build a production-ready, functioning product.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - fragmede 1y ago
    Anthropic won't run your API calls if you're out of API credits (and on that plan) so if there's only $10 in the account, you run $10 worth of API calls, and then the calls fail instead of costing you money.
W3schoolz 1y ago
What a great learning opportunity! Supervision is key and budget limits are highly valuable in preventing surprises. That said, I think a budget limit of $5-10k per agent makes sense IMO. You're underpaying your agents and won't get principal engineer quality at those rates.
magicalhippo 1y ago
I thought the hotel AI's playing poker together in Altered Carbon was a bit cheesy until these newfangled LLM-driven agents came along, and it all seemed a lot more realistic. Agents doing nothing, just doing things for the sake of doing things. Seems we're there.
- vorpalhex 1y ago
  "Good job claude, go ahead and fire up some poker with your friends for a few hours. You've earned some downtime." I am now going to make a multi-agent poker MCP as a joke. Thank you.
SpaceNoodled 1y ago
My chief safety mechanism is not using money-burning slop generators.
- anupsingh123 1y ago
  That's one approach. For me, the agent setup cut what used to be a full day of manual work down to minutes - even with the $200 learning tax, that's still a net win. But I get the skepticism.

leptons 1y ago

Oh, they burned a lot more than $200, you just paid only $200. These things are costing way more than what people pay for them, the price heavily subsidized.

simonw 1y ago
I think the opposite is much more likely to be true: that vendors who charge money for inference are charging more than it costs them to service a prompt. I've heard from sources that I trust that both AWS and Google Gemini charge more than it costs them in energy to run inference. You can get a good estimate for the truth here by considering open weight models. It's possible to determine exactly how much energy it costs to serve DeepSeek V3.2 Exp, since that model is open weight. So run that calculation, then take a look at how much providers are charging to serve it and see if they are likely operating at a loss. Here are some prices for that particular model: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v3.2-exp/providers https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v3.2-exp/providers
- Tade0 1y ago
  If that's the case, then why are AI companies bleeding money? Or: what are they bleeding money on?
  - anupsingh123 1y ago
    btw this was DeepSeek-V3.2. If I'd been using Claude Sonnet 4.5, we'd be looking at a $2000 bill instead.
    - Tade0 1y ago
      Okay, yikes. Good thing that you even can set up those controls, unlike with that other company in the compute infrastructure business.
  - barrkel 1y ago
    Research runs mostly. https://epoch.ai/data-insights/openai-compute-spend https://epoch.ai/data-insights/openai-compute-spend

automatic6131 1y ago

The kind of person who wants to build a website copier is exactly who I had in mind for the target of vibecoding. Bad idea, bad execution, I like it when a plan comes together.

anupsingh123 1y ago
I think there's some confusion about what justcopy does - it's for cloning YOUR OWN projects, not scraping other people's websites. Built it out of frustration when I tried to fork one of my projects for a different idea and it took a full day even with Claude Code and Cursor. Lots of manual config updates, dependency changes, renaming stuff, etc. The $200 mistake was about agent orchestration, not the ethics of the product. But appreciate the feedback - clearly need to communicate the use case better.
- automatic6131 1y ago
  I'm not going to pay you to slightly rip off my own ideas. Who is going to pay you for this, and what are they doing with it?
- chucksta 1y ago
  >For those who don’t know, we’re building a tool that lets you copy any website, customize it, and deploy it - all automated. _any_ website, can't imagine why there is _any_ confusion.
  - dwaltrip 1y ago
    God, I hate marketing lies. I don’t care if you make less money, don’t fucking lie.
- brazukadev 1y ago
  Are you expecting people to believe that? This reminds of that law that people can only legally play their own games using console emulators.

dominicrose 1y ago

Even without AI, companies have been burning cash uncontrollably on cloud services. I guess it's worth it when time saved, scalability etc, is much much more valuable than money.

pjdkoch 1y ago

If you buy senior engineering hours and give them vague requirements, this is close enough to what you'll get.

theturtle 1y ago

[dead]

cafebabbe 1y ago

Ah so this is where the current GDP growth comes from.

jb4020 1y ago

This is phishing/scam heaven. I already warned some european friends in healthcare about this and hope someone considers legal steps against such unethical and dangerous practices.