3 ms·

"[would have spent] $1,199 with Anthropic, $980 with OpenAI" How many tokens is that, input/output-wise? (a) I'm curious if you feel like you got $2000 worth

"[would have spent] $1,199 with Anthropic, $980 with OpenAI" How many tokens is that, input/output-wise? (a) I'm curious if you feel like you got $2000 worth of value out of them in the last month? (b) I'm also curious if you would have gotten similar quality out of a slightly lower-cost provider of an open-weight model? (e.g. Kimi K2.6 and DeepSeek v4 Pro) and what the spend would have been for that. I myself have managed to spend not quite $4 on OpenRouter and have felt it was very worth it; I just have much smaller, or more targeted requests I guess. (Lately, adding features to a static site generator in Python, or setting up log forwarding via a docker compose file)

simonw 5mo ago
Claude Code: Input tokens: 52,545,485 Output tokens: 5,767,253 Cache create tokens: 5,112,029 Cache read tokens: 1,475,069,465 Total tokens: 1,538,494,232 Total cost: $1,199.79 OpenAI Codex: Input tokens: 52,598,013 Output tokens: 4,681,867 Reasoning output: 2,091,063 Cached input tokens: 1,153,844,864 Total tokens: 1,211,124,744 Total cost: $980.37 I'm confident I got value out of OpenAI - I've been mainly on Codex for the last few weeks. Not so sure I got that value from Claude, just because I've been using it a lot less and somehow the price came to about the same as OpenAI. Given the code I've been able to build in the past month I genuinely do think I got value for the API price version, and (don't tell OpenAI or Anthropic) I think I'd have paid full price. I've not spent nearly enough time with GLM-5.1 and co to compare, but I do know that the prompts I'm using with the agents are not prompts I would have expected to work just three months ago.
- NortySpock 5mo ago
  Cool! Thanks for the details, and your blog posts are usually interesting food for thought, so thank you for them too!
- krupan 5mo ago
  Are you saying that the software you wrote using those tools generated enough revenue to cover the $2000?
  - simonw 5mo ago
    Not yet, but that's because it was almost all open source and I'm really bad at generating revenue from that. When I account for the amount of time it saved me there's no question $2,000 was worth it.
regularfry 5mo ago
If it were me I'd be asking "How long would it have taken me to do that, and what's the rate I'd have been charging for the work I would have been doing otherwise?" Personally, I've probably spent $60 or so on OpenRouter in the last month or so and got a working project out of it that it would probably have taken me a fortnight to knock together (which is inevitably an under-estimate because it covered things I'd have to learn but K2.5/6 already knew). There's an orders-of-magnitude gap there.

simonw 5mo ago

Claude Code: Input tokens: 52,545,485 Output tokens: 5,767,253 Cache create tokens: 5,112,029 Cache read tokens: 1,475,069,465 Total tokens: 1,538,494,232 Total cost: $1,199.79 OpenAI Codex: Input tokens: 52,598,013 Output tokens: 4,681,867 Reasoning output: 2,091,063 Cached input tokens: 1,153,844,864 Total tokens: 1,211,124,744 Total cost: $980.37 I'm confident I got value out of OpenAI - I've been mainly on Codex for the last few weeks. Not so sure I got that value from Claude, just because I've been using it a lot less and somehow the price came to about the same as OpenAI. Given the code I've been able to build in the past month I genuinely do think I got value for the API price version, and (don't tell OpenAI or Anthropic) I think I'd have paid full price. I've not spent nearly enough time with GLM-5.1 and co to compare, but I do know that the prompts I'm using with the agents are not prompts I would have expected to work just three months ago.

NortySpock 5mo ago
Cool! Thanks for the details, and your blog posts are usually interesting food for thought, so thank you for them too!
krupan 5mo ago
Are you saying that the software you wrote using those tools generated enough revenue to cover the $2000?
- simonw 5mo ago
  Not yet, but that's because it was almost all open source and I'm really bad at generating revenue from that. When I account for the amount of time it saved me there's no question $2,000 was worth it.

regularfry 5mo ago

If it were me I'd be asking "How long would it have taken me to do that, and what's the rate I'd have been charging for the work I would have been doing otherwise?" Personally, I've probably spent $60 or so on OpenRouter in the last month or so and got a working project out of it that it would probably have taken me a fortnight to knock together (which is inevitably an under-estimate because it covered things I'd have to learn but K2.5/6 already knew). There's an orders-of-magnitude gap there.