I spent $800 in a few hours when my sub maxed out because I was trying to get something done and had a long car ride to let it churn.
replyTheir api pricing is absurdly expensive.
Agreed I’ve seen what they’re paying at work for the OpenAI API but I also think that includes reserved capacity and ZDR O_o. Try some add on credits next time if you can. I was curious at how far $20 would go (500 credits). Watched them go to zero over an hour and assumed it’d stop. It then ran for another 6 hours and completed the task despite the meter at 0. What a task means is very unclear but it’s definitely not pricing sol at $20/500 credits an hr in tokens.
reply> Their api pricing is absurdly expensive.
replyI assume at this point that it subsidizes subscriptions.
Subscriptions are a mechanism to attract developers, who then advocate that their company should use the API.
replyyes, it absolutely does.
replyI've gotten more work done on a second chatgpt pro $100/mo subscription than I did with ~$150 of paying for usage through the app.
Massively subsidized. As soon as my Claude switches from subscription to overage I have to tap out quickly.
replyThis is a big part of the reason I went local-only. Subscription limits are horrible for having a decent workflow.
replyYeah, it sure was convenient that there was a RAM pricing crisis right when Apple was making local inference viable. All because of a promise that AI companies will buy more of it... with money they don't yet have, whereas Apple does have lots of money.
replyBecause API pricing is for corporations and subscriptions are for consumers.
replyAre we supposed to just shrug at the idea of businesses paying 10x more for raw materials than consumers? How long can this go on?
replyHopefully for a long time this is like the beginnings of a vac startup, enjoy while you can before the enshitification comes
replyI thought corporations were meant to be smart and get b2b / volume discounts - not pay 5-10x what the man in the street is paying.
replyFOMO. This won't last forever.
replyA billion a day? How many agents are you running?
replywith ultracode, it goes fast. I can easily get to a billion on a busy day.
replyThat's wild. I was gonna say 3-5 billion a month is more reasonable summed across all token types.
replyI am also on the pro $200 plan, the limit is high enough to do what I want for a week, and binge run Ultra Fast last day to use the remaining credits.
replyI have mine churning like butter and I'm rarely hitting a billion tokens per day, what's your workflow look like?
replyPretty basic. The codex app with one conversation per project and several running simultaneously all hours. I’m going for max caching that way and it never gets lost even with compaction somehow. Each has a plan with milestones to keep up to date and a thin agents file. I check in on them in the Remote app. Use case is protocol and control reverse engineering of audio hardware. I think they must be identifying the heavy use agent sessions and cranking up their cache lives so it’s not a big deal for them.
replyI'd like to see a benchmark on this specific topic: Reverse engineer the hardware protocol from a driver, or just migrate a driver from one OS to another.
replyI’ve chipped on it with each model since 5.2 but 5.6 sol is something else. When it first came out I’d get some refusals but they’ve since stopped. I wonder what an ideal candidate benchmark task would be for that?
replyA billion tokens a day is 11,000 tokens a second sustained. How many tokens per second are you getting off of GPT 5.6 Sol per project?
replyUltra mode spins up many sub-agents. On a particularly challenging task, I’ve had as many as 29 agents working at one time.
replyAlso if you don’t specify, most end up being the same as the parent model which is pretty wasteful.
I engineered a skill that spins up Terra High agents for most sub-agents, resorting to Sol Medium for technical research and Luna High for code/in-project research tasks.
On a slightly different topic, Luna Max is incredibly capable and doesn’t use as much quota (Luna tokens are dirt cheap).
Most importantly, are you seeing a return on investment for time and ultimate outcome?
replyNo one can judge the enjoyment, learning, and hobby aspects. Just wondering if there is an end goal for that much overall expenditure (time, money, energy, etc.)
I absolutely see a return. I do not pay for this (we have a corporate gateway), for the price of a junior developer I can get 3-4-5 senior developer's work done. it's insane value.
replyOften people are counting all tokens, including cached input tokens, for those more impressive "billions of tokens" quotes.
replyAh, thanks, I'd missed that nuance in the other reply!
replySome people just do crazy stuff. For example this now ex yc guy who said he has agents constantly scanning Sf govt apis and forming dashboards just because
replyIs anyone hitting caps without agents or API usage? Seems very difficult.
replyYeah I am, building large software with a vision - requirements - architecture - plan - code workflow. One Claude max account is enough to work on one, maybe two of those at a time (call it 15B tokens/month per project)
replyI’m exclusively using ultra and I run out in 3-4 days consistently. Those resets are great but I’ve noticed they like to cluster them at the start of the cycle, would be better if they spaced them out more.
replyA billion tokens per day?? Plausible estimates put the energy use at about 0.001 Wh/token, which means you're using 1000 kWh/day in electricity, just to generate slop. That's about the same as 50-100 houses. 300kg of CO2 per day - roughly the same as flying from London to New York every three days.
replyI think on average AI energy usage is not as big a deal as everyone is panicking about, but your usage is truly absurd and I don't know how you can live with that. It's immoral.
That’s for i/o tokens, mostly output. 90-98% is cache read usually, so you can divide electricity use by 10 at least.
replyAs for co2, it depends on the provider, it could be way lower as well.
As for ethics, you don’t know what he works on, and how effectively - he might be saving 10x that much of co2 for the planet.
I'm glad someone is voicing this. Overconsumption at that level is not defensible. However if they meant cached tokens so it's not that bad.
replyI can't speak for that guy, but I'm a physicist and work in clean energy... So it's not too hard! That said, I usually am closer to 10M on days I do heavy coding, so not nearly that bad.
replyToken caching is a thing
replyYou really think OpenAI is selling $1500/mo of electricity (at $0.05/kwh) for $200/mo?
replyI’m guessing that Wh/token estimate is several orders of magnitude too high.
They certainly could be using that much electricity at a loss based on their profitability, which doesn’t exist.
replyLeaked financial documents from 2025 show the company reported an operating loss of approximately $20.9 billion against $13.1 billion in revenue.
As a company... but that includes things like research costs, model training etc. to determine if they're selling electricity at a loss you should look at inference costs bc that's the "thing" they're selling
reply1. You do not know what they're using it for.
2. Get off your high horse please.
3. Immoral my ass.
reply> Immoral my ass.
replyIs any amount of tokenmaxxing moral?
Is any form of energy usage moral?
reply> just to generate slop
replyDo some people still deny you can do a shit ton of work with AI?
Most tokens are cached.
reply"slop"? come on. we're not in 2020 anymore, Dorothy.
replyI can’t sign up for that. I tried authorizing Codex a couple days ago. For some reason, their system says my phone number has been used for verification 3 times even though it definitely has not. I’ve had this phone number for over 20 years. OpenAI support is useless. They just keep repeating the policy without actually helping me.
replyUse TextVerified, load up like $5 of credit and OAI verification is like $1.00. Then when your account is made, ensure 2FA/passkey is setup then you don't need to worry about the phone number.
replyThanks for that tip!
replyYes I filed a support ticket with them and explained that their system is broken and they just did not care. I explained how it was impossible for me to use it 3 times already as I've only made 2 chatgpt accounts EVER, and only recalling entering my phone number for one of the two chatgpt accounts. I told them that this issue locked me out of codex and chatgpt for work and they weren't willing to do anything about it. Totally useless support.
replyI ended up borrowing my gf's phone number just so I could get access for work. Ridiculous
Get a burner and use it? If you're spending $200/mo on something, $40 or whatever for a burner phone seems like a pretty cheap price.
replyOh no fuck that, business 101 is make sure that your checkout page works. There is plenty of competition in this sector, take your money elsewhere.
replyYou can get a phone number online for a few dollars.
replyHistorically those are less useful because some of the verification systems require a real phone number and that your name is associated with the account, depending on what and how they verify. It's annoying, I use a google voice number as my primary, and it often gets rejected.
replyGood2Go is $5/mo for a real SIM with unlimited talk/text + 1GB data.
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