They're not cheap at all. I did one xhigh Qwen 3.8 27B agentic coding task last week via OpenRouter and it cost me like $10.
reply99% of the cost was in input tokens, I only used like 100k ish output tokens. It was a one shot task asking the agent to implement proxy injection to Guice. It did a pretty amazing job.
If you were to use hosted LLMs for a lot of agentic coding, a maxed out M5 Ultra Mac Studio would pay for itself in under a year.
Qwen is weirdly expensive. Deepseek v4 flash is dirt cheap. You'd need at least 128gb of ram to run this model and in my experience, a days work with it costs around 80 cents.
replySo I ran the math, assuming the agent takes 75 turns per 200k context, with deepseek v4 flash it costs around $2.57 to reach 1M context in 375 turns. Cached input costs scale quadratically with # of agent turns.
replyConsidering that I hit the 1M compaction multiple times per day with codex, it would definitely cost at least $5-8/day to use deepseek how I normally use codex.
It's a time sharing agreement, just like old-school mainframes and such. You're not getting a full machine to yourself, but a few cycles at a time.
replyThere are economies of scale but there’s also a data center bubble (probably) so there might be some selling dollars for fifty cents going on.
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