alt Hacker NewsAnthropic is a bit nuts, I had $260 of credits on my max account for the extra usage the other night. It was expiring, so I figured I'll fire up an agentic swarm to deep dive and make some deep changes to some old cold bases.. literally 25 minutes or less, $260 burnt, it didn't get get into the implementation, just wrote a ton of useless plans for the most part. It really opened my eyes to what they expect to charge people.. wayyyy overpriced.
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I managed to lose around $300 in credits I had saved for some emergency /fast sessions the following way: switch to Fable. Work on the design. Downgrade to Opus for the build. If any of other parallel Opus session has /fast enabled it seems to enable it for the newly spawned session by default. Before I knew it, the $300 was gone. I think the bug is now solved, but it was rather unpleasant. I dont ever remember bugs that would drain my wallet - with claude code its just another Tuesday. Still love it.
And at that cost they're still not profitable. It's going to be a bumpy road ahead...
I had same experience with OpenAI. I have the $200/month plan and use 5.6 Sol all the time. What would normally use about 2% of my weekly allowance burned through $100 of credits in 40 minutes.
It’s crazy how different the credit cost and subscription cost are.
With the $200 subscription, I can have Fable on ultracode working for hours and not dent the usage limits.
Its tough to go from max account at home and pay per usage enterprise account at work with heavy usage limits... but the limits are there because pricing is insane. Feel like I'm in the $5 Uber rides phase at home.
You plugged in a space heater on a roofless house.
There is some element of responsibility on the user to guide and monitor the model/harness and not let it rip to burn tokens.
> wayyy overpriced
Maybe they consider that hiring a person to do it would have cost at least as much and taken much more time, so paying them is a bargain.
Anthropic is the new AWS.
Amazon's first principle is the Customer Obsession. Making customers happy.
Fun bit is that the human psychology rates personal looking fixes better than having no issues at all.
For example, AWS overcharges you, you contact support, and more or less hassle free they refund or issue credits. The customer feels appreciated, or at least got something "extra" or "special treatment".
Meanwhile, any other (small) cloud. Simple, no weird charges. Even _most_ of network egress is free. But, no reason to call support or feel "extraordinary". Comes out as "meh" against Amazon's "top tier" support model...
You should just spend those towards a cursor subscription.
Hint: The new models are really good at burning tokens.
I've had to use it a bit for work, and it's been remarkable watching the degradation in performance with the default suggested current models (Opus 5 as a prime example) vs the models that got them huge attention a year ago (Opus 4.6)
If you give 4.6 a spec, or existing code to implement a feature in, it will ask some pointed questions if there's something unclear in the spec, and then produce a plan and move to implement it.
5 will freak out at even a basic task, ask itself if it's own assumptions or your instructions are correct, proceed to re-assess it's own plan, and it's instructions 3-4 times, and then maybe produce code after burning several hundred thousand tokens (and quite a bit of time) analyzing existing code and thoroughly sweeping it for irrelevant problems both to the task it was given and the spec it came up with.
It's quite bizarre to me how well advertised the benchmarks and anecdotes from people one shotting MVP browser games are, compared to the experience of everyone I know that's had to actually use it to accomplish even a relatively basic task.