alt Hacker NewsMan, that was my instinct too, but I’m not sure.
I don’t think everyone here is using Claude/GPT/… to create indie games?
If you’re using it for work then waiting another week/day/hour is a business expense, effectively.
Maybe it's like this guy I know who purchased a new-ish Bugatti but all the service is done by a local mechanic, during his time off, in a barn.
Replies
rfgplk • today at 4:40 PM
API costs are simply too high. If you go wild you can easily burn $3-5k a day. If you really hammer it (ie going full parallel agentic) you can exceed $10-20k. And this isn't even going crazy. Those costs are simply too high to make any sense.
I think you're underestimating the "more expensive". It's not a 30% discount or similar. API is at least 10 times more expensive (own experience), ~40x as expensive if [1] is accurate.
At that price difference, lots of things that are viable to do in whatever harness the subscription allows are simply impractical via API, you'd be spending a whole developer's salary just for the benefit of using a different harness.
I tried for example Deepseek V4 Pro for a bit (via API pricing), but it's _more expensive_ than Sol via subscription, even though $1.7/Mtok is a lot less than 20$/Mtok.
[1]: https://tibotattle.com/