[NortySpock]

"[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]

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]

Cool! Thanks for the details, and your blog posts are usually interesting food for thought, so thank you for them too!

[krupan]

Are you saying that the software you wrote using those tools generated enough revenue to cover the $2000?

[simonw]

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]

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.