[ThunderSizzle]

GitHub Copilot. It was one of the best values around in terms of cheap LLM access since each prompt was basically 4 cents (more or less), no matter how much it would do or how many tokens it used. A simple "Proceed" prompt that was telling the agent to execute a sophisticated plan could burn a lot of time without needing any direct intervention by the user, but as of June 1st, they switched to metered billing, meaning each token in/out has a cost now.

It was suspected to come soon enough, but it was a nice cheap road for my small hobby stuff. When they announced the price changes, I started to explore alternatives, and with the news of Qwen3.6 35B being both and having quality, I figured it was worth a try out, and self-hosting made the most sense to me, since that meant I was free from being a forever-renter.

[SeriousM]

And when you had a tool call that asked the user for the next step, you could easily run a whole day with 4c. Guess how the people did 5k $ worth of token with 100$ spent.