[junior44660]

> Our monthly total spend is around $180 with a team of 6, about half technical; our biggest line items are for American models or subscriptions which we probably will be planning to get rid of.)

Please tell more :). Do you pay per token from bedrock / openrouter / somewhere else? How many tokens you use over the month, and how many for each task? Which harnesses?

[trollbridge]

Pay for DeepSeek directly. One developer insists on having his own account and in theory expenses it, but he forgets to turn in $10 expense reports. (Total spend in last two months = about $45.)

Pay for OpenAI Pro directly, but I’m the only guy that uses Codex. $100 a month. My nontechnical partner likes to talk to ChatGPT 5.5 Pro for image related tasks (think generating interior decorating pics).

The nontechnical staff use a Gemini account on a Google family AI Pro sub. I use Antigravity when working on Android or Google Cloud API codebases.

Everyone gets OpenCode Go. The cost is trivial. $10 a month per person.

Pay for MiMo directly. We use it during Chinese off peak hours though. Total spend so far $25 in last month.

We run a few Qwen models locally and pretty much have them pegged all day. RTX 5090 on a PC and a Mac Studio.

There’s also Grok which is used for Imagine for artistic / graphic design related work. I also use the subscription for a vision model in my oh-my-pi harness.

We’re having discussions about how to pull in GLM-5.2 cost effectively. We compete with third world development shops so we can’t really pass on inference costs, but we can benefit from getting jobs done for customers faster. But ⅔ of our work is either internal or open source projects we can’t bill for.

[ignoramous]

> Pay for MiMo directly. We use it during Chinese off peak hours though. Total spend so far $25 in last month.

Team size, if you don't mind?

> We're having discussions about how to pull in GLM-5.2 cost effectively

Are you evaluating Alibaba's token plan ($50/mo) which includes Qwen3, MiniMax M2, Kimi K2, and GLM5 series.

[trollbridge]

6 people, 3 programmers, 3 non programmers who now use AI as much as anyone else.

I have not yet checked out Alibaba’s plans. We’re still just using OpenCode Go for GLM-5.2 and Qwen-3.7-Max.

I haven’t looked into MiniMax M3 much at all due to cost.

[stavros]

Not the GP, but I use Opus for planning, Deepseek for actual coding (implementing the plan) and GPT for review. GPT is inexhaustible on the $20/mo plan, Deepseek is dirt cheap (maybe $10/mo) and Claude is Claude.

[junior44660]

GP is talking about API / token-based prices, that's why I asked.

[stavros]

I don't know, he said "subscriptions" in the line items, but eg I use Deepseek via the API.

[junior44660]

Ah maybe you're right.

I can manage this budget with the chinese models in AWS BedRock. However, in my experience, they aren't as good as claude today.