#cost

Seedance 2.5 looks the best, but 10 seconds costs about $1, so a two-minute video easily runs over $14. To save money we switched to H3 on jqsp, and the same explainer with a host costs under $0.50.

Subscription quota often beats pay-per-use API calls by several times. Give your own non-urgent, one-off back-office jobs to your AI agent, and use the API only for features that serve users live at high volume. Includes four questions to decide and the limits you must not cross.

Beginner tutorial: first have your agent sort each step in a run log into four categories. Pick one judgment that repeats dozens of times a day and hand it to TypeSafe's Jev. Write the question by the question-writing rules, route by confidence, send uncertain cases to a large model, and do a one-week shadow run before switching. Includes 3 prompts you can copy directly.

The main session uses Sonnet, subagents go to Haiku, and Opus serves as an advisor that only reviews plans, checks repeated errors, and does final checks. The --advisor / --subagents startup flags circulating online throw errors in the current version, so this article gives working alternatives.

When the base-tier Claude quota runs out, it's usually because bulk output work was also handed to it. Keep judgment tasks for Claude, send bulk generation to Codex or a cheaper tool, and write the division of labor into CLAUDE.md.

Intermediate tutorial: Don't have the Agent run scheduled tasks by hand every day. Have it write the task as one Python script, hand it to the system's built-in cron or Task Scheduler, and run it at 0 Tokens per run. When the script finishes, it sends you a message saying whether it succeeded or failed.

An experience piece (members only): for occasional use (chat, copywriting, code edits), an API is cheaper; for high-frequency batch work (daily transcription, classification, processing large volumes of material, fixed workflows), running locally may pay off. The core dividing line is monthly token consumption, plus whether the task needs top-tier model quality. The article works out the numbers and the hidden costs on both sides for you.

Price changes on models and workflow tools arrive every few months. A short routine for finding out what it does to your daily workflows before the invoice does.

A daily workflow costs what it costs times 365. How to estimate before you build, measure after, and the three cheapest fixes when a workflow gets expensive.