alt Hacker NewsThey're not cheap at all. I did one xhigh Qwen 3.8 27B agentic coding task last week via OpenRouter and it cost me like $10.
99% of the cost was in input tokens, I only used like 100k ish output tokens. It was a one shot task asking the agent to implement proxy injection to Guice. It did a pretty amazing job.
If you were to use hosted LLMs for a lot of agentic coding, a maxed out M5 Ultra Mac Studio would pay for itself in under a year.
Qwen is weirdly expensive. Deepseek v4 flash is dirt cheap. You'd need at least 128gb of ram to run this model and in my experience, a days work with it costs around 80 cents.