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Comment by carpo | Hacker News Reader

aider looks amazing - I'm going to give it a try soon. Just had a question on API costs to see if i can afford it. Your FAQ says you used about 850k tokens for Claude, and their API pricing says output tokens are $15/MTok. Does that mean it cost you under $15 for your Claude 3.5 usage or am I totally off-base? (Sorry if this is has an obvious answer ... I don't know much about LLM API pricing.)

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I built a calculator for that here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/llm-prices

It says that for 850,000 Claude 3.5 output tokens the cost would be $12.75.

But... it's not 100% clear from me if the Aider FAQ numbers are for input or output tokens.

It's "total" tokens, input plus output. I'd guess more than two-thirds of them are input tokens.

If we guess 500,000 for input and 350,000 for output that's a grand total of $6.75. This stuff is so cheap these days!

When I was mostly just using Sonnet I was spending ~$100/month on their API. That included some amount of bulk API use for benchmarking, not just my interactive AI coding.

If you're concerned about API costs, the experimental Gemini models with API keys from API studio tend to have very generous free quota. The quality of e.g. Flash 2.0 Experimental is definitely good enough to try out Aider and see if the workflow clicks. (For me, the quality has been good enough that I just stuck with it, and didn't get around to experimenting with any of the paid models yet.)

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