Coding agents use extreme numbers of tokens, you’d be getting rate limited effectively immediately.
A typical small-medium PR with Claude Code for me is ~$10-15 of API credits.
A typical small-medium PR with Claude Code for me is ~$10-15 of API credits.
I'm much happier with gemini 2.5 pro right now for high performance at a much more reasonable cost (primarily using with RA.Aid, but I've tried it with Windsurf, cline, and roo.)
Do that every day for a month and you're already at $3k/month.
It's not hard to get to $5k from there.
I'm using RA.Aid to develop itself (dogfooding,) so I'm constantly running the coding agent.
That cost is my peak cost, not average.
It's easy to scale back costs to 1/10 the cost and still get 90% of the quality. Basically that means using models like gemini 2.5 pro or Deepseek v3 (even cheaper) rather than expensive models like sonnet 3.7 and o3.