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Comment by energy123 | Hacker News Reader

You can consider the o3/o4-mini price to be half that due to flex processing. Flex gives the benefits of the batch API without the downside of waiting for a response. It's not marketed that way but that is my experience. With 20% cache hits I'm averaging around $0.8/million input tokens and $4/million output tokens.

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I’m shocked people are signing up to pay even these fees to build presumably CRUD apps. I feel a complete divergence in the profession between people who use this and who don’t.

A whole codebase of 100k lines (~1M tokens) for ~a dollar. Would like to understand why would signing up for this be shocking?

That's really misrepresenting how it works. Most lines will be written, re-written again and adjusted multiple times. Yesterday I did approx 5 hours of peer-coding with claude 4 opus. And I have these stats:

Total tokens in: 3,644,200 Total tokens out: 92,349

And of that only approx 2.3k lines where actually commited for PRs.

I calculate that as $61.59 https://www.llm-prices.com/#it=3644200&ot=92349&ic=15&oc=75

So that's about $12/hour, or 2.6 cents per line of finished code.

Still pretty cheap! Very few unassisted human programmers can churn out 2300/(5 * 60) = 7.6 lines of code per minute consistently over a five hour time span.

That said, I think Claude Code, while impressive, is incredibly quick to burn through tokens. I still mostly use copy-and-paste info Claude or ChatGPT as my main AI-assisted workflow which keeps me in more control and spends a ton less tokens.

Yes I can confirm that's approx what I paid. My first time using claude 4 opus and I used aider. It seems the estimation aider gives is very wrong as it was telling me I used approx 15$. I only noticed because my credit ran out. The $/performance tells me I should check what grok4 can do. I didn't use it seriously yet.

Claude Opus 4 is 5x the price of Claude Sonnet 4. I don't think it's 5x as good. I default to Sonnet and rarely use Opus - in this case Sonnet would have cost about $12.31 for the same volume of tokens.

There are code generators for CRUD. You could be a 10x AI programmer without AI if the measure is how fast you bang out CRUDs.

Some people are struggling to build CRUDs.

Do you use them for code generation? I am simply using copilot as $10/mo is a reasonable budget...but quick guesses based on my use, would put code generation via an API at potentially $10/day?

o3 is a unique model. For difficult math problems, it generates long reasoning traces (e.g. 10-20k tokens). For coding questions, the reasoning tokens are consistently small. Unlike Gemini 2.5 Pro, which generates longer reasoning traces for coding questions.

Cost for o3 code generation is therefore driven primarily by context size. If your programming questions have short contexts, then o3 API with flex is really cost effective.

For 30k input tokens and 3k output tokens, the cost is 30000 * 0.8 / 1000000 + 3000 * 4 / 1000000 = $0.036

But if you have contexts between 100k-200k, then the monthly plans that give you a budget of prompts instead of tokens are probably going to be cheaper.

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