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CharlieDigital 3 hours ago [-]
You don't need a proxy to do this. I would argue you should not use a proxy to do this because the end result is a single point of failure direct in the line of your productivity.
Both Codex[0] and Claude Code[1] output OTEL traces that you can ingest and process.
Other harnesses like OpenCode, Pi, etc. you can hook into their plugin architecture and implement your own OTEL emission from a plugin (or use an off the shelf plugin[2]).
Host an OpenTelemetry collector[3][4] or rely on your existing collector infra (e.g. Datadog (no affiliation), AppInsights, etc.)
The OTEL traces will have exactly what you need. Tool calls, full prompts, token usage/cost, etc. It is less intrusive and does not become a single-point-of failure since the OTEL emission and collection is best-effort whereas a failing/overloaded proxy is going to strand your team until resolved. It's OK if you lose some OTEL traces; no productivity lost.
The configuration to enable this for Codex and CC is very straightforward (see [0][1] + [5])
Wouldn't a fair criticism of OTEL be that you only see what these harnesses are willing to show you?
There have been numerous scandals of AI companies offering CC/cursor alternatives, then indexing data they never should have; specifically Z.ai [0], ByteDance Trae [1] and Alibaba Qwen [2]. Maybe the argument should be that all harnesses should be sandboxed and monitored for all networking.
In 2026, all AI harnesses should be running on a VM with network logging enabled. Beyond not being able to trust what data they send via the harness, you should audit what data they access.
Disclosure: I work on Origin [1]. We built a platform for enterprises that consumes OTEL, and other traces without a proxy or an LLM gateway. We even support collecting traces from local inference workloads.
For supported tools, we collect prompts, responses, and tool calls, then tie them to the user, organizational context and what actually happened on the machine. We can then use this data to detect when agents (or the people piloting them) do bad things [2].
That shows what you do, not what the proxy does with your queries
CharlieDigital 3 hours ago [-]
If you are using a Datadog, Langfuse, Langchain, or other OTEL target, you do nothing. Just query it. Build alerts, dashboards, and datasets; whatever you normally do with your OTEL collector. A forward OTEL collector deployment is still useful for filtering but the Datadog Agent, for example, already has buffering and filtering built into it.
If you want to deploy your own collector and write your own handler (e.g. put it into a database), you can generate the stubs for the OTEL payloads and convert to domain records.
2. Generate the type/class stubs and endpoints for your platform.
3. I strongly recommend pre-filtering with the open source `opentelemetry-collector` before your custom endpoint handles the inbound telemetry payload. The collector is optimized for performing the filtering and I put it upstream of my custom ingest endpoint on a very small VM just to pre-filter and perform auth checks[0][1] on the inbound channel.
4. Do what you need to with the inbound payloads. Examples below:
I run my backend on Postgres with partitioned tables. You can forward to Elastic or other OLAP-type database targets for querying. You can see examples of what I do with the session telemetry here: https://zeeq.ai/docs/key-features/session-telemetry
I'd love to do something like this, or use API keys, but I still don't understand how people justify the cost of using API keys vs. subscription.
I tested it once, I'm in on the 20x claude max ($200/month) and I either max my weekly limit every week or come really close. But it only took 2-3 days to hit $200 spend with api keys.
bevr1337 38 minutes ago [-]
> I still don't understand how people justify the cost of using API keys vs. subscription
Like a big white truck or a 600mm lens, expensive gear should be purchased by an employer. I think most folks talking about API access are getting it through work/self-employment.
Anthropic needs to retune their personal plans. Opus is the Amelia Bedelia of models. Maddening! I shelled out $100 for Fable to drive Opus and finish a personal project, but that's probably my last time loading up on usage credits. I put a second $100 towards API credits so I could dink around with API access and understand conversations like these.
bob1029 8 hours ago [-]
I think in many cases the token bloat comes from using a fleet of autonomous agents that "collaborate" over a problem. Using one coherent agent loop with a human involved might not feel as futuristic but it's more effective and efficient (right now).
We have two wildly different cohorts of people. Those who see these tools as a technological curiosity and those who see them as a means to a specific end. I know that if I finish a task with a certain set of constraints that I will get paid a certain amount of money. I'd much rather be HITL on one very good agent loop if there is real money on the table. If you are mostly having fun, being curious, or exploring (which is fine!) then the cost of subscriptions might feel safer. Running an IRL version of factorio can get very expensive.
I also think the API tokens perform better but I have zero evidence other than observing the quality of my work product relative to that of my peers. I have almost a religious fervor about using prepaid tokens now. I am still using GPT5.5 in my copilot with custom model configuration for most heavy lifting in visual studio. It is more than sufficient. My average monthly token cost is <$100. Paying for a subscription would be more expensive because I have a predictable and controllable amount of demand.
This is analogous to variable vs fixed rate electricity. Paying the real time wholesale price is a massive economic advantage if you can figure out how to control the demand side of the house.
user43928 5 hours ago [-]
I often read opinions where people say their particular method of more hands-on working with AI is the most efficient and reasonable way.
From 500 hours working on my mobile app project outside of work, I can confidently say that using anywhere between 2 to 10 conversations to parallelize work is much more effective in my project.
The models being served in the API are the same as via the subscription, there are no shenanigans here, particularly not concerning quality.
And GPT 5.5 was great at the time, I made heavy use of it for my project, but it's long outdated and already being retired.
You also mentioned using it in copilot, which is a third-rate harness that is frustratingly buggy and inefficient.
There's no comparison to Opus 5.5 in Claude Code.
Use whatever works for you, but frankly, I think you should try something new.
dinosaurdynasty 32 minutes ago [-]
The models are the same but the system prompt isn't.
catchnear4321 3 hours ago [-]
Just not finding this to hold true. The difference in work quality for peers isn’t a matter of how many threads they run, but how much attention they give each. Which is a skill.
> I know that if I finish a task with a certain set of constraints that I will get paid a certain amount of money.
So not salary… ok. That explains some of it. Getting paid by the task might flavor one’s approach. But also one could reason, more tasks, more pay… somewhat confusing.
> I also think the API tokens perform better but I have zero evidence other than observing the quality of my work product relative to that of my peers. I have almost a religious fervor about using prepaid tokens now
And this appears to be the other half. It looks no less futuristic than the more wireheaded approach, just different in form.
rrr_oh_man 6 hours ago [-]
> This is analogous to variable vs fixed rate electricity. Paying the real time wholesale price is a massive economic advantage if you can figure out how to control the demand side of the house.
rrr_oh_man is claiming that wholesale fixed rate electricity is generally cheaper than varible rate domestic electricity. Or that the wholesale-bit is higher order than the variable rate-bit. Not that it's a big issue, bob1029's point doesn't actually care about one situation being wholesale. It's just a somewhat narrow, (in this case) inconsequential, but also valid, nitpick.
rrr_oh_man 6 hours ago [-]
I didn't express myself correctly.
The analogy is false.
Domestic electricity is priced per kWh, wholesale electricity is priced per kWh, the latter is, as a rule, cheaper. It is not fixed vs variable rate.
lesuorac 4 hours ago [-]
> Domestic electricity is priced per kWh
> wholesale electricity is priced per kWh
> the latter is, as a rule, cheaper.
I think you’re missing some detail. Why do two things that are “priced per kilowatt hour” have to have different prices?
rrr_oh_man 4 hours ago [-]
Possibly we are talking about different things. I am not prescribing or postulating anything. This is just reality.
Average Revenues/Sales (¢/kWh)
End-use sector July 2026
Residential 18.31
Commercial 14.53
Industrial 9.77
Transportation 14.97
--
Total 14.99
The reason is mostly higher consumption = lower average price.
james_marks 20 minutes ago [-]
Isn't there a time of day variable as well? That would further drive down the average for e.g, Industrial sites that run continuously.
dcss_gardener 13 hours ago [-]
The current crop of flash models are more comparable to sonnet than opus but they are very affordable.
The reality is that the subscriptions are heavily subsidized. Pretty much every sub that's not run by one of the money-burning frontier labs has had to drop it or dramatically increase prices and lower limits in the last few months. Cheap tokens are an acquisition tool, not a real product. It sounds dramatic but it really is the drug dealer sales funnel.
At some point they're going to drop the real prices in your lab and you're going to have to figure out how to pay that much or pay someone else a lot less. Better to get a handle on it now.
Aurornis 10 hours ago [-]
> At some point they're going to drop the real prices in your lab
The real price for tokens at a specific level of intelligence is dropping rapidly. Between models improving and new hardware getting faster, I think prices will be going down, not up.
> Better to get a handle on it now.
I experiment with a lot of providers and models. I strongly disagree that anyone needs to start migrating now in preparation for prices maybe going up in the future.
It doesn’t make sense. Deal with a price increase when it happens, if it does.
Switching models and providers isn’t some huge lift. I can jump to a new model or even hardness and get a feel for it in a day or two. It’s not some huge undertaking that requires preparation and planning.
If prices go up, try something at that point in time. Don’t worry about it until then.
qlte 9 hours ago [-]
When Claude Code subscriptions really started to catch on, there was a popular idea on HN that Anthropic's end game was that basically every dev adjacent role would need to pay for a $200/mo coding plan.
Then, both Anthropic and OpenAI in lockstep developed a enterprise pricing structure that openly coerced large businesses to pay API prices where it was feasible to spend $200/day rather than the comparatively cheap $200/mo.
Even if token pricing relative to intelligence does trend down over time, that doesn't mean the pricing structure will actually translate to lower costs, particularly in the cash cow B2B market.
Aurornis 1 hours ago [-]
The API/subscription split as always there. I don’t know why you’re talking about it as a bait-and-switch development.
That doesn’t change anything about what I said, though. The relative price per task or price per unit intelligence is also going down in the APIs too.
> Even if token pricing relative to intelligence does trend down over time, that doesn't mean the pricing structure will actually translate to lower costs, particularly in the cash cow B2B market.
What are you talking about? The APIs serve the same models as the subscriptions. Unless you think the price of APIs has been going up (it has not) this argument doesn’t make sense
xyzsparetimexyz 9 hours ago [-]
Its insane, I don't possibly understand how they convinced companies to pay 30x
Moto7451 4 hours ago [-]
From experience, if you work somewhere with very disconnected higher ups a sales person shows what your token usage is vs spend on the monthly subs for whatever set of users you have and then show an API price with a sample bill for even “more users” at that same number of tokens that is 30% lower. The crux of course being that your existing user base is not going to use fewer toke a just because you signed more people up and have a discount for the status quo.
Then when you consolidate all users to a single provider you find out you have a 2x to 3x larger bill because you… logically have more users at the same average token spend than the quote.
At my previous job, all while managing a full team, I did a lot of porting of legacy apps to modern standards to maintain various obligations. It was AI gen work in between meetings and paperwork. It was seen as such a success that I was asked to move to an IC role to focus on it within the “Elite new products team” that was supposed to be all AI and the latest tech. I showed up to find that they were pushing out low quality manually written code in 12 hour days six days per week to appear like LLMs were in use to save face because they lacked a token budget or the skills to properly manage one under the APIs. They had dismissed someone who had spent multiple thousands per month on Agent swarms. It was the perfect situation to make their 3x budget issue a 10-30x budget spend issue.
For many many reasons I left that job and got a new one but that was the cherry on top.
bityard 3 hours ago [-]
I see you are not familiar with enterprise IT hardware and software purchasing...
Foobar8568 6 hours ago [-]
Companies still believe they have IP to protect. Even when all they do are basic CRUD systems or on the verge of collapsing if they don’t renew some contracts.
jurgenburgen 7 hours ago [-]
What was the alternative? It takes time for the open weight ecosystem to develop.
tripleee 13 hours ago [-]
It's not obvious the subsidization will end. Loss leaders are a thing. Most enterprise at this point are paying API pricing
To better predict what they'll do with it we'd need to know the proportion of token usage via API vs subscription. Keeping an affordable, slightly unprofitable subscription to get people in isn't a bad idea. They also get marketing benefits from the word of mouth
swatcoder 12 hours ago [-]
In the optimistic case you describe, what smart customers want to watch out for is being lured into vibing your projects into such byzantine slop-complexity that subscription plans and trailing models are no longer sufficient to make progress on them.
Vibe-coders talk about surrendering understanding to the models, trusting that there will always be a model able to overcome and work through any technical debt they happen to accumulate, but the danger that still lurks there (at least for the naive) is that you'll need increasingly large contexts, increasingly sophisticated models, and increasingly large token spends just to keep that ball rolling.
Between profitable enterprise accounts being ineligible for subscription, eager but busy people paying for underutilized subscriptions, and naive vibe-coders falling into their pit trap, you can indeed imagine subsidized subscription accounts being available for a long time and remaining an effective value hack for people careful enough not to fall into the pit trap. But only insofar as they are that careful.
Gormo 2 hours ago [-]
> It's not obvious the subsidization will end. Loss leaders are a thing.
Loss leaders are a thing so long as they actually do lead somewhere. If your primary value proposition is conveyed by the loss leader itself, where do you go from there?
jbvlkt 11 hours ago [-]
Also they can always find another way to make money. Make subscription users product and sell some analytics like "show most trending project being built this week".
transitorykris 12 hours ago [-]
Also, some subset of developers on subscriptions are going to develop products that use the API, and some of those products are going to be successful.
dgellow 6 hours ago [-]
You cannot predict the future, but you can identify risks and attribute a likelihood. A risk is that the subsidized inference will either end or be reduced significantly in the next 1-2y. If you think the likelihood is high enough it makes sense to ensure your systems are prepared for it.
That’s risk management 101
gruez 13 hours ago [-]
>At some point they're going to drop the real prices in your lab and you're going to have to figure out how to pay that much or pay someone else a lot less. Better to get a handle on it now.
So just wait until that happens? What's the point of scrimping and saving now? Not to mention you're paying for a premium in the meantime.
dcss_gardener 11 hours ago [-]
I don’t disagree really and it is mostly what I am doing. I put probably like 20% of my work through open weights.
It does make me sharper I think. If you only ever use claude or whatever you don’t even really know exactly how tied to it you are.
Funny enough the drug dealer thing still holds. A deal’s a deal if you’re going to buy it anyway.
InsidiousWombat 3 hours ago [-]
Counter point - models get better, ways to run them gets optimized and hardware will eventually come down in price.
The share of tasks where "cheaper" models are enough also increases for same reason. For majority of use cases it will quickly become race to the bottom. And that means part of the pie for the "premium" models of frontier AI labs will quickly become smaller and smaller.
nl 9 hours ago [-]
> At some point they're going to drop the real prices in your lab and you're going to have to figure out how to pay that much or pay someone else a lot less.
This only applies under the assumption that everyone tokenmaxxes their subscription.
I have visibility across a few different Claude team subscriptions. I'd say roughly 10% of people max their subscriptions.
I think I've only seen one organization where the under-used subs don't more than pay for the tokenmaxxed ones.
And that is ignoring the 90% margin that API inference runs at.
chrisweekly 11 hours ago [-]
(meta commentary)
really gnarly word choice: "drop" in "they're going to drop the real prices in your lab"?
I took your meaning as "they're gonna drop [a bad surprise on you by raising] the real prices"... so at least it's not quite as tortured as the ambiguous "support for version N dropped today" (where you often can't even infer the direction from context).
this isn't just a tangent, I'm having trouble understanding the point you're trying to make, which hinges entirely on deciding if you meant "drop" literally
djeastm 4 hours ago [-]
The term "drop" becoming a synonym for "release", "put out" or "put into effect" for things outside of music/albums is one of the most confusing linguistic innovations of the last decade.
stavros 7 hours ago [-]
They meant "they're going to drop a bad surprise by charging you API prices", so yes, a better wording would be "they're going to give you a bad surprise in the form of forced API pricing".
catchnear4321 3 hours ago [-]
At some point companies will need to have the “scary” conversation about the value proposition of adding another human to the team, or adding a comparable amount of token spend to the team.
$1k/person sounds like a lot, but a ten person team at $1k token burn / head / month is spending $120k. How much does a new hire cost, tco? Does velocity from one more person compare with velocity from one more person’s worth of tokens?
Sure, learning to be efficient matters. So does taking the time to consider cost vs alternative. You might be surprised by what you find, in either direction.
another_twist 33 minutes ago [-]
I am on the 25 dollar plan and I never even come close to hitting the weekly limit. Still manage to ship quite a bit. Not sure how folks hit their Claude limits. I have handle on the codebase though.
dizhn 7 minutes ago [-]
There are tools like Paseo that call the existing CLIs meaning you can keep using the subsidized subscriptions while still having access to the json stream.
redmalang 6 hours ago [-]
For a lot of large scale day to day work, deepseek / zai models (the latter comes with a subscription) can be very cost effective and very competitive actually.
Another thing of note is that when coding at 'scale' to my surprise over time with memory aggregation across users/sessions these models can be better than the evals would have you believe because they seem to be differently/less (?) RL'ed (aka actually listen to instructions), which results in them being more fastidious about writing memories and benefiting from them, especially over time. These are of course mostly subjective opinions but they were surprising, and not what we were expecting.
Relevant: the proxy we wrote and use:
https://yapp.latchlabs.dev is partially open sourced: still working on releasing more of our memories stuff.
chatmasta 3 hours ago [-]
Any org with more than 150 employees needs to pay API prices for the enterprise subscription.
Darkphibre 10 hours ago [-]
I'm with you there. I'm on expensive plans with everyone because I run out of tokens and rotate/use the models that are best in their niche...
CLI Model Pct Remaining Reset Date
claude all models 15% 3d
claude Fable 50% 3d
grok all models 0% 4d
agy Gemini 36% 5d
agy Claude and GPT models 0% 5d
codex codex 0% 6d
And I also just used two of my three get-another-week-free tokens for codex.
If you've got an agentic swarm, or are working on multiple big projects at once, or have agents parsing data... you burn through tokens fast. The last four days in API would have cost me well over $3k.
bityard 3 hours ago [-]
I'm always curious, what kind of software exactly are people building that requires multiple parallel agents and thousands of dollars per month in AI tokens per developer!
paid_dot_expert 4 hours ago [-]
Asked Pi what I used last 3 days.
┌─────────────────┬─────────┐
│ UTC day │ Cost │
├─────────────────┼─────────┤
│ Oct 16 │ $2.72 │
├─────────────────┼─────────┤
│ Oct 17 │ $300.82 │
├─────────────────┼─────────┤
│ Oct 18 │ $208.72 │
├─────────────────┼─────────┤
│ Oct 19 (so far) │ $208.29 │
└─────────────────┴─────────┘
I am on $100/m sub.
Oct 16 I switched machine
Excludes work done on local and Claude Chrome plugin.
TacticalCoder 3 hours ago [-]
> I am on $100/m sub.
You spent $720 in four days on a $100 per month subscription? So that table isn't correct?
Do you mean the table shows what it'd have cost you if you weren't on the $100/m subscription?
AshamedBadger56 37 minutes ago [-]
> Do you mean the table shows what it'd have cost you if you weren't on the $100/m subscription?
Yep, that. There's tools out there that will add up your token usage and then estimate what it would be at API pricing. That's likely what they used.
my-huge-pony 1 hours ago [-]
I understand this as: he has a fixed rate $100/m subscription. Prices are what he would pay if he paid API rates.
mrheosuper 13 hours ago [-]
They are betting on people don't max out their subscription.
Someone who pays $20 a month may only use 10% of their max budget.
slyall 13 hours ago [-]
Personally at home I use the free github copilot and then openrouter when that runs out. Last month I used $0.90 of openrouter. Zero so far this month. When my bill starts hitting double digits I'll consider options.
Different matter at work but even there we are paying for API costs and have a monthly allowance (starts at $200/month but increases fairly easy to get)
cortesoft 13 hours ago [-]
This is true for pretty much every fixed price subscription service in existence
shepherdjerred 12 hours ago [-]
I honestly feel a bit worried Anthropic/OpenAI are going to drop me since I consistently hit my limits
hgoel 4 hours ago [-]
People using API keys heavily, are either making enough money from whatever they're doing to afford Anthropic's high prices, or are using a mix of locally hosted and cloud-based models. E.g. using a cloud model as a planner/orchestrator, with a local model as a subagent that follows the orchestrator's designs/instructions.
denkmoon 13 hours ago [-]
The drug dealer gives you a free hit because it is profitable for him in the long term for you to be addicted to his product, not because he is your friend.
calebkaiser 12 hours ago [-]
It's weird to me how often this analogy gets used because:
1. In most cases, like this one, the product isn't heroin.
2. Drug dealers don't actually do that.
rickdeckard 7 hours ago [-]
> "1. In most cases, like this one, the product isn't heroin."
I'm not sure about that. Someone using AI for productivity every day will experience massive issues if you suddenly take it away.
It's even the whole business model of MS Copilot: They don't work with companies to have their data structured in the past or going forward.
They don't help you to structure your business "life", they offer a tool you consume to make sense of it while you use it.
The moment you stop using it, you'll struggle to even make sense of your own past actions.
> "2. Drug dealers don't actually do that."
It would be a weird business if they only WAIT for people to demand the more profitable drugs...
calebkaiser 7 hours ago [-]
If you're genuinely curious, I'd recommend searching around about the history of this persistent urban legend. It's really interesting.
But the short version is that there are lots of people who want to buy any given drug and drug dealers sell them. I don't know exactly what you mean by "WAIT for people to demand the more profitable drugs", but there typically isn't a whole lot of waiting. There's a lot of demand out there. Giving away a bunch of free fentanyl to random people in the hopes that one of them instantly gets addicted would be a pretty wasteful and high risk sales tactic, especially given the number of people that want to buy it already.
denkmoon 11 hours ago [-]
Are you sure the product isn't heroin? If we take it away, there's a bunch of people around here at least that will definitely experience withdrawal.
calebkaiser 7 hours ago [-]
...yes? It doesn't literally kill you if use more tokens than usual?
And we're talking about subscription plans from OpenAI/Anthropic here. Switching to a different model and/or harness if the price changes isn't a "the world has run out of opioids and I'm going to need a detox center" level crisis.
rickdeckard 7 hours ago [-]
You're describing the impact of overuse or moving to another dealer, not withdrawing from it altogether ;)
calebkaiser 7 hours ago [-]
The original question was "are you sure an OpenAI subscription isn't heroin?" Different impacts of overuse (death vs slop code) feels like a valid point of difference.
This is a weirdly melodramatic analogy.
If you want to flatten everything to "all things habit forming are definitionally equivalent", you'll get some pretty funky results.
dns_snek 7 hours ago [-]
You're equivocating, they were talking about addiction, you're talking about overuse/overdose which is where the analogy breaks down for pretty obvious reasons.
gnabgib 12 hours ago [-]
What? (1) Yes.. it's never that [stupid economics, they don't want their purchasers to die.. might as well sell fentanyl], (2) it's always that [hardly any way to propose alternatives.. within the scope of not killing the customer]
calebkaiser 7 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure exactly what you're implying but if you're curious, there's a lot of writing about the persistence of this particular urban legend. A lot of it starts with 1920s newspapers painting pictures of dastardly drug peddlers luring in children with free drugs to get them hooked.
Turns out that drug dealers by and large prefer the straightforward approach of selling drugs to the huge market of people who want to take them.
goosejuice 13 hours ago [-]
Another way to look at it is they are running a business. It's not even close to gambling for example.
denkmoon 11 hours ago [-]
Running businesses at massive losses with the expectation of making that money back by being _the_ monopoly on this technology.
snikeris 4 hours ago [-]
I had a subscription for a few months. I found that at the end of every week I would succumb to the sunk cost fallacy and try to squeeze all the usage out of my subscription. I'd rather pay a little extra in LLM cost to not have that issue.
persedes 7 hours ago [-]
I think businesses are footing the majority of that bill right now due to regulatory requirements, but for individuals that price increase is def coming. Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but enjoy it while it lasts :')
mrgaro 10 hours ago [-]
You might not have a choice. For example, if you want to get a guarantee from Anthropic that they don't train bases on your prompts, you will need an enterprise deal, which is pay-by-token.
awsanswers 20 minutes ago [-]
My org is using https://visiqlabs.com/ for this. not a proxy, agent integration with rules engine
passive 13 hours ago [-]
Tailscale makes Aperture available for free, and while it's not something you own, it is in your tailnet, so at least you have a certain amount of control over how things access it.
It gives a nice view of what agents are doing, with lots of configurability and extensions, and the team behind it has been updating pretty steadily.
I happen to be working on an extension to Aperture, so I have my own reason to promote it. But I do think it's a nice easy solution, and I promoted it to people before I was extending it.
wild_egg 12 hours ago [-]
Aperture supports extensions? What sort are you working on?
I'm building a "bring your own data" layer for agentic work of all sorts, using the webhook method for now.
In the context of Aperture, I watch for agents looking for certain types/sources of data, and instead provide them with an in-tailnet API for accessing that data.
In a personal context, think email, calendar events, music playlists, fitness app records, transactions. I've also found it useful in a professional context, but I think I need to explore that a fair bit more.
It keeps credentials out of agents hands, and provides some relatively standard ways for controlling what agents can see and change.
I need a fair bit of hardening work before I try to get random folk to use it, but I might post something more here in the next week. :)
jakozaur 12 hours ago [-]
Proxies are good if you pay API prices.
For subscriptions, it is easier to collect the JSONL files from ~/.claude/projects/ and similar directories. They are better organized (e.g., subagents) than what the proxy sees.
However, the best value comes from collecting agent sessions across the whole organization. You'll need to scrub credentials and handle security.
lionkor 8 hours ago [-]
If you're in the EU, be aware that the chats might contain PII. Even if someone says something like "Sorry I have dyslexia" in a chat, that's PII.
So id be very careful with chats and treat them like chats, not like code.
iamacyborg 6 hours ago [-]
You’re conflating PII with personal data.
lionkor 6 minutes ago [-]
Is a medical condition not PII? Together with the fact that it's linked to a specific person, their tasks, responsibilities, mannerisms. Even an IP address is PII, not sure how a full chat log isn't, even if it's not text-book PII.
iamacyborg 1 minutes ago [-]
PII is not a thing under the GDPR. Like, at all. Personal data is. Personal data and PII are not the same thing.
krzyk 4 hours ago [-]
Isn't any personal data a PII? You just need a couple of personal o enable t identify individual. And if this is in an org then amount of individuals is quite small, so sometimes it needs just one personal detail.
AmazingTurtle 5 hours ago [-]
If you have dyslexia and I know it, that brings it down to 20% of people. Combined with some other data, this is a pretty good factor to narrow it down to "who you are", right?
5 hours ago [-]
ceejayoz 5 hours ago [-]
Claude often addresses me by name in chats.
alpineman 6 hours ago [-]
this guy GDPRs
baxtr 5 hours ago [-]
Is dyslexia PII or PHI?
KetoManx64 58 minutes ago [-]
Thank god I'm not in the EU where regulation is shoved down my throat by the government in order to make me feel like they're protecting me.
jasonvorhe 6 hours ago [-]
And I write that I have ADHD it's suddenly medical information?
SebFender 4 hours ago [-]
That's actually one of my skills lol
joeguilmette 7 hours ago [-]
Out of curiosity, what if someone says “I have dyslexia” into their dictation app in the next desk over?
Is my brain now subject to GDPR regulations?
Not an attack on you, but my word am I thankful I don’t participate in the European regulatory regime.
master-lincoln 6 hours ago [-]
So you don't think if employers collect private data about employees there should be limits on what they can do with that?
not an attack on you, but I am thankful to have guardrails for greedy scrupulous corporations
mcv 6 hours ago [-]
Unless you are a robot, you'll be fine. GDPR is about digitally recorded information. If you are a robot, it's probably best to delete that information.
OtherShrezzing 6 hours ago [-]
GDPR doesn't cover unrecorded human memory, so you're fine to overhear whatever in a day-to-day setting. If you then do anything that looks like digital processing or cataloguing that information though, then you're making it a GDPR issue.
skerit 4 hours ago [-]
Technically you can still run Claude-Code through proxies though, even with the subscription.
Right now I run my Claude-Code sessions through a very simple mitmproxy, logging everything that goes in & out. It's very low level, sure, but it works.
rao-v 11 hours ago [-]
What’s the best way to pull (ie archive) and search these across a few harnesses? I remember seeing a project or two trying to standardize them, but can’t find anything that seems to be a good sensible solution
Mlflow does it pretty nice including session gathering and optional data enrichment (eg what files were touched, what model was used, git remote).
We use these session IDs for commenting on issues and stories touched by AI for context tracing.
I just wrapped around the Mlflow setup to make this simple CLI helper to set it up. Ofcourse the name suggests only Claude but it’s Codex, CC, GHCP and Agy. https://pypi.org/project/claudetracing/
Ask claude to do it end to end, then write a solution that fits your needs from it's experience with you driving it.
I did exactly this - probably the single most valuable piece of software I've "written". It's the backbone of every piece of code coming out of any agent under my control (via MCP toolset).
rao-v 10 hours ago [-]
That’s like half a day to get to sensible useful defaults that everybody needs. Any chance you’d be up to push what you got to git?
I think that T3 Code tries to do something like this, though I do not use it and have not used it, and I have heard good things about this.
throwaway27448 11 hours ago [-]
Don't install a second harness. You only need one to begin with!
rao-v 10 hours ago [-]
I mean Claude and codex both have their uses for me and I’m one of the deranged running my own inferencing box with Qwen Next so I need pi for it.
krzyk 4 hours ago [-]
Are there mamy organizations that have subscriptions? Anything above 150 people is forced into API pricing.
binlog 4 hours ago [-]
Something like 99% of US businesses have less than 100 employees.
soared 14 hours ago [-]
One man’s fun is another man’s “idk what any of these words mean, I pay $20/mo for some company to abstract this complexity away”
For clarity, I do like blog posts like these.
variety8675 13 hours ago [-]
I’m not sure what people are doing with these subscriptions to feel the need to monitor what’s going on this closely. A $100 OpenAI subscription feels effectively infinite for my usage at home
TuxedoBuddy 13 hours ago [-]
Some people are fine with an ISP-provided router that just works, and some would rather run pfSense, if even just to look at the internals.
user43928 4 hours ago [-]
In similar spirit, the biggest motivation for me to set up DeepSeek Flash over Opus 5.5 would be seeing the reasoning traces, which is a mere curiosity.
throwaway_new_1 13 hours ago [-]
>ISP-provided router that just works
I don't remember the last time this was true. These things don't have a 'just works' mode.
robertclaus 12 hours ago [-]
I let them install the free ISP router a year back when they installed fiber in the neighborhood. I assumed I would swap it out the next day, but I haven't had any issues like back in the day. I love shopping for a nice router as much as the next tech nerd, but decent drop-in home networking seems to be pretty commodity now days.
throwaway_new_1 9 hours ago [-]
Maybe things have improved and our needs have remained the same giving the illusion that the ISP supplied routers are good enough.
jurgenburgen 7 hours ago [-]
If things have improved and needs have remained the same then it’s not an illusion that the routers are good enough.
hasyimibhar 13 hours ago [-]
I've never touched my ISP-provided router. But maybe it's just how it works in my country (Malaysia), we pretty much only have 1 ISP with monopoly, so maybe that helps.
throwaway_new_1 9 hours ago [-]
Maybe. In general though I think the speeds have improved and needs have remained the same giving the illusion that these things are good enough.
patatero 3 hours ago [-]
Unifi don't have a monopoly.
DANmode 10 hours ago [-]
Exactly how I feel about the two major AI compute dealers.
8 hours ago [-]
heisenbit 4 hours ago [-]
Quality and troubleshooting. This is a complex setup and there are plenty of places where things can go wrong.
XelNika 6 hours ago [-]
I think people who monitor their usage like this are probably running $20-30 subscriptions or PAYG API pricing.
$100 a month on an LLM subscription for hobby usage is an absurd amount of money IMO.
viccis 10 hours ago [-]
Cache TTL will get you anyway. For Claude subscriptions, subagents still have a 5m TTL and before I discovered that, their constant waits for ~10 min tests or similar tasks would destroy my 5h usage. And for my API subscription at work, Claude has a 5m TTL for all stuff, and that's nowhere near long enough. You have to be monitoring this unless you want to absolutely torch your company's budget.
hoppp 14 hours ago [-]
Yup. Setting up liteLLMProxy on some servers as we speak and will start playing around.
I can't orchestrate agents in sandboxes without it.
1. It can issue virtual keys, so provider API keys never go near the sandbox
2. I can see everything
3. Guardrails
And much more
Looking forward to it.
DelightOne 14 hours ago [-]
1) What kind of guardrails are you using? Do you do models like prompt injection checkers? Or what guardrails are useful that do not know the environment the agent lives in?
2) I heard Bifrost also works for this. Did you try that as well, pros/cons?
hoppp 4 minutes ago [-]
Still working on deploying it and setting it up with cloudflare sandboxes so I don't have deep expertise and need to experiment first before I can give advice
dcss_gardener 13 hours ago [-]
I'm not the person you asked but yes pretty much. I've found the prompt injection protection models pretty limited, but get good results from gpt-oss-safeguard with a policy describing various prompt injection techniques. More expensive but more flexible and reliable and I only run it on web fetch and web search results. Costs me like 5-20 cents a day depending on what I'm working on.
Sattyamjjain 23 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
jubilanti 14 hours ago [-]
Yeah you should run an LLM proxy, but imagine a world where LiteLLM and all the other LLM shovels weren't buggy vibecoded messes. And with the velocity of updates I feel there has to be vulnerabilities there. Or am I just holding it wrong? Anyone got a good alternative?
hoss1474489 13 hours ago [-]
Bifrost has been decent, despite being partially shareware
what 13 hours ago [-]
Imagine complaining about “buggy vibecoded messes” that you want to use to produce your own buggy vibe coded mess.
user37747273 9 hours ago [-]
This general phenomenon is not new, but it has been so obvious during 2026. Everyone want to consume everyone else hard work, to create their own slop. Just pure egoism.
pwillia7 3 hours ago [-]
Until they quit subsidizing my personal tokens I don't think I want this. I do love having insight when I run qwen locally through Claude Code Router so I do agree it's so valuable to have, just not valuable enough to pay API rates lol
ndom91 11 hours ago [-]
Want to shamelessly self promote my self hosted proxy, supports subs and API usage.
Primaily designed as a local LLM ops project, but will definitely do proxying for claude-code, opencode, codex, etc
Umm, observability ? I think the article means to say how do you know the agents arent talking nonsense to each other if you use a multi-agent system. Here again a thin layer of o11y would do the trick and also hooking into the wider ecosystem. Thats without having to bother with a proxy.
Havoc 6 hours ago [-]
Toyed around with it back when claude code showed up, but never really got any useful actionable insights from it so stopped
(Aside from ditching CC & it's bloated sys prompts that is)
kqr 6 hours ago [-]
How do you ditch Claude Code without paying for API tokens? (Assuming from the way you phrased it that you still use Claude, only you didn't want the system prompts that came with Claude Code.)
Last I looked into it, using other harnesses with a subscription was a TOS violation that Anthropic seemed to take quite seriously (with automatic rate limiting etc.)
Havoc 5 hours ago [-]
Mostly using GLM/zai and pi agent these days. GLM also allows hermes on their subscription which is very useful.
If I do need Opus/whatever to look at a specific issue I just use openrouter API.
Can't say I particularly care for the US providers walled garden ToS restricted handholding suprise fallback nonsense even if their models are the strongest. Most of my tasks work just fine with lagging behind absolute SOTA so don't feel the need to tolerate it.
5 hours ago [-]
redmalang 6 hours ago [-]
we use it to assign cost/project level analytics which is actually quite useful!
impure 14 hours ago [-]
OpenRouter does all this for you. It's pretty nice. Although for apps I use another server to lock down the requests even more and prevent the client from seeing my API key.
jeena 3 hours ago [-]
As long the harness is not open source a proxy won't help, it's easy to phone home on a different subdomain also.
left-struck 12 hours ago [-]
I like the content but I have to say the Mark Manson writing style is off putting.
il-b 2 hours ago [-]
Even worse if he had an LLM write this
zaptheimpaler 10 hours ago [-]
I agree its so important to proxy and capture all the data. I've been very happy with bifrost as a proxy. It's a quality piece of software, unlike LiteLLM. You also get this one interface to access all your models, across all services, including self-hosted, STT models, everything. There are ways to use subscriptions with proxies too, but they are discouraged because of grey-hat uses..
hdra 8 hours ago [-]
prob a noob question; but what kind of data are people looking to get to help with what kind of decisions with these tools?
i can see some IT/infra team using these tools to manage their LLM costs, but this blog post seems to hint at some kind of product decision making? what am i missing here?
Lucasoato 4 hours ago [-]
Just one info for many: if you’re a big company and have enterprise needs, subscriptions aren’t a solution. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google (ain’t sure about them tbh), GitHub Copilot aren’t offering subsidized subscription prices in their enterprise plans; discounts are calculated differently and these services are much more expensive.
For example, Github Copilot has these AI credits that are insane in terms of costs with the usual token-based pricing.
Feel free to prove me wrong, I really wish I was.
frank00001 4 hours ago [-]
Enterprise plans are almost never subsidized. You are paying a premium to get what others are missing. Guarantee of data residency, SLA agreements, fast support etc.
It is a not proxy. It can clearly show whats going on across all agents. The proxy's are generally inconvenient and yet another point of failure. I think the author got to the resort option quickly
jFriedensreich 4 hours ago [-]
what proxy is he using? i support not trying to support a specific product in a post but not even mentioning what you use after writing this seems pretty odd.
whazor 4 hours ago [-]
welcome to the new way of software distribution, blogs and tweets are the prompts you use
jsphweid 12 hours ago [-]
I don't do this but I do have a system that imports all my conversations with AI (claude code, chatgpt, claude app, etc.) to a storage system I call Chatacombs: a unified storage of most conversations I've had with AI, as detailed as I can easily get.
mrgzg1 5 hours ago [-]
Do you have it all scrapped via. on-device apps or does it scrape the browser (for chat convos, not for agent/harnesses)
bee_rider 11 hours ago [-]
“Chatacombs” is a fantastic name.
pluc 5 hours ago [-]
It's LLM, of course they don't know what's going on.
voodooEntity 17 hours ago [-]
Well that was one of the reasons why i build my own agent/harness - to have actual full observability of what it is doing and why it is doing what it is doing.
Don't really understand why other agents to give those insights but well found my solution.
sroerick 14 hours ago [-]
Seeing some good stuff in the comments, but how are people doing this?
kennywinker 13 hours ago [-]
I am not, but I can tell you how:
homelab running liteLLM or gomodel
bogie-go 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
crossroadsguy 11 hours ago [-]
Some don't need to. Not yet anyway. There's config, there's control, and then there's setup-theatre as a hobby.
aa-jv 2 hours ago [-]
Anyone know an easy, out of the box method of doing this inspection on DGXOS (the OS for DGX Spark devices)?
I'm a little miffed that this isn't just an immediate OOBE, but I'm prepared to do some nc/ssh tunnel magic if that'll work properly .. just wondering what other DGX users have vis a vis best practices ..
joshheitzman 12 hours ago [-]
By running my own agent harness that provides detailed API metrics in the GUI and logs very verbosely.
knodi 2 hours ago [-]
vibes
joaquieneCnix 5 hours ago [-]
> how do you know what's going on
there's the kind of people who care and the kind who doesn't ...
your local politicians and landlords do all kinds of normal, non-funky stuff you don't know about ... as do your local ISP-techies and hobbyists with access to supply chains and sub-distributing units ...
or your local school teachers and some parents and their widdle vintage schemes and circumambient tales they tell some kids but not others ... Lord, some guy even caught teachers and parents running schemes on teens to prep them for gay homo fag stuff, despair, frustration ... running for years ...
and you wonder how peeps don't what is going on xD?<
even those hackies and hackers and programmers and brogrammers and AI superusers who think they know and care and wield some power really really don't
but there you go, AI augmented diluted delusions
quixoticelixer- 12 hours ago [-]
What is the use case for these sorts of things?
ok_major_9889 13 hours ago [-]
Why not just grab it from the kernel?
verdverm 13 hours ago [-]
Because the details we care about right now already travelling over the network and the industry is adopting OTEL, where you can export and collate kernel things if you need to
stavros 14 hours ago [-]
Does anyone here use LiteLLM for this? How well does it do? Can I use it with my Claude subscription?
I use GoModel and its amazing. My favorite features are virtual model, the support for arbitrary request labels, and the nice dashboads / ui. Creator has more sophisticated report generation on the near term roadmap. He's super responsive to feedback and ships fast. (except for his recent trip to the US west coast to meet founders and investors, he's EU based)
You can use and control all.your subscriptions or aoikeys through a gateway like this, so you don't get pwned like what just happened with OpenCode (or an OpenRouter like vendor). GoModel has some ambitions like this, but is open source so you can run it on you own infra, with plans for self hosted enterprise as well (there are a few features already like SSO). We are rolling out the free version at work right now.
I run GoModel at home and have hyper detailed history of every agent interaction, across models running on my sparks and OpenCode sub. You can call me a committed superfan of this project.
All that posturing for the purpose to be manually monitoring cache hits and misses. This can't be serious. Buy a larger plan or reduce some instructions and you don't have to deal with this waste of time.
kennywinker 13 hours ago [-]
> Own your infrastructure
...proceeds to use codex.
With just a 12gb VRAM GPU + 64gb of CPU RAM, and you can actually own your own infrastructure. I can't wait for hardware prices to fall so that becomes even more accessible.
vetoms 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
sheephess44 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
roosterIllusi0n 12 hours ago [-]
I am boggled how the first step of an llm after you make an orchestrator isn't some kind of proxy that records your personal internet surfing to be used by your personal AI later. Every college should be running in house AI with their own in house search engines and in house any service. Don't go to any college that wants you to use chatgpt or other corporate nonsense. If they can't make local LLMs work, they are not a real college.
Both Codex[0] and Claude Code[1] output OTEL traces that you can ingest and process.
Other harnesses like OpenCode, Pi, etc. you can hook into their plugin architecture and implement your own OTEL emission from a plugin (or use an off the shelf plugin[2]).
Host an OpenTelemetry collector[3][4] or rely on your existing collector infra (e.g. Datadog (no affiliation), AppInsights, etc.)
The OTEL traces will have exactly what you need. Tool calls, full prompts, token usage/cost, etc. It is less intrusive and does not become a single-point-of failure since the OTEL emission and collection is best-effort whereas a failing/overloaded proxy is going to strand your team until resolved. It's OK if you lose some OTEL traces; no productivity lost.
The configuration to enable this for Codex and CC is very straightforward (see [0][1] + [5])
--
[0] https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/config-file/config-advanced#o...
[1] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/monitoring-usage
[2] https://github.com/DEVtheOPS/opencode-plugin-otel
[3] Open source collector: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/collector/
[4] Sample configuration for filtering noise: https://github.com/zeeq-ai/zeeq-app/blob/main/build/otel-col...
[5] Concrete examples of .codex/config.toml and .claude/settings.json: https://zeeq.ai/docs/key-features/session-telemetry#configur...
There have been numerous scandals of AI companies offering CC/cursor alternatives, then indexing data they never should have; specifically Z.ai [0], ByteDance Trae [1] and Alibaba Qwen [2]. Maybe the argument should be that all harnesses should be sandboxed and monitored for all networking.
In 2026, all AI harnesses should be running on a VM with network logging enabled. Beyond not being able to trust what data they send via the harness, you should audit what data they access.
[0] https://www.chosun.com/english/industry-en/2026/09/22/ABYLC3...
[1] https://github.com/segmentationf4u1t/trae_telemetry_research
[2] https://github.com/QwenLM/qwen-code/issues/11198
For supported tools, we collect prompts, responses, and tool calls, then tie them to the user, organizational context and what actually happened on the machine. We can then use this data to detect when agents (or the people piloting them) do bad things [2].
--
[1] https://www.originhq.com/
[2] https://www.originhq.com/investigations
If you want to deploy your own collector and write your own handler (e.g. put it into a database), you can generate the stubs for the OTEL payloads and convert to domain records.
1. Get the protos here: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-proto
2. Generate the type/class stubs and endpoints for your platform.
3. I strongly recommend pre-filtering with the open source `opentelemetry-collector` before your custom endpoint handles the inbound telemetry payload. The collector is optimized for performing the filtering and I put it upstream of my custom ingest endpoint on a very small VM just to pre-filter and perform auth checks[0][1] on the inbound channel.
4. Do what you need to with the inbound payloads. Examples below:
- Ingest endpoint (Codex/Claude -> OTEL collector -> API): https://github.com/zeeq-ai/zeeq-app/blob/main/src/backend/Ze...
- Codex telemetry adapter: https://github.com/zeeq-ai/zeeq-app/blob/main/src/backend/Ze...
- CC telemetry adapter: https://github.com/zeeq-ai/zeeq-app/blob/main/src/backend/Ze...
I run my backend on Postgres with partitioned tables. You can forward to Elastic or other OLAP-type database targets for querying. You can see examples of what I do with the session telemetry here: https://zeeq.ai/docs/key-features/session-telemetry
[0] https://github.com/zeeq-ai/zeeq-app/blob/main/build/otel-col...
[1] https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-co...
I tested it once, I'm in on the 20x claude max ($200/month) and I either max my weekly limit every week or come really close. But it only took 2-3 days to hit $200 spend with api keys.
Like a big white truck or a 600mm lens, expensive gear should be purchased by an employer. I think most folks talking about API access are getting it through work/self-employment.
Anthropic needs to retune their personal plans. Opus is the Amelia Bedelia of models. Maddening! I shelled out $100 for Fable to drive Opus and finish a personal project, but that's probably my last time loading up on usage credits. I put a second $100 towards API credits so I could dink around with API access and understand conversations like these.
We have two wildly different cohorts of people. Those who see these tools as a technological curiosity and those who see them as a means to a specific end. I know that if I finish a task with a certain set of constraints that I will get paid a certain amount of money. I'd much rather be HITL on one very good agent loop if there is real money on the table. If you are mostly having fun, being curious, or exploring (which is fine!) then the cost of subscriptions might feel safer. Running an IRL version of factorio can get very expensive.
I also think the API tokens perform better but I have zero evidence other than observing the quality of my work product relative to that of my peers. I have almost a religious fervor about using prepaid tokens now. I am still using GPT5.5 in my copilot with custom model configuration for most heavy lifting in visual studio. It is more than sufficient. My average monthly token cost is <$100. Paying for a subscription would be more expensive because I have a predictable and controllable amount of demand.
This is analogous to variable vs fixed rate electricity. Paying the real time wholesale price is a massive economic advantage if you can figure out how to control the demand side of the house.
From 500 hours working on my mobile app project outside of work, I can confidently say that using anywhere between 2 to 10 conversations to parallelize work is much more effective in my project.
The models being served in the API are the same as via the subscription, there are no shenanigans here, particularly not concerning quality.
And GPT 5.5 was great at the time, I made heavy use of it for my project, but it's long outdated and already being retired.
You also mentioned using it in copilot, which is a third-rate harness that is frustratingly buggy and inefficient.
There's no comparison to Opus 5.5 in Claude Code.
Use whatever works for you, but frankly, I think you should try something new.
> I know that if I finish a task with a certain set of constraints that I will get paid a certain amount of money.
So not salary… ok. That explains some of it. Getting paid by the task might flavor one’s approach. But also one could reason, more tasks, more pay… somewhat confusing.
> I also think the API tokens perform better but I have zero evidence other than observing the quality of my work product relative to that of my peers. I have almost a religious fervor about using prepaid tokens now
And this appears to be the other half. It looks no less futuristic than the more wireheaded approach, just different in form.
Wholesale electricity is almost always cheaper.
Sorry, I have to be that guy... https://xkcd.com/386/
The analogy is false.
Domestic electricity is priced per kWh, wholesale electricity is priced per kWh, the latter is, as a rule, cheaper. It is not fixed vs variable rate.
> wholesale electricity is priced per kWh
> the latter is, as a rule, cheaper.
I think you’re missing some detail. Why do two things that are “priced per kilowatt hour” have to have different prices?
The reason is mostly higher consumption = lower average price.
The reality is that the subscriptions are heavily subsidized. Pretty much every sub that's not run by one of the money-burning frontier labs has had to drop it or dramatically increase prices and lower limits in the last few months. Cheap tokens are an acquisition tool, not a real product. It sounds dramatic but it really is the drug dealer sales funnel.
At some point they're going to drop the real prices in your lab and you're going to have to figure out how to pay that much or pay someone else a lot less. Better to get a handle on it now.
The real price for tokens at a specific level of intelligence is dropping rapidly. Between models improving and new hardware getting faster, I think prices will be going down, not up.
> Better to get a handle on it now.
I experiment with a lot of providers and models. I strongly disagree that anyone needs to start migrating now in preparation for prices maybe going up in the future.
It doesn’t make sense. Deal with a price increase when it happens, if it does.
Switching models and providers isn’t some huge lift. I can jump to a new model or even hardness and get a feel for it in a day or two. It’s not some huge undertaking that requires preparation and planning.
If prices go up, try something at that point in time. Don’t worry about it until then.
Then, both Anthropic and OpenAI in lockstep developed a enterprise pricing structure that openly coerced large businesses to pay API prices where it was feasible to spend $200/day rather than the comparatively cheap $200/mo.
Even if token pricing relative to intelligence does trend down over time, that doesn't mean the pricing structure will actually translate to lower costs, particularly in the cash cow B2B market.
That doesn’t change anything about what I said, though. The relative price per task or price per unit intelligence is also going down in the APIs too.
> Even if token pricing relative to intelligence does trend down over time, that doesn't mean the pricing structure will actually translate to lower costs, particularly in the cash cow B2B market.
What are you talking about? The APIs serve the same models as the subscriptions. Unless you think the price of APIs has been going up (it has not) this argument doesn’t make sense
Then when you consolidate all users to a single provider you find out you have a 2x to 3x larger bill because you… logically have more users at the same average token spend than the quote.
At my previous job, all while managing a full team, I did a lot of porting of legacy apps to modern standards to maintain various obligations. It was AI gen work in between meetings and paperwork. It was seen as such a success that I was asked to move to an IC role to focus on it within the “Elite new products team” that was supposed to be all AI and the latest tech. I showed up to find that they were pushing out low quality manually written code in 12 hour days six days per week to appear like LLMs were in use to save face because they lacked a token budget or the skills to properly manage one under the APIs. They had dismissed someone who had spent multiple thousands per month on Agent swarms. It was the perfect situation to make their 3x budget issue a 10-30x budget spend issue.
For many many reasons I left that job and got a new one but that was the cherry on top.
To better predict what they'll do with it we'd need to know the proportion of token usage via API vs subscription. Keeping an affordable, slightly unprofitable subscription to get people in isn't a bad idea. They also get marketing benefits from the word of mouth
Vibe-coders talk about surrendering understanding to the models, trusting that there will always be a model able to overcome and work through any technical debt they happen to accumulate, but the danger that still lurks there (at least for the naive) is that you'll need increasingly large contexts, increasingly sophisticated models, and increasingly large token spends just to keep that ball rolling.
Between profitable enterprise accounts being ineligible for subscription, eager but busy people paying for underutilized subscriptions, and naive vibe-coders falling into their pit trap, you can indeed imagine subsidized subscription accounts being available for a long time and remaining an effective value hack for people careful enough not to fall into the pit trap. But only insofar as they are that careful.
Loss leaders are a thing so long as they actually do lead somewhere. If your primary value proposition is conveyed by the loss leader itself, where do you go from there?
That’s risk management 101
So just wait until that happens? What's the point of scrimping and saving now? Not to mention you're paying for a premium in the meantime.
It does make me sharper I think. If you only ever use claude or whatever you don’t even really know exactly how tied to it you are.
Funny enough the drug dealer thing still holds. A deal’s a deal if you’re going to buy it anyway.
The share of tasks where "cheaper" models are enough also increases for same reason. For majority of use cases it will quickly become race to the bottom. And that means part of the pie for the "premium" models of frontier AI labs will quickly become smaller and smaller.
This only applies under the assumption that everyone tokenmaxxes their subscription.
I have visibility across a few different Claude team subscriptions. I'd say roughly 10% of people max their subscriptions.
I think I've only seen one organization where the under-used subs don't more than pay for the tokenmaxxed ones.
And that is ignoring the 90% margin that API inference runs at.
I took your meaning as "they're gonna drop [a bad surprise on you by raising] the real prices"... so at least it's not quite as tortured as the ambiguous "support for version N dropped today" (where you often can't even infer the direction from context).
this isn't just a tangent, I'm having trouble understanding the point you're trying to make, which hinges entirely on deciding if you meant "drop" literally
$1k/person sounds like a lot, but a ten person team at $1k token burn / head / month is spending $120k. How much does a new hire cost, tco? Does velocity from one more person compare with velocity from one more person’s worth of tokens?
Sure, learning to be efficient matters. So does taking the time to consider cost vs alternative. You might be surprised by what you find, in either direction.
Another thing of note is that when coding at 'scale' to my surprise over time with memory aggregation across users/sessions these models can be better than the evals would have you believe because they seem to be differently/less (?) RL'ed (aka actually listen to instructions), which results in them being more fastidious about writing memories and benefiting from them, especially over time. These are of course mostly subjective opinions but they were surprising, and not what we were expecting.
Relevant: the proxy we wrote and use: https://yapp.latchlabs.dev is partially open sourced: still working on releasing more of our memories stuff.
CLI Model Pct Remaining Reset Date claude all models 15% 3d claude Fable 50% 3d grok all models 0% 4d agy Gemini 36% 5d agy Claude and GPT models 0% 5d codex codex 0% 6d
And I also just used two of my three get-another-week-free tokens for codex.
If you've got an agentic swarm, or are working on multiple big projects at once, or have agents parsing data... you burn through tokens fast. The last four days in API would have cost me well over $3k.
Oct 16 I switched machine
Excludes work done on local and Claude Chrome plugin.
You spent $720 in four days on a $100 per month subscription? So that table isn't correct?
Do you mean the table shows what it'd have cost you if you weren't on the $100/m subscription?
Yep, that. There's tools out there that will add up your token usage and then estimate what it would be at API pricing. That's likely what they used.
Someone who pays $20 a month may only use 10% of their max budget.
Different matter at work but even there we are paying for API costs and have a monthly allowance (starts at $200/month but increases fairly easy to get)
1. In most cases, like this one, the product isn't heroin.
2. Drug dealers don't actually do that.
I'm not sure about that. Someone using AI for productivity every day will experience massive issues if you suddenly take it away.
It's even the whole business model of MS Copilot: They don't work with companies to have their data structured in the past or going forward.
They don't help you to structure your business "life", they offer a tool you consume to make sense of it while you use it.
The moment you stop using it, you'll struggle to even make sense of your own past actions.
> "2. Drug dealers don't actually do that."
It would be a weird business if they only WAIT for people to demand the more profitable drugs...
But the short version is that there are lots of people who want to buy any given drug and drug dealers sell them. I don't know exactly what you mean by "WAIT for people to demand the more profitable drugs", but there typically isn't a whole lot of waiting. There's a lot of demand out there. Giving away a bunch of free fentanyl to random people in the hopes that one of them instantly gets addicted would be a pretty wasteful and high risk sales tactic, especially given the number of people that want to buy it already.
And we're talking about subscription plans from OpenAI/Anthropic here. Switching to a different model and/or harness if the price changes isn't a "the world has run out of opioids and I'm going to need a detox center" level crisis.
This is a weirdly melodramatic analogy.
If you want to flatten everything to "all things habit forming are definitionally equivalent", you'll get some pretty funky results.
Turns out that drug dealers by and large prefer the straightforward approach of selling drugs to the huge market of people who want to take them.
I happen to be working on an extension to Aperture, so I have my own reason to promote it. But I do think it's a nice easy solution, and I promoted it to people before I was extending it.
I'm building a "bring your own data" layer for agentic work of all sorts, using the webhook method for now.
In the context of Aperture, I watch for agents looking for certain types/sources of data, and instead provide them with an in-tailnet API for accessing that data.
In a personal context, think email, calendar events, music playlists, fitness app records, transactions. I've also found it useful in a professional context, but I think I need to explore that a fair bit more.
It keeps credentials out of agents hands, and provides some relatively standard ways for controlling what agents can see and change.
I need a fair bit of hardening work before I try to get random folk to use it, but I might post something more here in the next week. :)
For subscriptions, it is easier to collect the JSONL files from ~/.claude/projects/ and similar directories. They are better organized (e.g., subagents) than what the proxy sees.
However, the best value comes from collecting agent sessions across the whole organization. You'll need to scrub credentials and handle security.
So id be very careful with chats and treat them like chats, not like code.
Is my brain now subject to GDPR regulations?
Not an attack on you, but my word am I thankful I don’t participate in the European regulatory regime.
not an attack on you, but I am thankful to have guardrails for greedy scrupulous corporations
Right now I run my Claude-Code sessions through a very simple mitmproxy, logging everything that goes in & out. It's very low level, sure, but it works.
I just wrapped around the Mlflow setup to make this simple CLI helper to set it up. Ofcourse the name suggests only Claude but it’s Codex, CC, GHCP and Agy. https://pypi.org/project/claudetracing/
https://github.com/CauchyIO/claudetracing
I did exactly this - probably the single most valuable piece of software I've "written". It's the backbone of every piece of code coming out of any agent under my control (via MCP toolset).
For clarity, I do like blog posts like these.
I don't remember the last time this was true. These things don't have a 'just works' mode.
$100 a month on an LLM subscription for hobby usage is an absurd amount of money IMO.
I can't orchestrate agents in sandboxes without it.
1. It can issue virtual keys, so provider API keys never go near the sandbox
2. I can see everything
3. Guardrails
And much more
Looking forward to it.
2) I heard Bifrost also works for this. Did you try that as well, pros/cons?
Primaily designed as a local LLM ops project, but will definitely do proxying for claude-code, opencode, codex, etc
https://llama-dash.dev
(Aside from ditching CC & it's bloated sys prompts that is)
Last I looked into it, using other harnesses with a subscription was a TOS violation that Anthropic seemed to take quite seriously (with automatic rate limiting etc.)
If I do need Opus/whatever to look at a specific issue I just use openrouter API.
Can't say I particularly care for the US providers walled garden ToS restricted handholding suprise fallback nonsense even if their models are the strongest. Most of my tasks work just fine with lagging behind absolute SOTA so don't feel the need to tolerate it.
i can see some IT/infra team using these tools to manage their LLM costs, but this blog post seems to hint at some kind of product decision making? what am i missing here?
For example, Github Copilot has these AI credits that are insane in terms of costs with the usual token-based pricing.
Feel free to prove me wrong, I really wish I was.
my own ai gateway/proxy
It is a not proxy. It can clearly show whats going on across all agents. The proxy's are generally inconvenient and yet another point of failure. I think the author got to the resort option quickly
Don't really understand why other agents to give those insights but well found my solution.
homelab running liteLLM or gomodel
I'm a little miffed that this isn't just an immediate OOBE, but I'm prepared to do some nc/ssh tunnel magic if that'll work properly .. just wondering what other DGX users have vis a vis best practices ..
there's the kind of people who care and the kind who doesn't ...
your local politicians and landlords do all kinds of normal, non-funky stuff you don't know about ... as do your local ISP-techies and hobbyists with access to supply chains and sub-distributing units ...
or your local school teachers and some parents and their widdle vintage schemes and circumambient tales they tell some kids but not others ... Lord, some guy even caught teachers and parents running schemes on teens to prep them for gay homo fag stuff, despair, frustration ... running for years ...
and you wonder how peeps don't what is going on xD?<
even those hackies and hackers and programmers and brogrammers and AI superusers who think they know and care and wield some power really really don't
but there you go, AI augmented diluted delusions
You can use and control all.your subscriptions or aoikeys through a gateway like this, so you don't get pwned like what just happened with OpenCode (or an OpenRouter like vendor). GoModel has some ambitions like this, but is open source so you can run it on you own infra, with plans for self hosted enterprise as well (there are a few features already like SSO). We are rolling out the free version at work right now.
I run GoModel at home and have hyper detailed history of every agent interaction, across models running on my sparks and OpenCode sub. You can call me a committed superfan of this project.
https://github.com/ENTERPILOT/GOModel
...proceeds to use codex.
With just a 12gb VRAM GPU + 64gb of CPU RAM, and you can actually own your own infrastructure. I can't wait for hardware prices to fall so that becomes even more accessible.