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.
Someone who pays $20 a month may only use 10% of their max budget.
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.
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
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.
For clarity, I do like blog posts like these.
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?
Don't really understand why other agents to give those insights but well found my solution.
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.
...proceeds to use codex.
I can't wait for hardware prices to fall so we can all actually own our own infrastructure. Until then, it's for the lucky and the rich.