I Spent $900 on AI Coding Agents in 8 Weeks

Cost Summary

Total Cost: $928.45 over 70 days

Average per Request: $0.06

Cost per Task (Request): Ranges from $0.00 to $2.78, with 65.7% costing under $0.05

Projected Monthly Cost: ~$416 (based on average daily spend of $13.86)

Request Patterns

Requests per 5 Hours: Average 70.7, ranging from 1 to 451

Average Time Between Requests: 6 minutes 33 seconds

Median Time Between Requests: Just 13 seconds (shows bursts of activity)

Peak Activity: 1-2 PM (10.4% of all requests at 1 PM)

Busiest Day: Saturday with 21.7% of requests

Token Efficiency

Average Tokens per Request: 83,371 tokens

Median Tokens per Request: 38,342 tokens

Average Output per Request: 876 tokens

Cache Hit Rate: 88.8% (excellent! saves money)

Cost per 1,000 Tokens: $0.0009 (very efficient due to caching)

Cost per 1,000 Output Tokens: $0.14

Notable Stats

Most Expensive Request: $2.78 using 6.8M tokens (mostly cached)

Total Hours of Active Usage: 1,692 hours (~9 requests/hour)

Most Used Models: claude-4.5-sonnet-thinking, claude-3.5-sonnet, and others

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45914307