HACKER Q&A
📣 aicoder

How much do you spend on coding agents?


My bill on cursor for the first 2 weeks of this month was nearly 1500 USD. Am I an outlier, how much are other people spending on these tools?

  👤 latexr Accepted Answer ✓
You should probably to a poll instead, with some ranges.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

👤 incomingpain
1500 usd? holy crap. Are you using the biggest most expensive model or something?

Most people are in that sub 200usd/month range for heavy coding. Sure you dont get some massive intelligent model, but it will do the job.

At that price, you could justify getting yourself a 96gb rtx pro 6000 and run like gpt 120b on it. Pay itself off in under a year.

👤 jamesponddotco
With my wife and I using our OpenRouter account, via the API, we spend about $20 per month. Plus a Claude Pro subscription for Claude Code which I’m meaning to cancel.

We mostly use Claude Sonnet and Gemini 2.5 Pro, with a bit of GPT-5 when I need design work, and Claude Haiku in Home Assistant.

I prefer to use chat instead of agents… I use AI generated code as a starting point, mostly, and chat works better for that.

You’re definitely an outlier. Aside from companies, I don’t know anyone spending that much, to be honest.