New ask Hacker News story: Tell HN: I cut Claude API costs from $70/month to pennies
Tell HN: I cut Claude API costs from $70/month to pennies
7 by ok_orco | 3 comments on Hacker News.
The first time I pulled usage costs after running Chatter.Plus - a tool I'm building that aggregates community feedback from Discord/GitHub/forums - for a day hours, I saw $2.30. Did the math. $70/month. $840/year. For one instance. Felt sick. I'd done napkin math beforehand, so I knew it was probably a bug, but still. Turns out it was only partially a bug. The rest was me needing to rethink how I built this thing. Spent the next couple days ripping it apart. Making tweaks, testing with live data, checking results, trying again. What I found was I was sending API requests too often and not optimizing what I was sending and receiving. Here's what moved the needle, roughly big to small (besides that bug that was costin me a buck a day alone): - Dropped Claude Sonnet entirely - tested both models on the same data, Haiku actually performed better at a third of the cost - Started batching everything - hourly calls were a money fire - Filter before the AI - "lol" and "thanks" are a lot of online chatter. I was paying AI to tell me that's not feedback. That said, I still process agreements like "+1" and "me too." - Shorter outputs - "H/M/L" instead of "high/medium/low", 40-char title recommendation - Strip code snippets before processing - just reiterating the issue and bloating the call End of the week: pennies a day. Same quality. I'm not building a VC-backed app that can run at a loss for years. I'm unemployed, trying to build something that might also pay rent. The math has to work from day one. The upside: these savings let me 3x my pricing tier limits and add intermittent quality checks. Headroom I wouldn't have had otherwise. Happy to answer questions.
7 by ok_orco | 3 comments on Hacker News.
The first time I pulled usage costs after running Chatter.Plus - a tool I'm building that aggregates community feedback from Discord/GitHub/forums - for a day hours, I saw $2.30. Did the math. $70/month. $840/year. For one instance. Felt sick. I'd done napkin math beforehand, so I knew it was probably a bug, but still. Turns out it was only partially a bug. The rest was me needing to rethink how I built this thing. Spent the next couple days ripping it apart. Making tweaks, testing with live data, checking results, trying again. What I found was I was sending API requests too often and not optimizing what I was sending and receiving. Here's what moved the needle, roughly big to small (besides that bug that was costin me a buck a day alone): - Dropped Claude Sonnet entirely - tested both models on the same data, Haiku actually performed better at a third of the cost - Started batching everything - hourly calls were a money fire - Filter before the AI - "lol" and "thanks" are a lot of online chatter. I was paying AI to tell me that's not feedback. That said, I still process agreements like "+1" and "me too." - Shorter outputs - "H/M/L" instead of "high/medium/low", 40-char title recommendation - Strip code snippets before processing - just reiterating the issue and bloating the call End of the week: pennies a day. Same quality. I'm not building a VC-backed app that can run at a loss for years. I'm unemployed, trying to build something that might also pay rent. The math has to work from day one. The upside: these savings let me 3x my pricing tier limits and add intermittent quality checks. Headroom I wouldn't have had otherwise. Happy to answer questions.
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