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Hey, here’s VelsTech Weekly #5 – the cost special.
Everyone compares per-token prices. Nobody does the monthly math – so I did it for three real workloads across seven current models, plus a local rig priced the same way. The headline: one developer’s coding-agent usage costs $3,780/month on GPT-6 Astra – or $21.66 on a local 12 GB rig.
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💵 The money findings
1. A coding agent costs $25.70–$3,780/month depending on the model
Same workload, 40 tasks: MiMo Flash $25.70, DeepSeek $91, Sonnet 5 $756, Astra $3,780. Model choice is a 147x cost lever before you optimize a single prompt.
Full comparison →
2. Heavy automation on flagships buys a GPU every month
200 tasks/month: Astra $18,900, Sonnet $3,780, even DeepSeek $455 – vs $21.66 local. At this scale the cloud bill is a hardware budget.
See the tables →
3. Grok has a billing cliff at 200K tokens
Past 200K prompt tokens the entire request doubles to $4/$12 – budget past the cliff, not at the sticker.
Why it matters →
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📚 New on the site
4. LLM Hardware Requirements Checklist
Will it run on what you have? VRAM table by model size plus RAM/CPU/storage/PSU checks, in order.
Run the checklist →
5. Refreshed: llama.cpp how-to, Linux mini-PC picks, Qwen fit-error fixes
The llama guide now targets how-to searches, the mini-PC guide answers server/AI questions, and the Qwen lab post documents three ROCm error fixes. All updated Sept 22.
Browse the refreshes →
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