Agents made me 10x more effective — the real bottleneck is usage limits and token bills

Firm-Club-8334 · reddit · 2026-08-31

The author says agents have made him 10x more effective in a year, but his rate-limiting factor is now usage caps and token costs, which kill the economics of many projects. He argues Codex/Claude are subsidized yet waste tokens on expensive closed models where cheaper ones would do. He tried building his own model router with OpenRouter's auto-router without much luck, likes standardcompute.com's monthly-subscription router, but wishes it served free models — and asks the community for other heavily subsidized alternatives to maximize agentic work per dollar.

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