Reddit cost breakdown: one agent loop burned 1B tokens/day — on Opus that's hundreds of dollars
OvertaxedOne · reddit · 2026-11-01
A Reddit user breaks down the economics of agentic loops with frontier models: hooking subscriptions like Opus to third-party harnesses violates TOS and risks bans; their local agent burned 1B+ tokens in 12 hours (mostly cached) across dozens of compactions on one goal, which at Opus API rates ($4/$20 per M tokens) would cost hundreds of dollars daily. Their conclusion: for token-hungry loops, local or cheap models like DeepSeek (a few percent of Opus cost) make far more financial sense.
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