Section C3 · Running costs and economy
Fuel
This machine does not run on petrol, but it absolutely has a fuel bill, and the single most common complaint in the group since day one has been hitting the bottom of the tank by Tuesday. Here is how the meter works and how to drive economically.
How the meter works
Every word you send, and every word it replies, costs compute. Subscriptions hide this behind a flat fee with a usage cap; the cap is the tank. Two things drain it faster than people expect. First, a long conversation re-sends its entire history with every single turn, so hour three of a chat costs several times what hour one did. Second, some tools are simply thirsty: design and app-building modes, big document uploads, and images-as-input all gulp where text sips.
Economy driving
- Short sessions, clean handovers. When a chat gets long, ask for a summary, start fresh, paste the summary in. You lose nothing and stop paying rent on the whole transcript.
- Plain text beats everything. Paste text rather than screenshots; convert documents to plain formats before uploading. The machine reads a picture of words at many times the cost of the words.
- Ask tight. Half of token burn is the back-and-forth of vague requests. One well-specified ask is cheaper than five clarifications. (This is the Intent block earning its keep.)
- Save your good prompts. Anything you ask regularly should be a saved instruction, not retyped and re-negotiated each time.
- Right-size the brain. Sorting, summarising and triage do not need the flagship model. Use the cheap fast one for bulk work and save the expensive one for judgement. Paying top-tier prices to sort a list is hiring a partner to do the filing.
- The diesel option. Free open models running on your own computer are now genuinely good for everyday work. Slower, less brilliant, but the meter never moves. Worth a look if your usage is heavy and repetitive.
The two warnings
If you use a pay-as-you-go key, set a spending cap before you do anything else. Subscriptions fail safe (you hit the cap and wait); raw usage-based access fails expensive, quietly, and has surprised people in this group in a single morning.
Today's prices are somebody's introduction offer. The industry is currently selling compute below cost to win customers, and models get repriced, restricted or withdrawn with little notice; the group watched one launch and vanish inside a single week. Enjoy the subsidy, but do not build a business plan on it, and keep your setup portable enough to switch.