I use hosted providers myself, but I can churn through $100 worth of tokens in half a day even with cheap models like Deepseek easily. If someone's use is as light as yours, then sure - grab a subscription and you'll save far more. For higher use it will come down to how cheap your electricity is whether it is worth offloading at least some of it (for me it's not, FWIW)
Same, very surprised when people on HN are shocked by high token burn - it's really not hard if you've figured out how to use LLMs!
Could you share a bit about what you’re working on or what type of projects require that much usage? Is it hobby, production, revenue generating?
A mix. I have hobby projects that churn through that much when I don't need the tokens for others things. I also have projects for clients that easily consumes those levels. As well as a stealth-ish potential startup. Currently I'm at 4 different subscriptions + more than I'd like in spend via OpenRouter...
What multiplies it very quickly is when you start feeding them with test suites and "Ralph loops" that run until the test suites pass, or complex chains with lots of sub-agents being triggered.
If you're sitting there watching everything, it will be hard to burn all that much even if you're running multiple things in paralle.
I'm skeptical of letting agents run free like this. Even Opus makes decisions I don't always agree with. And I quickly lose my mental model of how the code is evolving.
I get more enjoyment and better results when the coding process is me and the agent working through a plan, at each step sparring over what to do next and how. Then I also catch the bad decisions before they manifest in the code.