I'd love to do something like this, or use API keys, but I still don't understand how people justify the cost of using API keys vs. subscription.
I tested it once, I'm in on the 20x claude max ($200/month) and I either max my weekly limit every week or come really close. But it only took 2-3 days to hit $200 spend with api keys.
Personally at home I use the free github copilot and then openrouter when that runs out. Last month I used $0.90 of openrouter. Zero so far this month. When my bill starts hitting double digits I'll consider options.
Different matter at work but even there we are paying for API costs and have a monthly allowance (starts at $200/month but increases fairly easy to get)
The current crop of flash models are more comparable to sonnet than opus but they are very affordable.
The reality is that the subscriptions are heavily subsidized. Pretty much every sub that's not run by one of the money-burning frontier labs has had to drop it or dramatically increase prices and lower limits in the last few months. Cheap tokens are an acquisition tool, not a real product. It sounds dramatic but it really is the drug dealer sales funnel.
At some point they're going to drop the real prices in your lab and you're going to have to figure out how to pay that much or pay someone else a lot less. Better to get a handle on it now.
It's not obvious the subsidization will end. Loss leaders are a thing. Most enterprise at this point are paying API pricing
To better predict what they'll do with it we'd need to know the proportion of token usage via API vs subscription. Keeping an affordable, slightly unprofitable subscription to get people in isn't a bad idea. They also get marketing benefits from the word of mouth
>At some point they're going to drop the real prices in your lab and you're going to have to figure out how to pay that much or pay someone else a lot less. Better to get a handle on it now.
So just wait until that happens? What's the point of scrimping and saving now? Not to mention you're paying for a premium in the meantime.
The drug dealer gives you a free hit because it is profitable for him in the long term for you to be addicted to his product, not because he is your friend.
Tailscale makes Aperture available for free, and while it's not something you own, it is in your tailnet, so at least you have a certain amount of control over how things access it.
It gives a nice view of what agents are doing, with lots of configurability and extensions, and the team behind it has been updating pretty steadily.
I happen to be working on an extension to Aperture, so I have my own reason to promote it. But I do think it's a nice easy solution, and I promoted it to people before I was extending it.
I’m not sure what people are doing with these subscriptions to feel the need to monitor what’s going on this closely. A $100 OpenAI subscription feels effectively infinite for my usage at home
I've never touched my ISP-provided router. But maybe it's just how it works in my country (Malaysia), we pretty much only have 1 ISP with monopoly, so maybe that helps.
Yeah you should run an LLM proxy, but imagine a world where LiteLLM and all the other LLM shovels weren't buggy vibecoded messes. And with the velocity of updates I feel there has to be vulnerabilities there. Or am I just holding it wrong? Anyone got a good alternative?
1) What kind of guardrails are you using? Do you do models like prompt injection checkers? Or what guardrails are useful that do not know the environment the agent lives in?
2) I heard Bifrost also works for this. Did you try that as well, pros/cons?
I'm not the person you asked but yes pretty much. I've found the prompt injection protection models pretty limited, but get good results from gpt-oss-safeguard with a policy describing various prompt injection techniques. More expensive but more flexible and reliable and I only run it on web fetch and web search results. Costs me like 5-20 cents a day depending on what I'm working on.
OpenRouter does all this for you. It's pretty nice. Although for apps I use another server to lock down the requests even more and prevent the client from seeing my API key.
Because the details we care about right now already travelling over the network and the industry is adopting OTEL, where you can export and collate kernel things if you need to
Well that was one of the reasons why i build my own agent/harness - to have actual full observability of what it is doing and why it is doing what it is doing.
Don't really understand why other agents to give those insights but well found my solution.
With just a 12gb VRAM GPU + 64gb of CPU RAM, and you can actually own your own infrastructure. I can't wait for hardware prices to fall so that becomes even more accessible.
I use GoModel and its amazing. My favorite features are virtual model, the support for arbitrary request labels, and the nice dashboads / ui. Creator has more sophisticated report generation on the near term roadmap. He's super responsive to feedback and ships fast. (except for his recent trip to the US west coast to meet founders and investors, he's EU based)
You can use and control all.your subscriptions or aoikeys through a gateway like this, so you don't get pwned like what just happened with OpenCode (or an OpenRouter like vendor). GoModel has some ambitions like this, but is open source so you can run it on you own infra, with plans for self hosted enterprise as well (there are a few features already like SSO). We are rolling out the free version at work right now.
I run GoModel at home and have hyper detailed history of every agent interaction, across models running on my sparks and OpenCode sub. You can call me a committed superfan of this project.
I tested it once, I'm in on the 20x claude max ($200/month) and I either max my weekly limit every week or come really close. But it only took 2-3 days to hit $200 spend with api keys.
Someone who pays $20 a month may only use 10% of their max budget.
Different matter at work but even there we are paying for API costs and have a monthly allowance (starts at $200/month but increases fairly easy to get)
The reality is that the subscriptions are heavily subsidized. Pretty much every sub that's not run by one of the money-burning frontier labs has had to drop it or dramatically increase prices and lower limits in the last few months. Cheap tokens are an acquisition tool, not a real product. It sounds dramatic but it really is the drug dealer sales funnel.
At some point they're going to drop the real prices in your lab and you're going to have to figure out how to pay that much or pay someone else a lot less. Better to get a handle on it now.
To better predict what they'll do with it we'd need to know the proportion of token usage via API vs subscription. Keeping an affordable, slightly unprofitable subscription to get people in isn't a bad idea. They also get marketing benefits from the word of mouth
So just wait until that happens? What's the point of scrimping and saving now? Not to mention you're paying for a premium in the meantime.
I happen to be working on an extension to Aperture, so I have my own reason to promote it. But I do think it's a nice easy solution, and I promoted it to people before I was extending it.
I don't remember the last time this was true. These things don't have a 'just works' mode.
For clarity, I do like blog posts like these.
I can't orchestrate agents in sandboxes without it.
1. It can issue virtual keys, so provider API keys never go near the sandbox
2. I can see everything
3. Guardrails
And much more
Looking forward to it.
2) I heard Bifrost also works for this. Did you try that as well, pros/cons?
homelab running liteLLM or gomodel
Don't really understand why other agents to give those insights but well found my solution.
...proceeds to use codex.
With just a 12gb VRAM GPU + 64gb of CPU RAM, and you can actually own your own infrastructure. I can't wait for hardware prices to fall so that becomes even more accessible.
You can use and control all.your subscriptions or aoikeys through a gateway like this, so you don't get pwned like what just happened with OpenCode (or an OpenRouter like vendor). GoModel has some ambitions like this, but is open source so you can run it on you own infra, with plans for self hosted enterprise as well (there are a few features already like SSO). We are rolling out the free version at work right now.
I run GoModel at home and have hyper detailed history of every agent interaction, across models running on my sparks and OpenCode sub. You can call me a committed superfan of this project.
https://github.com/ENTERPILOT/GOModel