api-pricing on S Anand

Things I Learned - 14 Jun 2026

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

Overheard a journalist saying: “I can tell when humans are lying. There are no tell tale signs of AI lying. At least I don’t have any.”
rdt-cli is a Reddit CLI. It uses a clever trick: it auto-detects installed browsers and extracts cookies (supports Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave). So, if you’re logged into Reddit on any browser, uvx --from rdt-cli rdt whoami automatically shows who you are logged in as. (The public-clis repo also lists other useful CLIs like twitter-cli, )
Currently, a $20 Claude Pro gives you ~$400 and a $100 Claude Max gives you ~$2,000 of API usage. For ChatGPT, the numbers are ~$700 and $3,500. SemiAnalysis
When Fable 5 refuses to answer questions, here’s the message that appears: “Fable 5 has safety measures that flag messages on most cybersecurity or biology topics. They may flag safe, normal content as well. These measures let us bring you Mythos-level capability in other areas sooner, and we’re working to refine them. Send feedback or learn more.” I managed to trigger this once while researching an M&A acquisition target. Clicking on “Edit and retry with Fable 5” triggered Opus 5 again, twice.
DNA codons (A, T, C, G) encode proteins in triplets. There are 64 triplets that map to 20 amino acids. Some like Leucine, have 6 codons. Some like Methionine have only one. Why? When creating genes, there’s a wobble, sometimes, at the 3rd codon. THe mapping minimizes that impact: small errors map to similar proteins. The more common proteins have more codons. There’s a lot of fascinating information science going on here. Gemini
ChatGPT now shows a “Check in” button when it’s thinking. Clicking on that gives you a work-in-progress answer while it continues thinking. When done, it replaces the WIP answer with the final answer. A useful feature!

AI Coding Agent Subscription ROI

Sat, 30 May 2026 23:19:34 +0800

I ran npx -y ccusage monthly --compact to get the following break-up of my AI coding agent costs.

Month	Codex	Claude
2025-09	$37.47	$2.29
2025-10	$106.79	$9.13
2025-11	$100.35	$14.24
2025-12	$240.69	$24.88
2026-01	$100.89	$20.28
2026-02	$323.21	$29.46
2026-03	$1996.32	$134.87
2026-04	$401.36	$47.07
2026-05	$378.20	$45.13

This shows the ROI of my $20 subscriptions to each. I get ~$35 worth of API calls for my $20 Claude Pro subscription and ~$400 of API calls for my $20 ChatGPT Plus subscription (on top of my ChatGPT chats.)

I end up using Codex a lot more - partly because it’s a bit more diligent, but mostly because it’s a lot cheaper.

Clearly, subscriptions are good deal for individuals. Codex, especially.

This may not be true for corporates. Simon Willison says that Anthropic and OpenAI both changed enterprise pricing to align with token prices. That means the cost of enterprise AI security is ~2-20 times their token budget - which is growing rapidly.

BTW, my moment of AI psychosis was in March 2026. The coding agents had increased their limits and I was tokenmaxxing. I’m far from that limit today, but the symptoms linger.

14 Jun 2026: SemiAnalysis tested and found that a $20 Claude Pro gives you ~$400 and a $100 Claude Max gives you ~$2,000 of API usage. For ChatGPT, the numbers are ~$700 and $3,500.

OpenAI TTS cost

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 05:12:32 +0000

The OpenAI text-to-speech cost documentation is confusing.

As of 2 Nov 2025:

GPT-4o mini TTS costs $0.60 / MTok input and $12.00 / MTok audio output according to the model page and the pricing page. They also estimate this to be ~1.5c per minute - both for input and output. It supports up to 2,000 tokens input.
TTS-1 costs $15 / MTok speech generated according to the model page but the pricing page says it's $15 / MChars. No estimate per minute is provided. Is supports up to 4,096 characters input.
TTS-1 HD is twice as expensive as TTS-1

I wanted to find the approximate total cost for a typical text input measured per character and token.

I converted this podcast with 4,096 ASCII characters and 877 tokens on o200k_base using:

I ran:

curl https://api.openai.com/v1/audio/speech \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d "$(jq -n --arg text "$(cat podcast.txt)" '{
    model: "tts-1",
    voice: "coral",
    input: $text
  }')" \
  --output tts-1.mp3

This took 46 seconds to generate and produced a 5.1 MB MP3 file (256 seconds)

To measure the cost, I ran:

curl "https://api.openai.com/v1/organization/costs?start_time=$(date -d '1 day ago' +%s)&project_ids=$PROJECT_ID&group_by=line_item" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_ADMIN_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json"

This cost: USD 0.061425. Then I ran:

curl https://api.openai.com/v1/audio/speech \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d "$(jq -n --arg text "$(cat podcast.txt)" '{
    model: "gpt-4o-mini-tts",
    voice: "coral",
    input: $text
  }')" \
  --output gpt-4o-mini-tts.mp3

This took 44 seconds to generate and produced a 4.3 MB MP3 file (268 seconds).

When I ran the admin API call again, the costs did not reflect for 5 minutes. So I ran it the GPT-4o mini TTS call again with the same input. This took 44 seconds to generate a 4.3 MB MP3 file. When I ran the admin API call again, the total cost for the 2 requests was: USD 0.12942 audio output and USD 0.0010524 input.

I also checked for TTS-1 HD. Here are the costs in USD:

Model	$ / MTok	$ / MChars	$ / hour	Time (s)	Audio (s)	Cost $
GPT-4o mini TTS	74.4	15.9	0.876	46	268	0.0652
TTS-1	70.0	15.0	0.864	44	256	0.0614
TTS-1 HD	140.0	30.0	1.728	62	257	0.1228

The GPT-4o mini TTS audio output cost was USD 0.06471 for the input of 877 tokens, i.e. $73.8 / MTok. Since the actual cost is $12 / MTok, this is a 6.15x multiplier. I guess 1 input text token produces ~6 output audio tokens.

In terms of quality:

GPT-4o mini TTS: Very slightly robotic. Looser interpretation of text (e.g. says "October" when I write "Oct").
TTS-1: Natural. Strict interpretation of text.
TTS-1 HD: Very slightly more natural. Strict interpretation of text.

I will likely use TTS-1 for now given the cost difference is small and the quality is good enough.

Incidentally, the usage API did not show an GPT 4o mini TTS line items even after 20 minutes.

curl "https://api.openai.com/v1/organization/usage/audio_speeches?start_time=$(date -d '1 day ago' +%s)&project_ids=$PROJECT_ID&group_by=model" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_ADMIN_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json"