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points by Gigachad 4 days ago | 0 comments

The costings here are based on API pricing, but my understanding is that no one is paying the API pricing and everyone uses the subscription pricing, or even multiple accounts with a subscription each. I'd be interested to know the actual cost incurred here.

[–] Yahivin 4 days ago

I’ve found that subscription is ~98% cheaper than API pricing.

[–] grumbel 4 days ago

On the stuff I have done (mostly Opus5.5) it came out at around 1/20 the cost, 95%. So a $20 subscription is around $1000 API. Somewhere in that ballpark.

[–] ivraatiems 4 days ago

I think the API pricing is a good proxy for "what was the actual physical cost of doing this," but even if you increase it from 5k to 30k or even 100k, it's a huge savings over getting a human to do it, AND it was faster.

I don't think the productivity gains from AI can be ignored for contexts like this. It's what they're best at.

I just hope it goes to good uses (more ports of fun games, more interoperability and opennesS) instead of bad ones (firing humans instead of retasking them), and that hope feels faint.

[–] coffeesoda 4 days ago

Yep, I agree. Further in the notes it's mentioned this probably would've taken a handful of Senior Engineers anywhere from 6 months to 2 years. The range of budget on the project is like $200 to $500k. This was done for peanuts in my spare time. I share both your optimism and pessimism, depending on the day, lol.

[–] starkparker 4 days ago

> This was done for peanuts

If you don't have a real dollar cost then can you tell us how much it actually cost in peanuts?

[–] The_Blade 4 days ago

$20 can buy many peanuts

[–] theYipster 4 days ago

explanation: money can be exchanged for goods and services.

[–] Gigachad 4 days ago

In no way am I suggesting that doing this without AI would be more practical. What I want to know is roughly how much is Anthropic subsidizing this stuff through the subscriptions currently and how much we can expect the real price paid to go up in the future.

[–] ivraatiems 4 days ago

Right, that's why the API pricing is a better metric than subscription pricing. It's probably still subsidized but not as much.

[–] bakugo 4 days ago

> it's a huge savings over getting a human to do it

This of course assumes it's something anyone would consider worth paying a human to do (it's not).

[–] ivraatiems 4 days ago

That's not true, companies pay humanies to develop ports and remasters of software all the time. Maybe not from one dead platform to another, but the same technology can be used to take a game like this from a dead platform to a living one.

[–] coffeesoda 4 days ago

It was, 15+ years ago, when porting N64 games to 3DS was a lucrative market for hired guns. We have the magic 'port' button and this tech just showed how easy it is with severely different architectures & constraints.