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Show HN: Cost.dev (YC W21) – making agents cost-aware and cheaper to call (https://cost.dev)

36 points by akh 2 days ago | 22 comments | View on ycombinator

photonair 1 day ago |

Tokens can get expended very quickly driving costs up substantially since there is no clarity in its usage If your service can cut the use substantially, for a large company with a huge AI bill, the savings could make up for the cost of the service which I think is pricey in my opinion. But I can see how it could work out.

lavaman131 1 day ago |

This is an interesting approach. I think people still underestimate how quickly token limits and context bloat become the bottleneck when you start running agents in production loops. Seems very relevant topic also given the environment. Will check it out

5701652400 2 days ago |

I don't know how they can justify 250 USD / month bill. let alone 1000 USD / month.

5701652400 2 days ago |

why would anyone need 10,000 runs a month? do people modify their infrastructure 10,000 times a month?

zuzululu 2 days ago |

Not really seeing the point I just use openrouter if I'm penny pinching

arxiv101 about 9 hours ago |

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winphoto 1 day ago |

[flagged]

songting591 1 day ago |

[flagged]

sid_ships 1 day ago |

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sanreds 1 day ago |

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ismrhao 1 day ago |

[flagged]

jing09928 2 days ago |

The interesting bit is making cloud cost a first-class constraint for the agent loop, not just a post-hoc report. I'd be curious how you handle confidence/uncertainty in estimates, since a wrong cheap-looking recommendation can be worse than no estimate in infra PRs.

zane_shu 2 days ago |

The useful split here seems to be: let the CLI do price lookup and validation, and let the agent decide which diff to make. The thing I’d watch is how visible the source of the estimate is in review — if a PR says “saved $X”, reviewers need to see which prices/rules produced that number.

dezsirazvan 1 day ago |

[flagged]

eugeneonai 2 days ago |

The 79% / 67% reduction generalizes broader than IaC. Any CLI agents shell out to (curl, jq, grep, kubectl, gh, psql) burns the same token tax — verbose JSON, free-form text output, agent-composed pipelines. A predicate-flag + compact-output redesign would land on all of those.

  Direct answer to your question: agents-writing-IaC-in-prod is rare today but not zero. I see more "agent reviews the IaC PR a human wrote", which Cost.dev sounds well-suited to since verification runs locally and the agent only consumes the result. Even if the prod-IaC path takes another year, the design pattern earns its keep on every agent-shellout you already do. One question: does the CLI surface its cache state to the agent, or does each invocation start fresh Repeated price-fetches across a single agent run would be the obvious next-tier savings.