If the Apis I call are not profitable for the provider then they won't be for me either.
This post is a fly.io advertisement
Not if you run them against local models, which are free to download and free to run. The Qwen 3 4B models only need a couple of GBs of available RAM and will run happily on CPU as opposed to GPU. Cost isn't a reason not to explore this stuff.
Let's be realistic and not over-promise. Conversational slop and coding factorial will work. But the local experience for coding agents, tool-calling, and reasoning is still very bad until/unless you have a pretty expensive workstation. CPU and qwen 4b will be disappointing to even try experiments on. The only useful thing most people can realistically do locally is fuzzy search with simple RAG. Besides factorial, maybe some other stuff that's in the training set, like help with simple shell commands. (Great for people who are new to unix, but won't help the veteran dev who is trying to convince themselves AI is real or figuring out how to get it into their workflows)
Anyway, admitting that AI is still very much in a "pay to play" phase is actually ok. More measured stances, fewer reflexive detractors or boosters
This post isn't about building Claude Code - it's about hooking up an LLM to one or two tool calls in order to run something like ping. For an educational exercise like that a model like Qwen 4B should still be sufficient.
sir, this is a hackernews
same thing you said but in a different context... sir, this is a hackernews
It costs like 0.000025€ per day to run. Hardly something I need to get "profitable".
I could run it on a local model, but GPT-5 is stupidly good at it so the cost is well worth it.
You don't need to run something like this against a paid API provider. You could easily rework this to run against a local agent hosted on hardware you own. A number of not-stupid-expensive consumer GPUs can run some smaller models locally at home for not a lot of money. You can even play videogames with those cards after.
Get this: sometimes people write code and tinker with things for fun. Crazy, I know.
They posted it here expecting to find customers. This is a sales pitch.
At this point why is it an issue to expect a developer to make money on it?
As a dev, If the chain of monetization ends with me then there is no mainstream adoption whatsoever on the horizon.
I love to tinker but I do it for free not using paid services.
As for tinkering with agents, its a solution looking for a problem.
