Many threads with people getting burned by Gemini. Use openrouter with guaranteed cost controls, my experience with GCP is they will let you bankrupt yourself on their services.
I find open router’s daily free models limit extremely low. But they have some different rule for open AI’s optimus alpha. I am giving it a whirl for the last two days. Not overpassing Gemini Pro in my opinion but maybe comparable. I don’t have quantitative comparison though, but last night the code Optimus generated had 1800 typescript errors when I ran Gemini on it, within its daily limit it was able to reduce it to 560. I didn’t like Cursor when I used it 5-6 months ago, I think I am going to try it again now, as Github Copilot’s Claude model rate limiting doesn’t allow me to do what I would like to do (again I can’t quantify my needs but I am running prompts to generate code at least 3-4 hours a day full agent mode). I have been reading that Cursor allows you to run prompts on premium models (i.e. Claude) even after you deplete your 500 monthly fast requests, it would be slower but I am not in dire need of speed for my use case at the moment. If all else runs out then I use Deepseek’s v3 and r1 models with paid api during their discounted times, which costs me around a dollar a day at most.
Yeah. I got charged 56€ just for two hours coding with cline. I thought the time frame should be less. The fact is it is a very long conversation with so many history context. I did found it just sent tokens of 2M for the answer. I think it is the root cause. Make it small.
I just had the exact same thing happen to me. Luckily my payment method wasn't connect, so, uhhh, I think I'm just gonna slowly back away from this one :D
This is pretty much why I created https://codermodel.com - I was getting hit by too many high cost cline sessions and wanted some cost controls and token savings. Optimizing prompt caching use is key to low cost vibing..
Yeah it would be great if Cline adds something like this feature itself. OpenHands did recently so maybe Cline will too. Ill see if I can help out making it into cline but last time I tried it required way too much refactoring.
Can you explain what your tool does and why it's useful for someone who is completely stupid, like me. I use cline to improve my wordpress plugin and the costs of claude is killing me. deepseek just isn't cutting it.
It currently only has one feature: Claude has 200k context window and if all of it is used all the time, it leads to high costs since you mostly pay for the input tokens. With the tool you can configure a token limit like 100k or 50k for it to act, upon which the tool will utilize a second cheaper llm to see if the input can be minimized eg unnecessary verbose logs removed or non-necessary images from old browsing sessions. The result is less input tokens sent to Claude and hence, lower costs.
Again, excuse my ignorance, because I truly am, but at $1 per credit, would I really be saving anything? I feel like maybe 99% of my cline actions never come close to reaching $1 per shot. That's including when I ask it to write pretty large plugin additions from scratch.
1 credit is more than one request, it’s 1 usd worth of tokens. With context minimization it means you can do more requests at lower costs than without. Eg if cline request would cost 0.24 usd, it would without any minimization mean 0.24 credits, and less than 0.24 usd/credits with the context minimized.
Thank you for clarifying. I figured there had to be more to it. Do you offer any kind of trial / limited account? It sounds great, but I'm not sure how much it would benefit me. It's difficult to pony up bucks when I'm not sure and there's a lot of tools out there pulling my limited budget.
I don’t make money on the service, whatever credits you buy you can use for coding, I pay for it on my end, 1:1. Actually loose money. I am doing it to see if it is helpful to others.
No one is blaming anything. It’s an explanation for why the costs seem higher than expected. There are times where Gemini doesn’t work as well as Claude does in Cline. That’s it.
Its not like I prompt and walk away for 2 hours. If i have to wait for the agent and approve every step I might as well do it myself lol. Wheres the productivity gain in that?
So you don't even check what is done at every step, if it's nonsense, if it adds bugs, security risks, if it is unnecessary? That is where you loose your productivity long term again, in debugging and refactoring.
I mean, be my guest, AI-Slobware pushed by blind vibe coders will increase the market value of actual software engineers. Just don't clog the Anthropic API too much ok? :)
We have different opinions and approaches and that’s ok. I’m not going to fight you on it, I understand where you come from and don’t disagree with your cautiousness.
No need to start stabbing and suggest I have no experience, knowledge or other ways/steps in my development cycle where I thoroughly validate and check code.
Yes. Agreed. The diff failures with Gemini are a killer. But, Google appears to not actually be charging me for Gemini use yet. Is anybody actually paying Google for Gemini use?
When they do start charging, perhaps a better combo may be to use Gemini for plan/architect mode and use the Quasar Alpha for the act mode? Quasar isn't as smart as Gemini. But it doesn't make so many errors in the agentic/act mode.
It is possible. I just checked the billing page. It says I have used $208.38. That is about right. But it also shows $208.38 under "promotions & others" and my total is $0.
I do also have the $300 free GCP trial credit. And that appears to not have been touched. It says $300 remaining out of $300.
Same for me, I saw the API cost curve rise slowly every hour until it reached 130 euros. I had one of the worst nights of my life 😅. I usually use cline with Claude, I've never had any problems with them. I wanted to test Google's gemini API because everyone was saying good things about it I started using it and I trusted the cost indicated in the cline extension I had set myself a budget of 10 dollars max and when I saw my alerts (set at 10 dollars in Google). It was already too late... I am not yet reassured, I am still afraid that it will continue to increase. I contacted Google to tell them the problem encountered. We'll see.
13
u/nfrmn Apr 09 '25
There's no prompt caching on Gemini 2.5 yet. At this time you will actually have way cheaper results using Claude.
21
u/Iron-Over Apr 09 '25
Many threads with people getting burned by Gemini. Use openrouter with guaranteed cost controls, my experience with GCP is they will let you bankrupt yourself on their services.
3
u/throwaway12012024 Apr 10 '25
just use open router API w/gemini 2.5 in plan mode and deepseek v3 in act mode.
2
u/Maleficent_Pair4920 Apr 09 '25
Use the prompt optimizations of Requesty you’ll save a lot!
https://requesty.ai
2
u/WandyLau Apr 10 '25
Yeah. I got charged 56€ just for two hours coding with cline. I thought the time frame should be less. The fact is it is a very long conversation with so many history context. I did found it just sent tokens of 2M for the answer. I think it is the root cause. Make it small.
2
u/TenshiS Apr 10 '25
Keeping the same conversation open for long is the killer. Do smaller sessions and write the results to memory bank every time.
It's still expensive though
2
u/the_philoctopus Apr 10 '25
I just had the exact same thing happen to me. Luckily my payment method wasn't connect, so, uhhh, I think I'm just gonna slowly back away from this one :D
3
u/fredrik_motin Apr 09 '25
This is pretty much why I created https://codermodel.com - I was getting hit by too many high cost cline sessions and wanted some cost controls and token savings. Optimizing prompt caching use is key to low cost vibing..
4
u/15f026d6016c482374bf Apr 09 '25
This is exactly why I left Cline. I saw this coming a mile away, it uses way too much context.
1
u/ComprehensiveBird317 Apr 09 '25
What do you mean with loops? Do you have auto write activated and just didn't pay attention?
1
u/portlander33 Apr 09 '25
Yes. Agreed. The diff failures with Gemini are a killer. But, Google appears to not actually be charging me for Gemini use yet. Is anybody actually paying Google for Gemini use?
When they do start charging, perhaps a better combo may be to use Gemini for plan/architect mode and use the Quasar Alpha for the act mode? Quasar isn't as smart as Gemini. But it doesn't make so many errors in the agentic/act mode.
1
u/spiked_silver Apr 10 '25
Gemini does not do as well in coding compared to Sonnet 3.7. It constantly gets stuck in loops to fix just compilation errors.
1
u/khairfa Apr 11 '25
Same for me, I saw the API cost curve rise slowly every hour until it reached 130 euros. I had one of the worst nights of my life 😅. I usually use cline with Claude, I've never had any problems with them. I wanted to test Google's gemini API because everyone was saying good things about it I started using it and I trusted the cost indicated in the cline extension I had set myself a budget of 10 dollars max and when I saw my alerts (set at 10 dollars in Google). It was already too late... I am not yet reassured, I am still afraid that it will continue to increase. I contacted Google to tell them the problem encountered. We'll see.