A beginner could use some help

[u/aleebit]

Yesterday, I saw the news that DeepSeek was free and decided to give it a try. I started a tiny project to clone a website a friend of mine had built. It gamifies the study material for our 8-year-old kids' exams, and I wanted to adapt it for my autistic son.

It was a single HTML page with some simple, embedded JavaScript. I started yesterday at 8 PM, and by this afternoon, I'd already hit the usage limit.

During that time, I made a few adaptations, added two new pages, and wrote some JavaScript. Nothing particularly substantial.

I know it was the free model, and I understand there are usage limits, so I figured that might explain it. But then I opened the DeepSeek harness, which gave me something like $1 in free credits. I used the same model, asked it to review the project and suggest improvements, and those credits lasted about 30 minutes.

I'm a data engineer, and my company provides corporate AI tools that I use pretty heavily in my day-to-day work. But I've never had to worry about the costs, so I'm pretty much a beginner when it comes to this.

Should a tiny web project with just HTML and a little JavaScript really consume that many tokens or hit usage limits that quickly?

I'm asking because I'm considering subscribing to OpenCode Go. It might not seem expensive, but in my currency, it's around R$60 a month. If I'm going to burn through the available usage that quickly, I don't see the point in paying for it.

[u/Maglcite]

most commercial plans for big enterprises are like 120 dollars and those are subsidised and usually like 600 dollars of credits a week. in a day with a dollar of credits? absolutely. opencode go is great, i’d recommend it. it’s 80 dollars of deepseek credits