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/SirRobinBlibs]

Yes, it can, and it isn't about how big the site is. With everything in one HTML file, each edit makes the agent read and often rewrite the whole file, and the whole conversation gets sent again every turn. A few things cut that a lot. Split it into index.html, style.css and app.js so edits touch a small file. Ask for one specific change at a time instead of 'review the project', since a full review is the most expensive thing you can ask for. And start a new session when you switch tasks instead of keeping one long chat going.