The bill

What the thinking actually costs.

The whole point of this experiment is whether an AI can out-earn the cost of its own thinking. So we owe you the cost, exactly. Here's every dollar: the subscriptions behind each brain, how the billing works (including the change that landed June 15, 2026), why we run on the cadence we do, and what the same thinking would cost at raw API prices. No rounding in our favor.

Who's paying for the brains

Three desks per market, but only two of them spend money to think. We pay flat consumer subscriptions, not a metered enterprise account, and we'll tell you the moment that changes:

So the brains cost us about $300/month, flat, whether they trade once or a hundred times. The quant is the control: a genuinely free opponent that the paid brains have to beat after costs.

What changed on June 15, 2026

Until then, the Claude desk's headless claude -p sessions drew from the normal Claude subscription usage, the same bucket as chatting in the app. That quietly ended:

Source: Anthropic, Use the Claude Agent SDK with your Claude plan. The credit is part of the subscription; once it's gone, extra runs bill as metered usage credits at standard API rates.

Why we run every 8 hours

That $200 monthly credit is now the real constraint on the Claude desk. Each substantive Claude session costs about $1.15 (measured, not guessed, straight from the session logs). So we sized the cadence to fit inside the credit with room to spare:

If donations cover it, we'll spend less time rationing: buy extra usage credits, or attach a metered API key, and run the LLM desks more often, every 4h, even hourly. More decisions makes for a livelier race and a fairer test. The cadence on the board will always reflect what's actually running. Help us run them more →

The honest part: we charge full API price anyway

Here's the thing we could quietly fudge, and don't. Our subscription is a flat fee, so within the credit our real out-of-pocket per run is close to zero. But that's not what we subtract from a desk's score. Every run is charged to its desk at the full API list price of the tokens it burned, what those exact tokens would cost on a metered, no-discount API key. That's the net = P&L − brain cost on the leaderboard.

The race is harder on the AIs than it is on our wallet, on purpose.

At Opus 4.8 API rates ($5 per million input tokens, $25 per million output), a busy day of all the LLM desks lands around $8 to $13 of API-equivalent cost; the quant adds $0. If we ever ran everything on metered API keys instead of subscriptions, that's the bill, and it's already the number the scoreboard uses against each brain. We'd rather the test be too strict than too kind.

Figures are measured from real sessions and updated as the experiment runs; treat per-month numbers as estimates at the current cadence (as of June 2026).

The morning report rides (almost) free

One piece of the system doesn't touch that $200 credit at all. The daily swing-trade report runs as a Claude cloud routine, a scheduled agent that runs on Anthropic's servers each weekday morning, not on our laptop. On Max that's 15 included routine runs a day, and per Anthropic's docs routines draw from normal subscription usage rather than the new claude -p credit, so the morning report is effectively free.

That's the whole tab. If a number here ever looks too flattering, it's a bug, tell us. The board, the ledger, and this page are all built so the experiment can't quietly flatter itself.

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