I let my AI agents run unsupervised and they burned $200 in 2 hours
27 comments
·October 14, 2025automatic6131
anupsingh123
I think there's some confusion about what justcopy does - it's for cloning YOUR OWN projects, not scraping other people's websites. Built it out of frustration when I tried to fork one of my projects for a different idea and it took a full day even with Claude Code and Cursor. Lots of manual config updates, dependency changes, renaming stuff, etc. The $200 mistake was about agent orchestration, not the ethics of the product. But appreciate the feedback - clearly need to communicate the use case better.
automatic6131
I'm not going to pay you to slightly rip off my own ideas. Who is going to pay you for this, and what are they doing with it?
dominicrose
Even without AI, companies have been burning cash uncontrollably on cloud services. I guess it's worth it when time saved, scalability etc, is much much more valuable than money.
leptons
Oh, they burned a lot more than $200, you just paid only $200. These things are costing way more than what people pay for them, the price heavily subsidized.
simonw
I think the opposite is much more likely to be true: that vendors who charge money for inference are charging more than it costs them to service a prompt.
I've heard from sources that I trust that both AWS and Google Gemini charge more than it costs them in energy to run inference.
You can get a good estimate for the truth here by considering open weight models. It's possible to determine exactly how much energy it costs to serve DeepSeek V3.2 Exp, since that model is open weight. So run that calculation, then take a look at how much providers are charging to serve it and see if they are likely operating at a loss.
Here are some prices for that particular model: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v3.2-exp/providers
Tade0
If that's the case, then why are AI companies bleeding money?
Or: what are they bleeding money on?
simonw
They lose money on research and training and offering model trials for free (a marketing expenses).
That doesn't mean that when they do charge for the models - especially via their APIs - that they are serving them at a unit cost loss.
Ferret7446
On building the next new feature/integration/whatever? I feel like this should be a rhetorical question, but the fact that it was asked I also feel it is not so...
barrkel
Research runs mostly.
anupsingh123
btw this was DeepSeek-V3.2. If I'd been using Claude Sonnet 4.5, we'd be looking at a $2000 bill instead.
anupsingh123
Classic "I'll be right back" moment that cost me real money.
Building justcopy.ai - lets you clone, customize and ship any website. Built 7 AI agents to handle the dev workflow automatically.
Kicked them off to test something. Went to grab coffee.
Came back to a $100 spike on my OpenRouter bill. First thought: "holy shit we have users!"
We did not have users.
Added logging. The agent was still running. Making calls. Spending money. Just... going. Completely autonomous in the worst possible way. Final damage: $200.
The fix was embarrassingly simple: - Check for interrupts before every API call - Add hard budget limits per session - Set timeouts on literally everything - Log everything so you're not flying blind
Basically: autonomous ≠ unsupervised. These things will happily burn your money until you tell them to stop.
Has this happened to anyone else? What safety mechanisms are you using?
magicalhippo
I thought the hotel AI's playing poker together in Altered Carbon was a bit cheesy until these newfangled LLM-driven agents came along, and it all seemed a lot more realistic.
Agents doing nothing, just doing things for the sake of doing things.
Seems we're there.
W3schoolz
What a great learning opportunity! Supervision is key and budget limits are highly valuable in preventing surprises.
That said, I think a budget limit of $5-10k per agent makes sense IMO. You're underpaying your agents and won't get principal engineer quality at those rates.
fragmede
Privacy.com credit card with a limit set, and making sure that billing is not set to auto on the LLM platform.
anupsingh123
How would that help with supervising agent runs for each user on justcopy.ai?
W3schoolz
What is justcopy.ai? Is justcopy.ai the project you are working on? How can I find out more about justcopy.ai?
SpaceNoodled
My chief safety mechanism is not using money-burning slop generators.
anupsingh123
That's one approach. For me, the agent setup cut what used to be a full day of manual work down to minutes - even with the $200 learning tax, that's still a net win. But I get the skepticism.
The kind of person who wants to build a website copier is exactly who I had in mind for the target of vibecoding.
Bad idea, bad execution, I like it when a plan comes together.