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Marketing School - Digital Marketing and Online Marketing Tips

How I Cut My $7,500 Claude Cost To Almost $0

Marketing School - Digital Marketing and Online Marketing Tips

Eric Siu and Neil Patel

Business, Marketing, Careers

4.61.4K Ratings

🗓️ 6 May 2026

⏱️ 19 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Eric and Neil break down how Eric cut his AI token spend from around $7,500 a month to nearly $0 by changing his model hierarchy, fixing fallback issues, and reducing unnecessary API usage. They also get into why usage-based AI pricing is changing software, why some tools become more valuable in an agent-driven world, and what founders, marketers, and agencies need to understand as AI costs shift from seat-based pricing to usage-based pricing. Key takeaways ◾ You can dramatically reduce AI token spend by fixing model hierarchy and fallback logic. ◾ AI costs need to be actively monitored because broken workflows can quietly burn cash. ◾ Usage-based pricing is becoming a bigger part of software economics. ◾ Some tools get more valuable in an agent-first world, while others matter less. ◾ Agencies that help companies become AI-readable may have a major opportunity. Chapters (00:00) How Eric cut his $7,500 AI token spend (03:25) Why usage-based AI pricing is going up (05:08) Why some software matters less in an agent world (08:11) ClickFlow ad break (12:29) Why AI-readable brands matter more (17:19) What this means for agencies and founders

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

When a buyer asks AI for a solution like yours, does your business come up?

0:04.5

Most companies have no idea.

0:06.2

And by the time they find out, they've already lost the deal to someone who did.

0:09.9

HubSpot AEO helps you show up in those moments, what the right answers buyers are looking

0:14.7

for.

0:15.6

Before the first click, before the first form fill.

0:18.6

That's the moment HubSpot AEO is built for.

0:21.5

Check out HubSpot.com,

0:23.2

the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

0:26.2

Here's how I decreased basically my $7,500 month AI token spend

0:30.4

to zero, where it's trending towards zero.

0:33.1

So you can see this over here.

0:34.9

So Neil, look at this.

0:36.7

So you can see this month to date so far, 6,700, right?

0:38.9

You can see the graphs over here. It's like going up to $400 a day or whatever. And I'm not saying I spending the most because some people hit me up on Instagram. I'm spending $30,000 a month. Congratulations. So anyway, my point is you can see the graph starting to go down. Okay. So what's the red versus the white?

0:53.9

That's just the different models.

0:55.2

So red would be sonnet. see the graph starting to go down. Okay. So what's the red versus the white? That's just the different

0:54.5

models. So red would be sonnet and then you have opus over here as well. And then you have opus like

1:01.1

4-7 and all that. So my point is Neil, I got it down. Somehow something broke over here like yesterday

1:07.5

it went up. So I'm going to have to look into that. But all I did, Neil, was I changed my model hierarchy. And so what I mean by that is I have, I paid $200 a month for Claude Max. Okay. And then at the second level. So what they're using first versus second versus third. And then opening I, Oath is number two. Chapter 2505.5 is amazing. And then the last one is a fallback to the API. And I realized what happened. Yesterday, what happened with my OpenClaught is it kept screwing up. It kept calling the old API because it didn't realize that it had the CLI. So something's broken there. And so that was fixed as of this morning, actually. So that was fixed. So you do need to continue to monitor your costs. but I got this as low as, uh, I got this to $20. So it was trending towards zero and I'm going to remove all the cron jobs. And so now it's a good deal. That's a great deal. Here's something that I saw interesting the other day because I was talking to Heath and we're talking about Mac Studios because he has quite a few of them. Yeah. He has like 15, right? I don't know.

2:02.8

He has a lot.

2:03.4

So you know what happened?

...

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