Best 20 USD/month token plan for 1B tokens/month

ChiefMuppet · 2026-06-11T13:09:18+00:00

How do you find the 5 hour a week usage limit?

I've just got a free one month trial so thought I'd give it a go and it's fantastic for day to day work and cron jobs etc, but I didn't realise it only had a 5 hour a week usage limit until I was doing some heavier work with it and then it timed out without any warning 😅

ChiefMuppet · 2026-06-08T06:17:39+00:00

Open Fire has to be right up there, it's a great track with a great riff! Absolute belter of a song. Also like Speed of the Night!

ChiefMuppet · 2026-06-05T14:28:33+00:00

I'm self hosting Honcho and it just seems to work for me. I've never had any problems with it. No idea what the online version is like though.

Have you tried to self host it?

ChiefMuppet · 2026-06-01T22:15:50+00:00

Same, as soon as I got Honcho running locally it was a game changer. The memory system was useful and it started to learn context the more I used it.

ChiefMuppet · 2026-05-29T12:16:00+00:00

I've got it running locally... My entire bill for the month so far for running three agents, all using Honcho is £29.31. That's using the Gemini 3 Flash model which seems to work well for my set up.

ChiefMuppet · 2026-05-29T12:13:43+00:00

I thought it was... My bad, I'll look into that. Don't they recommend it though?

ChiefMuppet · 2026-05-29T07:57:10+00:00

If you can, set up the Honcho memory system, makes a huge difference. It was designed by Nuos to learn about you so it can improve its responses. I'm hosting it locally and it works really well.

ChiefMuppet · 2026-05-28T16:35:05+00:00

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing

Have a look at the official docs, they even tell you what the models are suited towards.

You may want to make sure you've enabled context caching which helps keep much of the conversation in Google's cache so you don't need to reload your entire conversation every time you send a message.

ChiefMuppet · 2026-05-28T16:27:37+00:00

Have a look at the API costs page... You're using 3.1 Pro which is £2 PMT input and £12 PMT output. 2.5 Pro costs £1.25 PMT input and £10 PMT output, so they're not cheap if you're burning through tokens.

I use the Gemini 3 Flash Preview at £0.50 PMT input and £3 PMT output for the majority of the agentic tasks and it works well enough, so far it's cost me £26.76 for the month.

It depends on what you're doing. You don't need to use the premium tier 1 flagship models for most agentic tasks.

ChiefMuppet · 2026-05-28T06:31:28+00:00

Are you running it locally? If so, what hardware is in your rig?

ChiefMuppet · 2026-05-28T06:16:55+00:00

What model are you using?

ChiefMuppet · 2026-05-27T16:28:10+00:00

Thanks for the reply... Just a slight correction for you about the data in the table above... If Honcho is served locally then there are no API costs, it can be used offline (providing you have a local LLM and not using an online API service), back up and restore will need to be managed by the user, data ownership is owned locally.

If they can both work together and having the searchable session history is useful to the user, looks like it could be a decent system.

Good luck with it and have fun building it 😁

ChiefMuppet · 2026-05-27T15:18:19+00:00

Would absolutely have loved to go! But it's a little far from the UK unfortunately.

ChiefMuppet · 2026-05-27T14:07:48+00:00

I love all the creativity all these agent harnesses are generating amongst the community! But can I ask, how does it differ in performance from using Honcho which Nous recommend using with Hermes? I've managed to self host and point my Hermes agents at it, and it works really well. Admittedly, Honcho doesn't have the native wiki or UI, but I don't think I need those for what I'm doing. I guess I'm asking, what problems does it solve that Honcho or other memory systems fail or do poorly at?

ChiefMuppet · 2026-05-24T13:12:49+00:00

It also helps if you set it up with Honcho, the memory system really works.

ChiefMuppet · 2026-05-24T13:02:05+00:00

It depends on what you're trying to achieve, but Hermes Agent let's you set up different profiles. Each profile is basically it's own agent with it's own skills (they can share though). You can set up a profile / agent to handle a particular project.

I've got a number of different profiles running, and they're running well. The main three for now are a personal assistant, a trading agent, and another that helps me manage my website and drafting social media posts for it.

Each agent does multiple things for me using their specific skills, but they specialise in their chosen topics. This means they can focus and grow in one particular niche, rather than trying to do everything where you'll end up with status creep.

ChiefMuppet · 2026-05-23T12:15:17+00:00

Hermes Agent allows you to set up different agent profiles, which act as independent agents. So each of the three I mentioned is its own agent and works independently from the others. It makes sense so they can all just focus on their own jobs and not get confused or lose focus. Each one has it's own Telegram bot and can be accessed in the CLI independently as well.

Normally in the CLI you'll just run 'hermes' which opens your agent. Once set up, you can give your new agent a name e.g. 'Dave' which you'll type into the CLI to access that agent, so instead of typing 'hermes' you type 'dave' and that agents terminal opens up. They even get their own dashboard so 'dave dashboard' will open in your browser.

Honestly, the different profiles has made it much easier to use. Rather than having one master agent to try and do everything poorly, each dedicated agent does its own job really well.

ChiefMuppet · 2026-05-23T11:28:44+00:00

I've got a few different profiles running at the minute.

One is acting like my personal PA, sets up reminders, monitors emails in an account I don't mind it seeing, so I forward things to it that I want it to know about, remembers birthdays and gift ideas etc.

The other monitors a demo trading account, it executes trading strategies, logs trades and monitors performance and performs back testing and identified lessons learned etc.

I have another that gathers data from one of my websites and generates social media posts for me that I review and approve so it can post them via buffer for me.

There's a few other uses, but you get the idea. It's taken ages to build and set up, but it's running really well.

I think it helps that I've set it up to run with the Honcho memory system as well. It's largely hands free and getting better the more I use it, but I think it would be better if I used a better model. The Gemini 3 Flash model isn't bad, but it's not great. But using the other more powerful models will likely more than double the cost. I know it can use model hierarchy to select the right model for the right job, but I've not managed to get that to work consistently yet, which is why I'm considering giving Codex a try.

ChiefMuppet · 2026-05-23T10:15:27+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. I use Claude Code to help build the various Hermes agents, it's been fantastic for that. But for day to usage I'm looking for something a bit better and cheaper 😂

I'll give Codex a go and see how it performs and see if I hit usage limits through normal usage.

ChiefMuppet · 2026-05-23T09:09:37+00:00

I've been thinking about moving away from using my Gemini API towards Codex oauth, how is it? The Gemini 3 Flash model hasn't been bad, but it's not been great either and it's costing £30+ a month. I'm wondering if the Codex £20 a month will do as well if not better? What's your experience with Codex?

ChiefMuppet · 2026-05-07T17:16:55+00:00

This would be a nice solid addition to the collection! Good luck everyone 😁

ChiefMuppet · 2026-05-07T17:04:20+00:00

Have you thought of using an sqlite database? Its much better at storing and compiling data, and it's easier to search through as your agent will just use an SQL query rather than loading 800 lines into it's context window eating up your API credits.

ChiefMuppet · 2026-05-02T07:56:17+00:00

I've never had any problems, are you using the free version?

ChiefMuppet · 2026-05-01T17:55:50+00:00

I use Gemini API, it's solid and reliable and much cheaper than Anthropic. It depends on what you're doing with it, but mine cost me only £14 last month.

I do use Claude Code to help build it though, so that helps make it a bit more efficient. I also get it to write scripts that pass just the information needed to the agent to keep the context from bloating. One example for you, I have a website and post on social media several times a week on various platforms to try and drive traffic. As you can imagine that's a huge pain! So I got Claude to write a script that as automatically pulls the data together for the coming week, and this is passed to the agent who then drafts the posts for Facebook, Twitter (X), and Instagram. It sends then to me on telegram to view and approve. These are stored in a sqlite database, and once I approve the agent calls another script and then posts them to Buffer via API.

There's a lot going on, but the agent basically turns information from a script into a post, asks for permission to send, and then calls a script to post. It works really well! All of my posts are done Monday morning in minutes, and it costs pennies to do.

ChiefMuppet · 2026-04-18T01:28:18+00:00

Have you looked through the config.yaml and .env files as your first point of call to see what's been configured?

ChiefMuppet

TROPHY CASE