decryption on Nostr: did the math comparing the cost of making the sizzle with an LLM vs paying me, a ...

did the math comparing the cost of making the sizzle with an LLM vs paying me, a human, to do it instead:

Today's Sizzle is about 1700 tokens, which at Optus 4.8 pricing is US$0.0425 for the output.

But you need to feed the LLM articles for it to read to make the summary. There's usually around 2000 unread items in my feed reader each morning and lets say each item is around 600 words each - that's 1.2m words. If each word is about 2.5 tokens, that's 3 million input tokens - US$15.

Opus is pretty expensive, so if you use a cheaper Chinese LLM on Openrouter, like DeepSeek V4 Flash, you're paying US$0.30c for the input and the output is basically a rounding error. So A$0.43 per issue of The Sizzle.

There's around 240 issues per year of The Sizzle, which at 43c each, is A$103.20 using DeepSeek.

I only charge A$60 a year. So I'm cheaper than the LLM. I think I'm better too.