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How to not get an AI bill that makes you cry
iox bills you for the box. Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, DeepSeek bill you for tokens. The first one is predictable. The second one isn’t — unless you read this page.
What you pay iox for
The subscription pays for compute, storage, the IDE, the add-on platform, snapshots, and any iox-built AI features (panel, voice). That’s it.
- Starter $19/mo — one CAX11 box (2 vCPU / 4 GB / 90 GB). Margin: ~53%.
- Standard $59/mo — one CAX31 box (8 vCPU / 16 GB / 400 GB). Up to 3 boxes total.
- Power $149/mo — one CAX41 box (16 vCPU / 32 GB / 1 TB). Up to 10 boxes total.
What you do NOT pay iox for
Anthropic API tokens. OpenAI tokens. Gemini tokens. xAI tokens. DeepSeek tokens. Those keys live in your vault, get injected into every box, and the calls hit yourprovider account directly. iox never sees the tokens, never counts them, never marks them up. If your Claude Sonnet bill is $400 this month, that’s between you and Anthropic.
Rough cost cheatsheet
Order-of-magnitude estimates for common tasks — prices change, check your provider for current rates.
| Task | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | DeepSeek V4 | Claude Max |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 PR review (5K tokens in/out) | ~$0.07 | ~$0.01 | included |
| 1 refactor session (100K tokens) | ~$1.20 | ~$0.14 | included |
| 8h of agent-driven coding | $20—$80 | $2—$8 | included (subject to rate-limit) |
| A “run six refactors overnight” fleet | $50—$200 | $5—$20 | probably rate-limited |
Rules of thumb
1. Claude Max > Claude API for normal use
If you’re using Claude as your daily driver and don’t need to fan out across many boxes, Claude Max ($20/mo) usually beats paying per-token. The break-even is around 3 hours of moderate Claude Code use per month.
2. DeepSeek beats Sonnet for extraction / boilerplate
For mechanical work — data extraction, type-shape generation, parsing — DeepSeek V4 is 10× cheaper and quality is fine. Save Sonnet for the parts that need reasoning.
3. Set a budget alarm
Anthropic and OpenAI both let you set a monthly spend cap on the API key. Do that beforehanding the key to iox. Cap at 2× what you expect to spend; if you blow through it, the calls just fail, and you investigate. Don’t skip this step.
4. Auto-sleep is your friend
iox auto-sleeps your box after 60 min of zero activity. Compute pauses, only storage keeps ticking. Wake from any device, any time — we never destroy a box without you asking.
If something looks wrong on your bill
Email matt@iox.cloud with the date and the amount. iox bills are deterministic, so anything weird is a bug we’ll fix.