Updates · 2026-11-05

What it costs to run: real usage numbers from the Hive

Cost is the first thing people ask about agents that run overnight. The Hive (hivelab.ca) runs the official Claude Code (or Codex) program on your machine, under your own login, so it uses the plan you already pay for, within your limits. An API key works too. It does not make the usage cost nothing, and it does not hide it. This post is our own measured load, with dates, so you can judge what the limits look like.

One caveat first. Our Hive runs on a subscription, so nobody here is billed these dollar figures. They are the API list price of the tokens used, as a yardstick (a cost tool computes them from the agents' transcripts). And our load is heavy: a whole team working on a dozen projects at once. A single person's overnight run should be much smaller, but we have not measured it. A measured table is being worked out.

The numbers

At API list prices, the Hive's model use was:

Over seven days to 5 November that is about $4,500, of which about $4,160 was the largest model (Opus 5.5), about $215 Sonnet and about $110 Fable. In the same five days (31 October to 4 November) the log shows 2,474 agent runs by 843 distinct agents.

Where it went, from a measurement on 1 November (about $1,300 at list price): cache reads 43 %, cache writes 33 %, output 24 %. Most of the cost of an agent is not what it writes. It is re-reading its context.

What the weekly limit meant

On 1 November the weekly meter worked out to about $16 of list price per 1 % of one login's weekly limit, with two later windows at $18 and $13. By 2 November every login we use had reached 100 % of its weekly limit, and the Hive spent that night waiting (see what a night of unattended work looks like). That is the cost that matters to a person on a plan: not dollars, but the day your limit ends.

The Hive can stop starting new agents before your weekly limit, at a line you set. That is the cheapest feature in it.

What we changed to spend less

• A cap on context. Replies with more than 200,000 tokens of context were 30 % of replies and 44 % of spend on 1 November. On 3 November the automatic compaction window was set to 200,000 and then, the same day, lowered to 120,000.
• Cold wakes. The first reply after the one-hour cache lapses has to rewrite the whole context. Those were about 11 % of the largest model's spend in a 12-hour window. That is the reason for the lower window.
• Choosing the model. An agent starting another can choose a smaller model for a search or a summary instead of inheriting the large one. Search and file lookups go to the smallest.
• Connectors off. Turning off connectors that agents never used cut about 12,000 tokens from the first reply of each run (22,900 against 35,200 on a test with the smallest model). We estimate that at about 3 % of spend.

What we don't know

We don't know yet how much a single person's night costs against a given plan. Our own numbers are for a team, and the right size for one person depends on the plan, the model and the job. The sizing table is being measured on our own Hive and will go in the guide with its date.

Until then, the honest advice is the boring one: set the stop line, start with one job, and watch the meter for a night.