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

0:00Eric Siu:When a buyer asks AI for a solution like yours, does your business come up? Most companies have no idea. And by the time they find out, they've already lost the deal to someone who did. HubSpot AEO helps you show up in those moments with the right answers buyers are looking for. Before the first click, before the first form fill. That's the moment HubSpot AEO is built for. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Here's how I decrease basically my$7 ,500 a month AI token spend to zero, where it's trending towards zero. So you can see this over here. So Neil, look at this.

0:36Eric Siu:So you can see this month to date so far,$6 ,700, right? You can see the graphs over here. It's like going up to like$400 a day or whatever. And I'm not saying I'm 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? That's just the different models. so red would be Sonnet and then you have Opus over here as well and then you have Opus like 4.7 and all that so my point is Neil I got it down somehow something broke over here like yesterday 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 CloudMax okay and then at the second level.

1:20Eric Siu:So what they're using first versus second versus third. Yes and then OpenAI OAuth is number two. Chapter GPT 5.5 is amazing. And then the last one is a fallback to the API. And I realized what happened. Yesterday, what happened with my OpenClaw 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, I got this to$20. So it was trending towards zero and I'm going to remove all the cron jobs.

1:49Eric Siu:and so now it's a good deal that's a great deal here's something that i saw interesting the other

1:56Neil Patel:day because i was talking to heath and we're talking about max studios because he has quite a few of them yeah he has like 15 right i don't know he has a lot so you know what happened

2:04Eric Siu:top remember thomas from same box so they they interviewed him for his uh his podcast and he's like yeah he has 15 mac minis how many do you have i was like i have one so so he's been buying

2:14Neil Patel:like max studios as well not just minis yeah and i didn't know this he was breaking down to me He's just like, dude, he's like, yeah, it costs a lot for memory. You can't even get any of these computers anytime soon. I'm like, what are you talking about? So I go to the Apple website. Oh, nothing's available. Nothing's available. And the memory storage is way lower than what you actually need.

2:36Eric Siu:I was trying to buy the 512, and then two weeks later, it was only down to 256. Now I can only get the 96. Is the 96 even available for the memory?

2:44Neil Patel:96, right? you can get 96 or 256, but your delivery time is nowhere near soon and they don't offer 512 anymore. Yeah.

2:54Eric Siu:So I use, so my plan is to wait for the new ones. They're going to sell out quickly, but I want to buy like two of the new ones, but I bought two of the DGX Sparks. That's why, because the Mac minis are out. And so Neil, to your point, the Quinn model, I think Alibaba, their open source model, almost equivalent to Opus 4.6. Opus 4.7 is out right now, but it's really good. It's really solid. and so what we talked about earlier in this podcast, my Camry fleet has to run on these DGX Sparks and then we're also going to have open source as well. So I might just eliminate the API at least from my personal, but I think for my company, you're still going to have to keep paying for API because you want them to have the best models.

3:31Neil Patel:Yep.

3:31Eric Siu:Just like you want your kids to have the best food, the best schooling and all these things. Yes, that is true.

3:38Neil Patel:It all ends up adding up to being a lot of money. But yeah, dude, these computers, Like I was going on the checkout. Like these things are expensive. I don't realize how expensive these computers.

3:48Eric Siu:It's like 16 grand for a fully loaded one.

3:49Neil Patel:I was like, this is like a car almost. Yeah, but it's worth it.

3:54Eric Siu:This is a productive car. Way more productive than a car. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So while Neil's looking for something right now, I'm going to go for the next one. Okay. So Salesforce just admitted it. Switching from per seat to usage pricing made customer spend go up 83 % Neil, 83%. So earlier we just talked about how Salesforce is going all in on APIs, CLIs, all these things, right? So Jason Lemkin, the Saster or the EchoSign guy, okay? He said they reduced their seats from 10 plus to two human seats and one API seat. And yet we now pay$22 ,000 a year, 83 % up from 12 grand. Why? Our 20-plus AI agents use Salesforce 100 times more than we did a year ago.

4:44Eric Siu:So they now have an AI VP of marketing, AI VP customer success, and run four third-party AI GTM agents, including AgentForce. Is their pricing model still by seat, but it's for AI? Is that what they switched it to? API. The API cost. Oh, the API usage is going up instead of the seat.

4:59Neil Patel:So they're spending less on the seats, but they're spending way more on the API.

5:02Eric Siu:Yeah, which you can try to optimize as much as you can. It's still going to keep going up. It's just about dampening the cost. So he's spending more money. Yeah, you're spending more money. So 83 % up on 12 grand to 22 grand, right? And so I think we're going to continue to see this. Now, here's the flip side of that, Neil. Notion. Do you use Notion? You pay for Notion? We probably pay in our company, but I don't use it. I don't use it either, right? So here's the thing. Notion, they're all over AI, right? They're like, okay, they've been accelerating their AI adoption, all this stuff. They just realized they hadn't used Notion in months, even with the strong AI product enhancements, because their agents don't need Notion, right?

5:40Eric Siu:They do need Salesforce. What do the agents need? They need.md files. That's what they need. You're okay just using Obsidian for that. Wait, is this Notion realizing

5:47Neil Patel:or this is Jason Limpkin?

5:48Eric Siu:Jason Limpkin realizing he doesn't need Notion.

5:50Neil Patel:I thought you were like, Notion realized they don't need Notion. Yeah, they just shut their company down. I'm like, wow, I don't know who runs marketing there, but I would fire that person.

5:59Eric Siu:Yeah, so I think that's really interesting. Percy versus Usha's base. I think we're going to continue to see this change because even the API for SEO stuff, the way we're planning to do it now is, Okay, freemium, you get some access, and then you'd have to pay on usage. I'm sure you're thinking about that for your SaaS products too.

6:12Neil Patel:Yes, and then a lot of companies, if you look at FIN, it is for ticket resolved, which people just want... I can go both ways. I know a lot of people want to pay for outcomes. It's hard to measure too. It's hard to measure. I personally, as a business owner, prefer monthly costs that are fixed.

6:36Eric Siu:Yeah, because it's more predictable.

6:37Neil Patel:very much more predictable yeah now if we use it a lot more and all right i get you you may have charging just like with emails like you know how your emails is fixed but if they uh if you send out x amount more emails you have x more contacts you go into a higher band yeah the reason i personally like that and you you nailed it is i like predictability in our cash flow and our accounting our business what we're going to generate each quarter like i don't like this ambiguity of, oh, you just pay for whatever you use. Well, if you just get spammed and a lot of you know, Finn fixes a lot of support tickets that were just spam or bullcrap, like what?

7:15Neil Patel:You just ended up spending thousands of extra dollars for something that wasn't needed?

7:19Eric Siu:It's tough. I think it's a tough job for CFOs in the next few years because you're an enterprise company before you're trying to protect as much. But now it's like you have to pay on usage for the best cloud tokens, the best open AI tokens. I do think, you know, the agents that we're selling right now for the revenue agent side, we're basically going to charge like a base fee. There's a management fee, but also there's token overages too. And we're probably just going to mark up whatever it is that they're spending because we don't want to hold them back. If you're getting this intelligence that could do more for you, you probably want to pay more for it.

7:48Eric Siu:And so unless you don't want to grow as fast, so like what are you supposed to do? Yeah. Yeah. But speaking of Finn, by the way, they launched a sales agent. Do you see that?

7:56Neil Patel:I did not see that.

7:57Eric Siu:They launched a sales agent. They're baiting it right now, but I think they're trying to charge people based on like a per lead basis. So we'll see how that goes.

8:03Neil Patel:And it just goes out there and tries to get you leads.

8:05Eric Siu:I think, I think it's more of an inbound. So, uh, it comes to your website and then they take on those leads.

8:13Neil Patel:So, so they take on leads that I've already taken on myself and then they'll do the sales for you. Yeah. And then they charge you a percentage.

8:20Eric Siu:I think they'll charge you just more than$1. I think they'll make, maybe they'll save for like, I don't know, 500 bucks, 100 bucks, 50 bucks or something like that. So, but they'll help you close the deal. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe they'll say, well, just help you with self-serve. So I don't know all the details. Yeah. I don't see it working for enterprise, but for self-serve, it could potentially help. Quick break. If you're doing AI SEO or content marketing in general, you know what the problem is. The problem is you're spending hours writing yourself or you're paying agencies lots and lots of money.

8:50Eric Siu:and you're getting AI slop that sounds just like everyone else. That's why we built ClickFlow. ClickFlow creates production-grade content that actually sounds like you. Plus, it helps you with other areas such as building internal links, creating FAQs, and more. One customer even reported saving 90-plus hours a month just by using ClickFlow. You can get a 14-day free trial just by going to clickflow.com. No more AI slop, just production-grade content that drives traffic and conversions. Back to the show. Yep. All right, so let's talk about this one over here. So Neil's tired already. Wait, before we get into the next one, you want to know why we're tired?

9:24Eric Siu:Why?

9:25Neil Patel:Dude, my son comes, he says, three o 'clock in the morning. I usually wake up like at four something, five at the latest. But he's like, check in on me. So my kids have this thing where like they want you to check in on them. So I'll put them to bed. And I usually do the nighttime routine. Then I surprise check in on them within like five minutes of putting them to bed so they know that I'm watching. We have cameras in their room, not in a creepy way. But like the nanny cams to make sure they're okay. You know, they don't just try to roam out the front door. It notifies us because you don't want your kids just trying to like leave the house or do something that they're not supposed to.

9:59Neil Patel:Or if they cry, it notifies us like something could be wrong. And my son, like at 3am, he's like, check up on me. So I go to his room like, hey, everything okay? And he's just like, I had a nightmare. I was so scared. And he's like shaking. So then he's like, would you lay with me, daddy? Please. I'm so scared. So I just lay in his bed. Is he in his own room? He's in his own room, yeah. So then I'm laying with him, and I'm just trying to fall asleep. And he's grabbing me tight. Oh, so you don't have sleep. So I didn't have much sleep. And then he's like, are you going to leave in the morning to go to the gym?