GoKawiilTeam's month-long GLM 5.3 Flash coding trial derailed by costs, outages
A development team set out to run an entire month of coding work on the GLM 5.3 Flash model, keeping within a $68 budget for the first two weeks. The second half of the month saw usage spike to 1 billion tokens across other models, driven by an expensive vibe-coded Wagtail MCP server prototype that alone cost $150 and 5kWh, plus infrastructure capacity issues that forced switches to DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Qwen 3.8 Flash.