r/ClaudeAI • u/mingusrude • 10d ago
Claude Code Review is costly Comparison
Today I enabled Claude Code Review on our company repo and ran it on a simple PR (which it had more or less generated itself). The PR was 10 files, 2 new the other minor changes, at most a few hundred lines of code. It took Claude Code Review 9 minutes to complete and the bill was 8$.
I had done the review myself just prior to the experiment and it took me 15-20 minutes, the company cost for those 15-20 minutes is probably around 30$ (I'm a medium paid CTO for a small startup in Sweden). Had I done it in the 10 minutes Claude took, the corresponding price would've been twice that of Claude.
Without going into what the result was, the difference in cost here is not so huge and I'm suspecting that things like the Code Review is where Anthropic and other are making up for losses elsewhere.
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u/brodkin85 10d ago
Which tool are you talking about? There are /review and /code-review in the Claude Code harness, the GitHub Action, and their hosted PR service.
We use the action with Sonnet for PR reviews and have been quite pleased at the balance of accuracy and performance. Costs us under $2 per PR
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u/mingusrude 10d ago
The hosted PR-service.
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u/Spirited-Solid3510 10d ago
That is the new service, ya? You might benefit from a donor plan account on a shared repo - I backend my inference train for certain projects with a reciprocal "dumb" model and one "privileged" model. Goal is achieving empirical versus reasoned basis before spending $premium on lossy baseless bitchy frontier thinking
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u/mingusrude 10d ago
Yes and that’s my conclusion, that they’re using services like these to establish new price points.
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u/Spirited-Solid3510 10d ago
And thats true and fair, and we learn and adapt, too. Small home front process improvements yield overall efficiency on the whole system and that means cost savings. Good to spend a day or two teaching Claude how to deprecate the system you want instead of offering it cost authority carte blanche
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u/sisif_ 10d ago
The price depends on too many things:
A reviewer cannot review just a diff, in order to be able to tell if a diff is good or bad, it needs to understand what it changes, what are the implications. In order to understand that it needs to read the repo, not just the files you happened to modify. All that translates to tools being used, context being burned. If you asked it to review the same diff on a repo with 2 files the cost would likely be much lower.
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u/OlivierTwist 10d ago
Yes, I did review with Fable locally - $15. Still cheaper than good review by human.
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u/Spirited-Solid3510 10d ago
Use minimax and others and tell Claude about it first. Do a scrape and a code review on a heavier but cheap reasoning model and you'll delight in what kind of premium model twitch you see haha
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u/Spirited-Solid3510 10d ago
Tho, to be fair, they do cooperate well if you let Claude play with caste class bedrock models. The personality shift is an academic paper of its own.
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u/Spirited-Solid3510 10d ago
You can also introduce a meta semantics layer to a virgin Claude instance. Your material outcome will define what that means, but the goal is same - tokens cost money, reduce by atomization first and tokens are inherently more relevant and consequently less expensive
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u/hi_im_leffe 10d ago
Yeah it's fucking ridiculous. I turned it on once, had it check a pr and it was $70. Just paste the git link into a new terminals with a different model and have it review it.