Systems engineer Yacine reports a single prompt run on the Fable platform cost him over $130
Story Overview
Systems engineer Yacine shared that a single prompt fed into Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 model has already piled up more than $130 in API charges, illustrating how the new frontier model handles extended agentic tasks that generate massive token volumes and long runtimes.
Agentic tasks inflate bills fast
Fable 5 targets the toughest planning and multi-step workflows that cheaper models cannot tackle, which explains why costs scale with duration and output tokens rather than any fixed per-prompt fee.
Duration still unknown
Midjourney founder David Holz replied by asking how long the prompt had been running, leaving open whether caching or other optimizations were applied in this particular case.
Users criticized Fable for its high costs, with reports of single prompts exceeding $130 and daily usage projected at $300, calling the expenses wasteful and not worthwhile.
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@yacineMTB how long was it running for?
A single prompt with fable has cost me over 130$ so far
So if I use fable the same way I abuse codex 5.5, it's going to cost me like 300$ per day. Know this because I have been abusing fable for the past 12 hours. Like really whipping this thing
@yacineMTB
@yacineMTB e/greed
@yacineMTB he asked it how many r's in strawberry
@yacineMTB if you ask it about the nature of the universe, it's going to take a while fam
@yacineMTB Yes a simple 30 minute prompt of fable for me was $60
@DavidSHolz Like 8 hours, though a lot of that time is running training runs on my server
@yacineMTB a single prompt to opus cost me my sanity so far
@yacineMTB i used 5.5 High for 14 hours yesterday for less than $1.
@yacineMTB i thought you didnt like anthropic
@yacineMTB Yeah Fable lights your money on fire and I don't think it's proportionally that better
@yacineMTB i had no usage left and though maybe the extra usage credits where a decent option. bu 50$ in 10mins of one prompt? I dont want to think about api cost
@PeteRegular I'm having it continue my dingbotics dot com project from my phone. I just had a baby so all I can do is lazily text my server over tmux. I've over doubled the training speed at this point. Though I have no idea if it will transfer. It is a funny model
@yacineMTB It's hyper expensive. Seems to be a good clip ahead of opus 4.8. it's marginally better than opus 4.6
@yacineMTB dont use it, backboard with opus 4.8 is better: https://github.com/Backboard-io/Backboard-R-CLI-Terminal-Bench-2.1-Results
@yacineMTB This isn’t rent seeking from Anthropic, it’s servitude.
@yacineMTB Fable is gonna cause the world economic to collapse
@yacineMTB I'm never paying for it once my subscription is done. I've gotten legit work out of it but it's definitely possible to imitate it with cheaper systems in place for dedicated roles
@yacineMTB No way tokens at these prices are ever profitable.