101. The Real Cost of AI Agents (And How I Cut Mine to Almost $0)

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The Real Cost of AI Agents (And How I Cut Mine to Almost $0)

AI agents are incredibly powerful, but they can quietly drain your credits way faster than you expect. That surprise overage bill is more common than these platforms want you to know.

In this episode of Run Your Private Practice with AI, I’m sharing exactly what happened when Perplexity and Manus started charging me in ways I didn’t anticipate, and the simple fix that moved my entire automation workflow to Claude for basically nothing. I walk through how to turn any agent workflow into a portable skill so you’re never locked into an AI that’s costing too much or underperforming.

AI Tips You Don’t Want to Miss:

  • Why AI platforms use separate credit tiers for agents, apps, and automation tools, and why that matters for your budget.
  • How to convert any agent workflow into a reusable skill you can take to any AI.
  • Why your brand guide and custom skills are your most portable assets across platforms.
  • What to do if an AI updates and suddenly stops working the way you trained it.
  • A coming free resource, the Therapist AI Cheat Sheet, breaking down which AI is best for which job.

Mentioned in this episode:
Run Your Private Practice with AI Free FB Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/aiprivatepractice
Thera AI Hub https://kymtolson.kartra.com/page/AI-Tools-for-Therapists
Newsletter: https://kymtolson.kartra.com/page/Join-AI-Newsletter

Connect with me:

Sponsored by Alma: www.helloalma.com/kym
Sponsored by Berries:www.heyberries.com/therapists
Sponsored by Auralink Pro: Start your free trial and use code KYMTOLSON for 20% off www.auralink.com/pro

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Run Your Private Practice with AI. Another interesting week in AI. Gosh, there was so much I wanted to talk about, like Claude, learning Canva automation, which I’ve been playing with it. I just need to figure out a good way to teach it. I’m super excited about it.

[00:00:17] A new guide I’m creating around how to save basically credits with Claude, if you’re using Claude or ChatGPT. I’ll tell you the story of what led me to create this. All of my lead magnets, like all the different things I create for you guys, and I’ll, I’ll give you this probably in two weeks, I think I’ll link it ’cause it’s not quite ready yet is because I’ve had some sort of problem or issue, and I’ve tried to figure it out, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, this would be really helpful for everybody to figure out how to do.”

[00:00:43] So I don’t know about you, but I use like all kinds of AIs, right? I use Manus, Perplexity. You guys hear me talk about this. Claude is my new favorite ’cause it can just do so many cool things. Every day I’m learning a new cool thing that just blows my mind with Claude. But what is happening, you guys have heard me talk about Perplexity specifically, right?

[00:01:02] The Perplexity Comet browser that I use, like that’s my browser. It replaced Chrome for me because it’s all AI enhanced. You can open up a little assistant on the side and, you know, just talk to it and chat with it, and it’ll do whatever you’re doing on the screen. It’ll take over and do it for you or help you with whatever you’re doing in case you’re stuck like me, like trying to create a new WordPress website, like that kind of thing.

[00:01:23] It, it almost did the whole thing for me, and there’s lots of use cases like that. Anyway, all of these AIs are releasing like versions of these Claude computers, which happens to be a whole other tier of credits that you’re having to like pay for. They package it in a really clever way. They make it sound like, Oh, just, you know, you’ll have a month’s worth of usage, right?

[00:01:47] And it’s all based on these credits,” and that sort of thing. But when you start actually using all the different things they’re putting out, like Manus, right? Manus has an agent you can use. It has the cloud now. It’s got these apps you can build and run in the background. It has an agent that lives down in your dashboard that you can talk to and it’ll do things for you.

[00:02:05] What you don’t realize, and maybe you have, maybe I’m the only one that doesn’t realize this because I don’t really read the fine print. I just move and I’m like, “Ooh, what’s that? What’s that? What’s that?” All of them have different credit structures. So you might have like a hundred dollar plan, which I do for a lot of these.

[00:02:19] It’s k- it’s a business write-off for me, and probably you too, if you’re using it for your private practice business or anything that you’re doing that’s making you money. They’ve all got other tiers. So for example, you guys know I vibe code like a million apps. Like anytime I think of an idea, I’m like, “Oh, this would be a really cool app.”

[00:02:35] So I vibe code it with Manus, and I put some of them into the Thera AI hub for the user to… users to use over there in the, in the hub. And what’s happening is they are using them, a lot of the members are using them. I’m up to, I don’t know, I think I’ve got like seven hundred members or something between the two memberships, the two AI memberships.

[00:02:57] So a lot of people are using these apps, and the other day I got hit with like a bill, an overage usage on Manus, and it said “Oh, you just went over by twenty dollars. We just read up to you.” And I’m like, “What?” ‘Cause on Manus, I’ve got like fourteen thousand credits sitting there because I haven’t been doing anything on it lately, and I’ve got a high tier.

[00:03:15] So I’m like, “Huh?” So I go over and I look, and turns out if you’re hosting your app there, which is fine, I mean, it’s fine to do this, and it probably, when I do the math, it works out fine, but it’s still like annoying to me that they’re doing this, that all these companies are doing this. You go over and you look, and the apps that everybody’s using in the Thera AI hub, I can see the back end.

[00:03:37] It’s like a database. I can see who’s using it. They’re logged in, you know, through their email to use these apps, and I can see every time they hit it and use it, it’s pulling like credits from my Manus. Not my regular Manus credits, but my app Manus credits, which are different. It’s a different tier of pricing that I’ve opted into.

[00:03:56] So that’s just one example of what I’m talking about. So I guess I’m saying that one, to make sure that you’re reading the fine print, ’cause I never do that. I’m just like, “Ah, squirrel. That, that’s cool. Let me try that.” And then before I know it, I’m like paying more money.

[00:04:07] Perplexity Here’s what happened with Perplexity last week. They have Computer, and you guys have heard me talk about Computer, which is different than the Comet browser. Computer, I spent all this time like setting up these really cool automations for Computer to like write my newsletter for me. If you guys are opted into the Running Private Practice with AI newsletter, it’s a really good newsletter, but I’ve trained Perplexity Computer to do it for me.

[00:04:31] Like I’ve given it all the parameters so it knows what to do. It knows my brain would go over and search this person and see what they’re talking about this week and this other person, and it pulls my Google alerts on AI mental health, and it does all this stuff. I would be doing that by myself, but I’ve trained Perplexity Computer to go do it, right?

[00:04:49] So I’m like, “This is so badass.” I was so excited about it. So it runs it the first couple of weeks, and I’ve got a month’s worth of credits in the Computer, which is different than the regular Perplexity Comet browser credits, by the way. It runs it three weeks, and the fourth week it’s in the middle of running it.

[00:05:06] I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m such a genius. Ah,” you know? And then it stops, and it says, “You’ve hit your credit limit for the month,” right? I’m like, “Okay, I’ve got like two weeks left in this month. I need to at least run this one more time.” There’s nothing you can do about it. You have to pay for overages. So I calculated this.

[00:05:23] If I wanted to run that one optimization in Claude, in Perplexity, I would have to pay probably like seven hundred dollars a month to be able to run one automation in Perplexity, the browser. So of course, I’m pissed, right? ‘Cause I paid annual for this. I paid like two thousand dollars for this computer tier for the year ’cause I’m like, “It’s so valuable.”

[00:05:45] But now I’m like realizing huge mistake. I should’ve looked more into this. I didn’t realize how many credits it was gonna take. Or have they changed it? I don’t know. Have they changed the value of the credit since I did this? So of course, I’m like fuming. I’m like, you know, “Fuck this,” right? I like email customer support.

[00:06:02] I’m like, “I want my money back. Like, this is ridiculous. There’s literally nothing I can do with this except for run four automations a month. One automation a month, like four times in a month. I can’t think of new cool things to do with this. Like, it’s done. Like two thousand dollars a year, and that’s it.”

[00:06:17] Now, if you break it down, how much would I have to pay a VA to do that? I don’t know. I could probably do that math, but still, it pissed me off. So here’s what I did. And I’m just telling you guys this in case you’re like experiencing the same thing I’m experiencing. I went back, you know, once the credit… I actually approved some more credit to come through, and I said, “I want you to turn this entire workflow into a skill.”

[00:06:37] So it calculates everything it’s been doing for me, all the parameters I put in, all that time I spent building out this automation, and it put it into like a perfect little skill for me, which if you guys don’t know what that is, I taught this in the, the Thera AI Hub and the Clinical AI Club, how to make skills, and also I’ve got a ton of skills in there that are pre-built for members to use.

[00:06:58] So I had to turn it into a skill. Took the same automation over to Claude, where I’m paying a hundred dollars a month, Claude Max, put it in there, uploaded the skill. If you’re in the club or the hub, you know how to do that because I’ve taught you how to do it now. Uploaded the skill, and it knows the automation.

[00:07:15] It runs it perfectly, and it cost me, like, nothing to do this. So all that to say, if you’ve got any cool automations going with, like, your agents now, if you’ve been building out really cool stuff and you’ve got it, like, automating your blog post or, you know, your email sequences or anything like that, turn it into a skill today in case your credit usage changes, so you can take it down and just go use another AI.

[00:07:39] It’s just crazy. If you have a brand guide, which you guys in the club hub, you know a brand guide is so important, we create one in there. Anywhere you go now, you can take these skills that are yours if you want, or you can use other people’s. There’s tons of them out there. I have a ton for you in the club and the hub.

[00:07:54] But your brand guide, a customized skill for what you’re trying to do, take it out of that AI that is suddenly super expensive, put it in another AI, and you can do it again. And have it replicated over there and see how much it’s gonna cost you. I would just, like, highly recommend that. This is also, also useful for, you know, like, like three months ago, everybody was pissed at ChatGPT for taking g- a government contract, and they’re like,

[00:08:17] “how do I leave ChatGPT?” And this is another way to do that. You can go over to ChatGPT if you’ve got custom GPTs, if you’ve got automations you set up with the agent over there, anything like that, compress it into a skill and take it over to an AI that you like better.

[00:08:31] And I am consistently doing that with every single thing I’m building out now because you just never know what’s gonna happen. You never know if they’re gonna do some update like ChatGPT did. It was, like, so awesome at, like, five point one. When it updated to five point four or five point five, terrible, right?

[00:08:47] It’s been, it’s been terrible. It’s getting better now. I think this newest update is better, but in between there it was really bad and it was, like, unusable for a while. And the custom GPTs, they were starting to lose their, like, efficiency and effectiveness and all of that. And it’s like, where do you go with this stuff?

[00:09:02] But if you have these custom skills, you can open a skill, you can update it, you can change it, you can close it back down, save it, re-upload it to all of your AIs. Like, they’re so smart now that you can say, “You’ve already got a skill just like this. Which one do you wanna use? Do you want it to delete the other one?”

[00:09:15] It’ll just delete the other one and uplid- upload the new one for you. So this is super effective for agent workflows, and it’s only gonna get… Agents are only gonna become more and more, like, easy to use and more popular. So I feel like having these, like, multifaceted skills like I’m doing with that newsletter and being able to just plug it into an agent, you know, whatever agent of the week is cheaper with my brand guide and just having it know how to do that is gonna save me so much time and effort.

[00:09:42] So I wanted to share that with you guys because what I did do is I emailed Perplexity and I was like, “Not that y’all care, but this is ridiculous. I took this, I put it into a skill and put it in Claude, and it cost me nothing to do this.” And I was like, “If you don’t care, maybe send this to somebody that might care because it’s ridiculous.”

[00:10:00] It’s like, a waste of money. I threw the money away over there and it really pisses me off. So anyway, that’s my story of the week. Just wanna tell you guys.

[00:10:07] The other thing I’m working on,

[00:10:09] it’s a guide, and this guide is basically multipurpose guide. I’m gonna like have it as a, like a freebie. You guys know I talk about lead and that sort of thing. So this is what the guide does. The Therapist AI Cheat Sheet.

[00:10:22] It’s so cute. I can’t wait to get this ’cause it’s an interactive guide. I’ve been making a lot of these interactive lead magnet PDFs. It’s for ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Manus, and it works on all AIs pretty much. But what I’ve done is I’ve told you in here which AI is the best for which job for therapists, like blog posts, content creation, that sort of thing.

[00:10:42] So I’ve got it all sorted out. The hidden superpowers that each of the AIs can do that you probably don’t know that they can do. And then there’s all these shortcut commands that if you do the slash, and there’s like these secret shortcut commands that a lot of people don’t know about, so I put them in for each of the AIs.

[00:10:56] And then ways to save credits. Just like this workflow I was just telling you about, turning into Skill Take it to a different AI if it’s charging you too much for it, that is one of the tips. There’s a ton in there that I’ve, you know, tested myself, and I know that it saves a lot of credit. So I put all of that in this guide together, and probably in the next two weeks I’ll talk about it a little bit more on this podcast and send it to you guys so you can see it and use it and make your workflow easier and credit-saving tips.

[00:11:25] Again, you know, when I run into stuff like I did with Perplexity and Manus with charging me for the apps and me not realizing it, I’m like: How am I gonna save money, and how am I gonna help you guys save money, really is the thing I wanna tell you about. Because there are so many things to do, but even in this guide, it’s like I’ve got, Claude with Opus 4.7 for blog post writing, you know, but then I’ve got Manus for building a lead magnet.

[00:11:51] You know, I’ve got Claude Cowork for website creation. So there’s all these different tools, and I want you to be able to use all of them, but it helps, I think, to know like how to save money and credits essentially, and also know what you’re getting into if you’re using a computer and an agent and a desktop app and, you know, some other automation tool that they’ve got in there.

[00:12:12] All of those things are pulling from a different pot of money. So read the fine print.