---
title: What it cost to build
description: The provider's own usage export for the period the framework and its documentation were built, with the figure and the receipt behind it.
type: overview
section: Project
order: 2
---

## The figure

**$33.26** in total, across 22 days with usage between 18 August and 16 September 2026, on
DeepSeek's `deepseek-v4-flash`.

One number with no receipt is not evidence, so the provider's export is published
alongside it, and this page is the summary of what that export contains.

| Measure | Total |
|---|---|
| Cost | $33.26 USD |
| Days with usage | 22 of 30 |
| Requests | 14,350 |
| Input tokens, cache misses | 25,016,232 |
| Input tokens, cache hits | 3,719,054,720 |
| Output tokens | 13,869,189 |

The cache-hit figure is the one that explains the cost. Nearly all of the input is
re-read context rather than new text, and a cache hit is a fraction of the price of a
miss: three and a half billion tokens of it cost a few dollars, which is why a month of
work on a framework, two sites and their documentation came to the price of a meal.

## What the days look like

The work was not spread evenly, and the shape of the bill follows the shape of the
work: a slow start, weeks of small days, and then the last four days carrying two thirds
of the total while the sites were finished and deployed.

| Day | Cost |
|---|---|
| 2026-08-18 | $0.15 |
| 2026-08-19 | $0.18 |
| 2026-08-20 | $0.85 |
| 2026-08-21 | $0.18 |
| 2026-08-22 | $0.18 |
| 2026-08-24 | $0.02 |
| 2026-08-25 | $0.30 |
| 2026-08-28 | $1.80 |
| 2026-08-29 | $0.02 |
| 2026-09-04 | $0.44 |
| 2026-09-05 | $0.84 |
| 2026-09-06 | $1.43 |
| 2026-09-07 | $1.27 |
| 2026-09-08 | $0.32 |
| 2026-09-09 | $0.44 |
| 2026-09-10 | $0.32 |
| 2026-09-11 | $1.13 |
| 2026-09-12 | $1.25 |
| 2026-09-13 | $4.01 |
| 2026-09-14 | $5.94 |
| 2026-09-15 | $7.90 |
| 2026-09-16 | $4.30 |

A day the provider reports no usage for is not a row, which is why the table is shorter
than the period.

## The receipt

[Download the usage export](/cost/asheeui-build-cost-2026-08-18_2026-09-16.zip) (17 KB,
two CSV files and a note).

It is the provider's export with two columns removed, because they identify the account
rather than the work: `user_id`, which is the account the usage is billed to, and
`api_key`, which the provider already masks but which is still a prefix of a key. Every
other column and every value is as exported: the model, the wallet, the per-day cost,
and the per-day token and request counts. The archive carries a note repeating this, so
a reader does not have to take it on trust.

The tool that produced the archive is in the repository at
`scripts/build-cost-receipt.py`, so the redaction can be read rather than believed.

## What is not in it

The receipt is a cost record, not a work record. It says how much was spent on the model
and nothing about what was built with it, and it is evidence for one claim only: this is
what the build cost, and this is the figure to hold the project to if anyone asks.