Y Combinator's Garry Tan Spends Up to $200K a Year on AI Tokens
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Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, says his AI agents cost him between $100,000 and $200,000 a year in tokens. Tokens are the units AI providers use to bill for model use, so the figure shows what a heavy personal agent habit costs.
Price as the one open problem
Tan believes personal agents will eventually go mainstream, but only if one problem gets solved: costs have to come down. "It's too expensive right now," he said.
He also called his own spending a privilege that not everyone can afford.
Big Tech agents may not be the answer
Free agents run by Big Tech may not be the answer either. Discussing the future he wants tech to build and how Meta has affected people, Tan said the company controls the algorithm and that people wish it did not. He said one could imagine a personal AI that a person controls and programs.
An agent with a company brain
Inside Y Combinator, Tan says, an agent is rebuilding how the firm operates. It is called Stray Light. He says it has a personality and a company brain: the full context of every founder the firm has backed, anyone who has emailed it and all applications.
Not software in the old sense
Tan was an early adopter of OpenClaw and is now a power user. His lesson is that an agent should not be treated like traditional software, which is judged by repeatability and safety. Some people worry so much about repeatability and safety, he said, that they lose the best parts of working with an agent, which he says can be very much like a human.
What the agent has read
He describes using agents as a Jiminy Cricket on the shoulder at all times. The agent knows the user, helps with nearly anything in daily life and may run ahead to ask whether the user has considered something else.
By his account the agent has gone through all of his email and his Dropbox, and his Apple Notes too, including therapy notes that go back 20 years.
It also does more routine work. Tan used it to research Isaacson's podcast and to prepare for the questions he might be asked on the podcast.
Tan put the number on the table in an episode of Walter Isaacson's podcast The Builders, due out on Tuesday. "I spend about maybe $100[,000] to $200,000 a year on tokens," he said.
The agents work on countless projects and on coding. Tan has shared his set of 23 Claude Code skills, called gstack, on GitHub. He says the aim is to help others see what agents can do.
Our Take
Two limits sit side by side in Tan's account: the cost of running agents and how much personal data they are allowed to reach. The interview, as reported, does not say what boundaries he or YC set on what the agents may read or do. It also leaves open how the spending divides between work and personal use. Those splits would show whether his bill is typical for heavy users or an outlier.
Source: TechCrunch