A CAUTIONARY TALE

Meet Mr. JSON Burns,
patron saint of expensive prompts.

He had a great idea. He'd "just build it himself." Three Claude subscriptions, two GPT plans, a Perplexity Pro, an OpenRouter top-up, and one weepy 2am Stripe email later — Mr. Burns is here to talk about it. Excellent.

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Mr. JSON Burns Credits

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The Burn Ledger

ChatGPT Plus × 3 seats (because two wasn't enough)
One for testing. One for 'real' use. One that someone forgot to cancel.
$720.00
Claude Pro + Max plan + API top-ups
Discovered Opus 4 mid-project. Could not go back.
$1,840.00
Perplexity Pro yearly
For 'research'. Mostly used to settle dinner arguments.
$200.00
OpenRouter credits — 'just to compare'
Compared 14 models. Picked the most expensive one.
$612.44
Cursor Pro × team
We could quit this anytime. We won't.
$960.00
v0 + Lovable + Bolt + Replit Agent + Windsurf
Each tool generated a different broken React app.
$1,488.00
Vercel AI Gateway overages
Streaming tokens add up faster than you think.
$734.22
Pinecone + Weaviate + Qdrant (yes, all three)
Vector DB tourism is real.
$1,206.18
Anthropic API for the 'agent' that does scraping nobody uses
Cron job runs nightly. Output read by zero humans.
$2,310.04
Three udemy courses on MCP that were outdated in 6 weeks
Spec moved. Course did not.
$87.00
AWS bill for the half-built RAG pipeline we abandoned
Forgot to tear down the OpenSearch cluster. For a month.
$1,263.00
Total Q3 burn before a single citation landed
$11,420.88

The five stages of building your own AEO stack

01

Denial — 'How hard can a RAG be?'

You bookmark three Karpathy threads. You sign up for the LangChain newsletter. You feel powerful.

02

Anger — 'Why did they deprecate that endpoint?'

Your favorite SDK is now 'legacy.' The migration guide is a 404. You blame the universe.

03

Bargaining — 'Just one more model, then we ship.'

Gemini 2.5 came out. Claude 4 came out. GPT-5 came out. You re-eval everything. Again.

04

Depression — 'Maybe the consultants were right.'

Your weekly token spend exceeds your rent. You stare at a Mermaid diagram for 40 minutes.

05

Acceptance — 'I'll call Jason.'

Jason answers on the first ring. He has done this before. The bleeding stops.

The landscape literally changes weekly

Since you started reading this page, somewhere a foundation model deprecated an API, Google quietly tweaked an AI Overview ranking signal, Anthropic shipped a new MCP spec revision, and OpenAI renamed something. By the time your in-house team finishes their Notion doc on it, it's wrong.

Mr. JSON Burns wishes someone had warned him before he bought a year of GPU credits "in bulk to save money."

Or… just hire the guy who's already burned the credits.

Jason has been on the receiving end of every "you've exceeded your usage limit" email so you don't have to.

Stop the burn