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# Your Automation Costs $1 Per Run. Mine Costs $0.

April 4, 2026 · Leon Ting · 4 min read

AI browser agents are incredible in demos. They navigate pages, fill forms, extract data — all from a natural language prompt.

Then you look at the bill.

## The Per-Run Tax

> "The program cost $1.05 to run. So doing it at any scale quickly becomes a little bit silly."

> — rozap, Hacker News

> "I was spending $149/month on a scraping infrastructure subscription for a side project that pulled competitor pricing data once a day."

> — anonymous developer, Dev.to

Every AI browser agent — Browser Use, Stagehand, Claude Computer Use — sends the page to an LLM on every single run. The LLM reads the DOM, decides what to do, executes actions, reads the result, and repeats.

For a simple data extraction task, that's 5,000-20,000 tokens per run. At current API prices:

Runs per day | AI agent (per run) | Monthly cost
--- | --- | ---
1 | $0.50 | $15
10 | $0.50 | $150
100 | $0.50 | $1,500
1,000 | $0.50 | $15,000

And that's just inference cost. Add hosting, retry logic, error handling — the real cost is higher.

## The Reliability Tax

It's not just money. AI agents are probabilistic.

> "If each step has a .95 chance of completing successfully, after not very many steps you have a pretty small overall probability of success."

> — rozap, Hacker News

Steps | Per-step success | Overall success
--- | --- | ---
5 | 95% | 77%
10 | 95% | 60%
20 | 95% | 36%

A 20-step workflow fails 64% of the time. Every failure burns tokens and produces no result.

## A Different Model: Compile Once, Run Forever

What if AI only ran once — at authoring time?

    # Step 1: AI writes a deterministic program (one-time cost)
    $ tap capture https://news.ycombinator.com hackernews/hot --intent "top stories"
    ☉ Inspecting https://news.ycombinator.com...
    ☉ Deterministic template hit (RSS / JSON-LD)
    ✔ Lint passed
    ✔ Saved: ~/.tap/plans/hackernews/hot.plan.json

    # Step 2: Run forever. No AI. $0.
    $ tap hackernews/hot
    30 rows (245ms) Cost: $0.00

The math flips completely:

Runs | AI agent | Deterministic program
--- | --- | ---
1 | $0.50 | $0.03 (forge)
10 | $5.00 | $0.03
100 | $50.00 | $0.03
10,000 | $5,000 | $0.03

Run #1 and run #10,000 cost exactly the same: $0.00.

## But What About When Sites Change?

This is the natural objection: deterministic programs break when the site changes.

True. But the solution isn't "re-run AI every time." It's health contracts that detect breakage, plus AI that fixes the program only when needed:

    # Daily snapshot equivalence check (no AI)
    $ tap verify hackernews/hot
    verdict: equivalent    30 rows
    $ tap verify github/trending
    verdict: equivalent    25 rows

    # Site changed (verdict: drifted)? Re-capture against the same site/name
    $ tap capture https://news.ycombinator.com hackernews/hot

99% of runs need zero AI. You only pay for intelligence when the world changes.

## 70+ Taps, Ready to Run

You don't even need to capture from scratch. 70+ community taps are available — Hacker News, GitHub, Reddit, BBC, ESPN, npm, and more.

    $ git clone https://github.com/LeonTing1010/tap-skills ~/.tap/skills  # install community taps
    $ tap hackernews/hot   # run immediately, $0
    $ tap github/trending  # another one, $0
    $ tap list             # see everything available

### Try it

    curl -fsSL https://taprun.dev/install.sh | sh
    tap update && tap hackernews hot

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