Planning is Expensive - Here's a simple work around

Tips & Tricks
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Using the planning tool is very helpful because it has all the context of your codebase, but it’s pretty dang expensive, running up to $1.50, to simply answer a few questions about your codebase. Ways that I found to get around this are:

  1. Take my repo and load it into something like Windsurf that has a lot cheaper coding planning tools and can help put together a plan for you and ask it questions about your repo to then understand what you need to do for your application.

  2. Take the PRD that you get from that and post it into Replit. Have it maybe do one look-through to agree with it on its plan level, and then you can move right into the build.

That saves you from having to go back and forth with the plan mode, which I think is by far the most expensive in terms of the output that you get based off of the effort that it uses.

Hope that helps others. It’s saved me a decent amount of money, but it’d be nice if there was just a simpler, cost-effective chat engine like Ask used to be, where you could just ask it things and it would understand stuff about your codebase and answer it without charging you money for it. That’d be pretty fantastic.

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Yeah!! Plan is so expensive for no reason!

I think it got a little cheaper with this recent update.

I upload the relevent code files to chatgpt since its technically free since I already pay for it and ask it stuff lol super not advanced and reliable way. Thanks for the tip!

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I appreciate people need to save every cost possible. But the quality of response I get from Replit’s agent in planning mode is extremely high. Compared to the costs of hiring a product manager, and CTO, project manager, and growth/marketing manager, and,… so many other people, the costs are very justified.

They may not be affordable to individuals, but expensive is not the right word.

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$1.50 for a 200 word response in todays world is expensive, especially due to the fact you get just as good of a response for free with other tools. Given i vibe code all day, this adds up to nearly $40 of my $100 daily budget that could be used for actual code.

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I guess my view is that it’s the value of those 200 words that is important, not a simple per-word costing. ChatGPT and Claude can’t see your codebase and understand what you have built, which is why I personally prefer to do that planning in a central place with Replit.

Believe me, I get how this just adds up and up and up. But I’d still prefer it to the olden days when I’d need a team around me who’d cost a lot more that $1.50 for an hour’s work.

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If you pull your files into claude code or chatgpt codex or what i said (windsurf) you can get free analysis of your codebase to get a plan. thats the whole point and the workaround? without additional effort you cant run DB queries with this method but general purpose plans and questions and put together some pretty strong plans for free, then paste that into the replit plan tool to validate. but saving yourself 10-12 back and forth prompts can be as much as $20 in savings and when I run this process 15-25 times a day, that really adds up

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