One Coding Setup, Three Developers, a $30 Budget

01 / The $30 envelope for a three-person team

A tiny team needs a repeatable coding assistant setup, not three independently improvised configurations. Share the tool settings, project instructions and billing plan. Keep credentials out of the shared repository.

Here is a concrete planning exercise: three developers, 20 working days and a $30 monthly spending envelope. That equals $10 per developer, or $0.50 per developer per working day. It is a budget target, not a promise that every workload will fit.

The receipt below uses hypothetical token rates to make the arithmetic inspectable. These are not CheapRelay price quotes. Replace every assumed rate with the current rate for your chosen model before funding the account.

02 / A sample token receipt totals $16.30

Assume the team records the following usage over those 20 working days. Each category is separate: the uncached input line excludes tokens already counted as cache reads or writes.

• ■ Uncached input: 6 million tokens × an assumed $1.00 per million = $6.00.
• ■ Output: 1.2 million tokens × an assumed $5.00 per million = $6.00.
• ■ Cache reads: 18 million tokens × an assumed $0.10 per million = $1.80.
• ■ Cache writes: 2 million tokens × an assumed $1.25 per million = $2.50.
• ■ Modeled usage subtotal: $16.30.
• ■ Unspent room inside the $30 envelope: $13.70.

That modeled subtotal is approximately $5.43 per developer for the period. The $13.70 remainder is a reserve, not another invoice line. It absorbs heavier debugging sessions, retries and changes in the mix of requests.

Notice that cached traffic is not free in this receipt. CheapRelay bills real token usage, including cache reads and writes. Count all four categories rather than estimating the bill from visible answers alone.

03 / Share configuration without sharing a login

Put a small setup document in the project repository. Record the assistant client, API base, selected model, project instructions and where each developer supplies credentials locally. CheapRelay provides one key for access across multiple model families and works with Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and OpenAI SDK clients.

That does not mean every client consumes identical configuration. Document the settings for the client your team actually uses. Keep a credential-free example configuration alongside the instructions, and exclude local secret files from version control.

Use separate developer credentials where supported. If you operate with one billing credential, keep it in a controlled secret store and document who can access and rotate it. Sharing a setup should never require pasting a production secret into team chat.

04 / Give the $30 budget three checkpoints

Assign one person to review spending at $10, $20 and $25. These are team procedures, not claims about built-in platform controls. At $25, pause nonessential assistant work until the owner checks the remaining balance and expected workload.

The sample receipt implies $0.815 of usage per team working day. If spending reaches $10 after only five working days, the pace is $2 per day, implying $40 over 20 days. That is an early warning to investigate, not evidence that the service changed its prices.

Check long conversation histories, repeated repository context, oversized outputs and automated retry loops first. Ask for a focused patch when a complete file rewrite is unnecessary. Measure the resulting bill rather than assuming a shorter prompt always produces a cheaper completed task.

05 / Buy usage before adding recurring commitments

CheapRelay fits this experiment because it is pay-as-you-go, with no monthly fee or subscription. The team can start with one documented configuration and compare actual token charges against the receipt instead of treating three recurring plans as the default.

Sign up for CheapRelay, check the current rates and run a small funded pilot before committing the full $30 envelope. After one working week, replace the hypothetical receipt with your own numbers. Keep the shared setup; adjust the budget using observed usage.