I Cut My AI Test Automation Cost by 300x by Ditching Vision Models
From $0.011 per step to $0.00004 — here's how I learned vision models are overkill for most web testing, and what I built instead.
It started with a $400 monthly API bill (and yes, that's USD — I'm in China, but you'll feel the same pain in any currency).
I was running an AI-powered test automation platform built on Midscene.js with Qwen-VL vision models. Every test step meant sending a full-page screenshot to a multimodal LLM — and paying about $0.011 per step.
A 50-step test case cost about $0.55. Run it daily? $16.50/month. Add a few more test scenarios, and suddenly I was spending more on API calls than on coffee.
