Computer Use Is 45x More Expensive Than Structured APIs — Reflex Benchmarks Vision Agents vs. API Agents

Reflex / Hacker News·high signal

Reflex published a benchmark showing that vision-based computer-use agents (browser-use, screen-scraping) cost 45x more than calling structured API endpoints for the same task: 47 steps and 495K tokens vs. 8 calls and 12K tokens. The cost gap is architectural — an agent that must 'see' to act will always pay for the seeing, regardless of model improvements. At 465 points and 260 comments on HN, this quantifies what many builders suspected and has direct implications for agent architecture decisions.