I have no idea how people vibe code without spending thousands of dollars every monty. Any tips?

Hello, as my company pushes hard to use as much AI as possible, i wanted to learn the new ways of living, and so i set up openai console and got codex cli. I ran it through my game project code to analyze how to improve one part i was slacking about for some time. It did provide some tips! But in the process burned 1.5 million tokens, in mere minutes. I was on Terra. Sure i have limits set and account topped off to some amount, but how the HELL im gonna learn this thing without spending nearly my rent on the api prices? Surely im missing something, but what?