[zomglings]

If anyone from Anthropic is reading this, your billing for Claude Code is hostile to your users.

Why doesn’t Claude Code usage count against the same plan that usage of Claude.ai and Claude Desktop are billed against?

I upgraded to the $200/month plan because I really like Claude Code but then was so annoyed to find that this upgrade didn’t even apply to my usage of Claude Code.

So now I’m not using Claude Code so much.

[jdance]

This would put anthropic in the business of minimizing the context to increase profits, same as Cursor and others who cheap out on context and try to RAG etc. Which would quickly make it worse, so I hope they stay on api pricing

Some base usage included in the plan might be a good balance

[zomglings]

You know, I wouldn't mind if they just applied the API pricing after Claude Code ran through the plan limits.

It would definitely get me to use it more.

[Wowfunhappy]

But the Claude Pro plan is almost certainly priced under the assumption that some users will use it below the usage limit.

If everyone used the plan to the limit, the plan would cost the same as the API with usage equal to the limit.

[karbon0x]

Claude Code and Claude.ai are separate products.

[twalkz]

I’ve been using codemcp (https://github.com/ezyang/codemcp) to get “most” of the functionality of Claude code (I believe it uses prompts extracted from Claude Code), but using my existing pro plan.

It’s less autonomous, since it’s based on the Claude chat interface, and you need to write “continue” every so often, but it’s nice to save the $$

[zomglings]

Thanks, makes sense that an MCP server that edits files is a workaround to the problem.

[fcoury]

Just tried it and it's indeed very good, thanks for mentioning it! :-)

[dist-epoch]

Claude.ai/Desktop is priced based on average user usage. If you have 1 power user sending 1000 requests per day, and 99 sending 5, many even none, you can afford having a single $10/month plan for everyone to keep things simple.

But every Claude Code user is a 1000 requests per day user, so the economics don't work anymore.

[zomglings]

I would accept a higher-priced plan (which covered both my use of Claude.ai/Claude Desktop AND my use of Claude Code).

Anthropic make it seem like Claude Code is a product categorized like Claude Desktop (usage of which gets billed against your Claude.ai plan). This is how it signs off all its commits:

     Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.ai/code)

At the very least, this is misleading. It misled me.

Once I had purchased the $200/month plan, I did some reading and quickly realized that I had been too quick to jump to conclusions. It still left me feeling like they had pulled a fast on one me.

[dist-epoch]

Maybe you can cancel your subscription or charge back?

I think it's just oversight on their part. They have nothing to gain by making people believe they would get Claude Code access through their regular plans, only bad word of mouth.

[zomglings]

To be fair to them, they make it pretty easy to manage the subscription, downgrade it, etc.

This is definitely not malicious on their part. Just bears pointing out.

[fcoury]

Well, take that into consideration then. Just make it an option. Instead of getting 1000 requests per day with code, you get 100 on the $10/month plan, and then let users decide whether they want to migrate to a higher tier or continue using the API model.

I am not saying Claude should stop making money, I'm just advocating for giving users the value of getting some Code coverage when you migrate from the basic plan to the pro or max.

Does that make sense?

[replwoacause]

Their API billing in general is hostile to users. I switched completely to Gemini for this reason and haven’t looked back.

[fcoury]

I totally agree with this, I would rather have some kind of prediction than using the Claude Code roulette. I would definitely upgrade my plan if I got Claude Code usage included.

[datavirtue]

I don't what you guys are on about but I have been using the free GitHub Copilot in VS Code chats to absolutely crank out new UI features in Vue. All that stuff that makes you groan at the thought of it: more divs, bindings, form validation, a whole new widget...churned out in 30 seconds. Try it live. Works? Keep.

I'm surprised at the complexity and correctness at which it infers from very simple, almost inadequate, prompts.

[zomglings]

They did it!

[cypherpunks01]

Claude Pro and other website/desktop subscription plans are subject to usage limits that would make it very difficult to use for Claude Code.

Claude Code uses the API interface and API pricing, and writes and edits code directly on your machine, this is a level past simply interacting with a separate chat bot. It seems a little disingenuous to say it's "hostile" to users, when the reality is yeah, you do pay a bit more for more reliable usage tier, for a task that requires it. It also shows you exactly how much it's spent at any point.

[fcoury]

> ... usage limits that would make it very difficult to use for Claude Code.

Genuinely interested: how's so?

[cypherpunks01]

Well, I think it'd be pretty irritating to see the message "3 messages remaining until 6PM" while you are in the middle of a complex coding task.

[unshavedyak]

Conversely I have to manually do this and monitor the billing instead.

[fcoury]

No, that's the whole point: predictability. It's definitely a trade off, but if we could save the work as is we could have the option to continue the iteration elsewhere, or even better, from that point on offer the option to fallback to the current API model.

A nice addition would be having something like /cost but to check where you are in regards to limits.

[zomglings]

The writing of edits and code directly on my machine is something that happens on the client side. I don't see why that usage would be subject to anything but one-time billing or how it puts any strain on Anthropic's infrastructure.

[visarga]

Yeah, tried it for a couple of minutes, $0.31, quickly stopped and moved away.

[ghuntley]

$200/month isn't that much. Folks, I'm hanging around with are spending $100 USD to $500 USD daily as the new norm as a cost of doing business and remaining competitive. That might seem expensive, but it's cheap... https://ghuntley.com/redlining

[oytis]

When should we expect to see the amazing products these super-competitive businesses are developing?

[zomglings]

$100/day seems reasonable as an upper-percentile spend per programmer. $500/day sounds insane.

A 2.5 hour session with Claude Code costs me somewhere between $15 and $20. Taking $20/2.5 hours as the estimate, $100 would buy me 12.5 hours of programming.

[bambax]

Asking very specific questions to Sonnet 3.7 costs a couple of tenths of a cent every time, and even if you're doing that all day it will never amount to more than maybe a dollar at the end of the day.

On average, one line of, say, JavaScript represents around 7 tokens, which means there are around 140k lines of JS per million tokens.

On Openrouter, Sonnet 3.7 costs are currently:

- $3 / one million input tokens => $100 = 33.3 million input tokens = 420k lines of JS code

- $15 / one million output tokens => $100 = 3.6 million output tokens = 4.6 million lines of JS code

For one developer? In one day? It seems that one can only reach such amounts if the whole codebase is sent again as context with each and every interaction (maybe even with every keystroke for type completion?) -- and that seems incredibly wasteful?

[bambax]

I can't edit the above comment, but there's obviously an error in the math! ;-) Doesn't change the point I was trying to make, but putting this here for the record.

33.3 million input tokens / 7 tokens per loc = 4.8 million locs

3.6 million output tokens / 7 tokens per loc = 515k locs

[cma]

That's how it works, everything is recomputed again every additional prompt. But it can cache the state of things and restore for a lower fee, and reingesting what was formerly output is cheaper than making new output (serial bottleneck) so sometimes there is a discount there.

[dannersy]

I'm waiting for the day this AI bubble bursts since as far as we can tell almost all these AI "providers" are operating at a loss. I wonder if this billing model actually makes profit or if it's still just burning cash in hopes of AGI being around the corner. We have yet to see a product that is useful and affordable enough to justify the cost.

[timmytokyo]

It's burning cash. Lots of it.

[0] https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the...

[dannersy]

Great article, thanks. Mirrors exactly what the JP Morgan/Goldman report claimed but that was quite dated.

[ghuntley]

It sounds insane until you drive full agentic loops/evals. I'm currently making a self-compiling compiler; no doubt you'll hear/see about it soon. The other night, I fell asleep and woke up with interface dynamic dispatch using vtables with runtime type information and generic interface support implemented...

[UltraSane]

Do you actually understand the code Claude wrote?

[cpursley]

Do you understand all of the code in the libraries that your applications depend on? Or your coworker for that matter?

All of the gate keeping around llm code tools are amusing. But whatever, I’m shipping 10x and making money doing it.

[UltraSane]

Up until recently I could be sure they were written by a human.

But if you are making money by using LLMs to write code then all power to you. I just despair at the idea of trillions of lines of LLM generated code.

[zomglings]

Fair enough. That's pretty cool, I haven't gone that far in my own work with AI yet, but now I am inspired to try.

The point is to get a pipeline working, cost can be optimized down after.

[m00dy]

Seriously? That’s wild. What kind of CS field could even handle that kind of daily spend for a bunch of people?

[ghuntley]

Consider L5 at Google: outgoings of $377,797 USD per year just on salary/stock, before fixed overheads such as insurance, leave, issues like ramp-up time and cost of their manager. In the hands of a Staff+ engineer, these tools enable replication of Staff+ engineers and don't sleep. My 2c: the funding for the new norm will come from either compressing the manager layer or engineering layer or both.

[malfist]

LLMs absolutely don't replicate staff+ engineers.

If your staff engineers are mostly doing things AI can do, then you don't need staff. Probably don't even need senior

[ghuntley]

That's my point.

- L3 SWE II - $193,712 USD (before overheads)

- L4 SWE III - $297,124 USD (before overheads)

- L5 Senior SWE - $377,797 USD (before overheads)

These tools and foundational models get better every day, and right now, they enable Staff+ engineers and businesses to have less need for juniors. I suspect there will be [short-to-medium-term] compression. See extended thoughts at https://ghuntley.com/screwed

[StefanBatory]

I wonder what will happen first - will companies move to LLMs, or to programmers from abroad (because ultimately, it will be cheaper than using LLMs - you've said ~$500 per day, in Poland ~$1500 will be a good monthly wage - and that still will make us expensive! How about moving to India, then? Nigeria? LATAM countries?)

[breckenedge]

> These […] get better every day.

They do, but I’ve seen a huge slowdown in “getting better” in the last year. I wonder if it’s my perception, or reality. Each model does better on benchmarks but I’m still experiencing at least a 50% failure rate on _basic_ task completion, and that number hasn’t moved higher in many months.

[cpursley]

Oh but they absolutely do. Have you not used any of this llm tooling? It’s insanely good once you learn how to employ it. I no longer need a front end team, for example. It's that good at TypeScript and React. And the design is even better.

[mmikeff]

The kind of field where AI builds more in a day than a team or even contract dev does.

[ghuntley]

correct; utilised correctly these tools ship teams of output in a single day.

[rudedogg]

Do you have a link to some of this output? A repo on Github of something you’ve done for fun?

I get a lot of value out of LLMs but when I see people make claims like this I know they aren’t “in the trenches” of software development, or care so little about quality that I can’t relate to their experience.

Usually they’re investors in some bullshit agentic coding tool though.

[ghuntley]

I will shortly; am building a serious self-compiling compiler rn out of an brand-new esoteric language. Meaning the LLM is able to program itself without training data about the programming language...

[sbszllr]

All can be true depending on the business/person:

1. My company cannot justify this cost at all.

2. My company can justify this cost but I don't find it useful.

3. My company can justify this cost, and I find it useful.

4. I find it useful, and I can justify the cost for personal use.

5. I find it useful, and I cannot justify the cost for personal use.

That aside -- 200/day/dev for a "nice to have service that sometimes makes my work slightly faster" is much in the majority of the world.