[lelanthran]

> $100 is something most people on this forum could make back in 1 day of work.

I expect so. The question is "How many days does the limit last for?"

Maybe they have a per-day limit, maybe it's per-month (I'm not sure), but paying $100/m and hitting the limit in the first day is not economical.

[asaddhamani]

I wrote about this on my blog: https://www.asad.pw/llm-subscriptions-vs-apis-value-for-mone...

But basically you get ~300Mn input tokens and ~100Mn output tokens per month with Sonnet on the $100 plan. These are split across 50 sessions you are allowed, each session is 5 hrs starting from the first time you send a message until 5 hrs after the first message. During this time, you get ~6Mn input and ~2Mn output tokens for Sonnet. Claude Code seems to use a mix of Sonnet and Haiku, and Haiku has 2x the limits of Sonnet.

So if you absolutely maxed out your 50 sessions every month, that's $2400 worth of usage if you instead had used the API. So it's a great deal. It's not $100 worth of API credits you're buying, so they don't run out like that. You can exhaust limits for a given session, which is at most a 5 hr wait for your next one, or you can run out of 50 sessions, I don't know how strongly they enforce that limit and I think that limit is BS, but all in all the value for money is great, way better than using the API.

[divan]

Thanks for the link and explainer. My first experience with Claude Code left mixed feelings because of the pricing. I have Pro subscription, but for Claude Code can only use API mode. So I added 5$ just to check it, and exhausted 4.5$ in the first 8m session. It left me wondering if switching to Max plan will exhaust it at the same rate or not.

[Loic]

Right into the announcement, later down, they even explain how to handle the limits:

How Rate Limits Work: With the Max plan, your usage limits are shared across both Claude and Claude Code:

Shared rate limits: All activity in both Claude and Claude Code counts against the same usage limits.

Message variations: The number of messages you can send on Claude varies based on message length, conversation length, and file attachments.

Coding usage variations: Expected usage for Claude Code will vary based on project complexity, codebase size, and auto-accept settings.

On the Max plan (5x Pro/$100), average users:

- Send approximately 225 messages with Claude every 5 hours, OR

- Send approximately 50-200 prompts with Claude Code every 5 hours

On the Max plan (20x Pro/$200), average users:

- Send approximately 900 messages with Claude every 5 hours, OR

- Send approximately 200-800 prompts with Claude Code every 5 hours

[ziofill]

How many prompts does Claude code send per user prompt? Is it 1:1?

[asaddhamani]

Nope, it can be even a dozen (because agentic). Claude usage limits are actually based on token usage, and Claude Code uses a mix of Haiku and Sonnet. So your limits are split among those two models. I gave an estimation of how much usage you can expect in another comment on this thread, but you will find it hard to max out the $100 plan unless you are using it very, very extensively.

[kridsdale1]

I didn’t realize they were tuning cost optimization by switching models contextually. That’s very clever. I bet the whole industry of consumer LLM apps moves that way.

[Loic]

I am using cline, it plans with Haiku and execute with Sonnet. It works well.