Quite a premium for speed. Especially when Gemini 3 Pro is 1.8x the tokens/sec speed (of regular-speed Opus 4.6) at 0.45x the price [2]. Though it's worse at coding, and Gemini CLI doesn't have the agentic strength of Claude Code, yet.
no, it’s for Max subscribers to enable “use API when running out of session limit”. the assumption (probably) being that many will forget to turn it off, and they’ll earn it back that way.
This was my first thought, but by default, you have no automatic reload of your prepaid account. Which I think is for once user friendly. They could have applied a dark pattern here.
Definitely an interesting way to encourage whales to spend a lot of money quickly.