[vanillameow]

I ran this just now and for a small web-app I built I used over $50 in a single day. This was using superpowers plugin and almost exclusively coordinating through Opus. Could I get by with 100$ a month without the subscription? Maybe, but I pay for the convenience of just being able to throw Opus with lavish plugins at it (with 5h limits that are, in my opinion, pretty reasonable). I don't really WANT to have to think about when Haiku or Sonnet are enough.

If anything I would consider switching to OpenAI subscription (if I didn't despise them even more than Anthropic as a company), but converting to API use seems completely infeasible to me. I'd have to severely cut back on my use for not much benefit, other than having maybe an agent thats a little less jank than CC.

[blitzar]

Depending on your workflow, in the spirit of reallocating $100/Month subscription, it may be worth dropping to the $20/Month plan (or equivalent at other providers) and then pay as you go on the (rare) occasions you "build a small web-app I built and used over $50 in a single day".

But at that point we are just min/maxing the details, and all I can say is if you are on a $100/$200 a month subscription to any of these services and not using them regularly then you shouldn't be on a $200 subscription any more than you should be on a $700 a month gym membership when you go every 3 months for 15 minutes.

[vanillameow]

Nah I get you, but for me personally, I do use CC a ton. It's building me so many useful internal tools right now, and deep research is also bootstrapping me into some new hobbies etc. I think I'm kind of in a rare-ish (maybe not so much on HN, but for the general population) spot where I'm not really trying to make some SaaS get quick rich scheme, but just directing CC to make apps that would take me a few days to make in a few hours, smoke test them, and solve a problem I had before. (e.g. photo tagging automation, MCP connections for personal services for documentation of chats or setting up todos, ansible playbooks for VMs, setting up data pipelines from external APIs for home automation...)

I deffo get more perceived value out of it than the 100$ I pay. Could I get MORE value with the same 100$? imo only through OpenAI (no harness lock in and more lenient limits), but I deeply dislike the way their company is evolving. Admittedly, recent launches from Anthropic like managed agents and Mythos Preview don't make me very hopeful the individual developer pricing is here to stay, but I'll use what I can get while I can get it.

Could I get my required value with less than 100$? Mayyybe I could get by with like, three Anthropic 20$ plans? or 2x20$ and an OAI 20$? but this is so min-maxy that I just don't really want to bother. Pay by token would kill my workflow instantly. I'd have to add so many steps for model selection alone. I'll cross that bridge when Anthropic cuts me off.

I agree though most people on the $200 plans are either just not using them or in some deep AI psychosis. I'd like to exclude myself from these groups, but the pipeline to AI psychosis seems very wishy washy to begin with (the thread the other day about iTunes charts being AI dominated had a surprising amount of people defending AI music, imo).

[sandos]

I dont understand how CC can burn that much money. Iv'e built many webapps using copilot, and our normal business tokens rarely run out. I would say Ive never exceeded 150% of a normal months tokens.

[vanillameow]

I think Opus is just an expensive model on API, especially without context management. A single message with near full context (I think this was still on 250k as well) costs like 1$ or something like that iirc.

Imo this is the premium I pay right now to just not have to worry about this. The project where I burned 50$ in a day was using superpowers plugin (A set of skills that makes Claude meticulously plan out design and implementation, interview for details, use subagents for subtasks and review them independently, etc.) - it burns tokens like crazy, but it has super good results for me for custom software tools for myself.

I would probably change my approach if I a) was creating software for customers where I had to actually worry about the implementation details or b) if I was forced to switch to API and couldn't just throw Opus at a 28-task plan for an hour. But this works for me right now so meh. I feel like I'm in some rare Goldilocks zone where Anthropic is not super ripping me off (I use CC quite heavily and generate real value for myself) but I also don't go crazy if I go 2 days without building the next SaaS startup.