[vmbm]

Yeah, I don't doubt that there was some abuse going on. But keep in mind there are plenty of reports out there that companies were setting up tokenmaxing leaderboards essentially encouraging this type of behavior from their employees. So I think the broader point here is that the insane growth that Anthropic has experienced over the last six months might be a temporary blip due to companies scrambling to take advantage of these more powerful agentic capabilities while not fully understanding the resulting costs.

I think for your use case, the most likely outcome is that you are going to need to be on a $100-200 month plan if you want access to the cutting edge models. But on the other end of the spectrum, you could probably get closer to $10-20 month using Chinese models. My usage was closer to yours, with the occasional tokenmaxxing sprint just to experiment a bit and test out the limits of the plan. I am not quite sure what I will be doing next month once it moves to API billing but I suspect I will move to openrouter and one of the open source CLI harnesses.