[pmxi]

> If you are a heavy user, you should use pay-as-you go pricing

if you’re a heavy user you should pay for a monthly subscription for Claude Code which is significantly cheaper than API costs.

[ramesh31]

Am I alone in spending $1k+/month on tokens? It feels like the most useful dollars i've ever spent in my life. The software I've been able to build on a whim over the last 6 months is beyond my wildest dreams from a a year or two ago.

[fainpul]

> The software I've been able to build on a whim over the last 6 months is beyond my wildest dreams from a a year or two ago.

If you don't mind sharing, I'm really curious - what kind of things do you build and what is your skillset?

[zppln]

Care to show what you've built?

[OtherShrezzing]

I’m unclear how you’re hitting $1k/mo in personal usage. GitHub Copilot charges $0.04 per task with a frontier model in agent mode - and it’s considered expensive. That’s 850 coding tasks per day for $1k/mo, or around 1 per minute in a 16hr day.

I’m not sure a single human could audit & review the output of $1k/mo in tokens from frontier models at the current market rate. I’m not sure they could even audit half that.

[kergonath]

> Am I alone in spending $1k+/month on tokens?

I would if there were any positive ROI for these $12k/year, or if it were a small enough fraction of my income. For me, neither are true, so I don’t :).

Like the siblings I would be interested in having your perspective on what kind of thing you do with so many tokens.

[tovej]

I would personally never. Do I want to spend all my time reviewing AI code instead of writing? Not really. I also don't like having a worse mental model of the software.

What kind of software are you building that you couldn't before?

[sothatsit]

You're not alone in using $1k+/month in tokens. But if you are spending that much, you should definitely be on something like Anthropic's Max plan instead of going full API, since it is a fraction of the cost.

[dingi]

I'm starting to notice a pattern with these kinds of comments. They almost never provide any actual evidence for the work they mention.

[Terretta]

Define heavy... There's a band where the max subscription makes most sense. Thread here talks $1000/month, the plan beats that. But there's a larger area beyond that where you're back to having to use API or buy credits.

A full day of Opus 4.1 or GPT 5 high reasoning doing pair programming or guided code review across multiple issues or PRs in parallel will burn the max monthly limits and then stop you or cost $1500 in top up credits for a 15 hour day. Wait, WTF, that's $300k/year! OK, while true, misses that that's accomplishing 6 - 8 in parallel, all day, with no drop in efficacy.

At enterprise procurement cost rates, hiring a {{specific_tech}} expert can run $240/hr or $3500/day and is (a) less knowledgable on the 3+ year old tech the enterprise is using, (b) wants to advise instead of type.

So the question then isn't what it costs, it's what's the cost of being blocked and in turn blocking committers waiting for reviews? Similarly, what's the cost of a Max for a dev that doesn't believe in using it?

TL;DR: At the team level, for guided experts and disbelievers, API likely ends up cheaper again.

[Nizoss]

Yeah, this is a no brainer for certain use cases.