I guess one issue is that you pay $200/month whether you use it or not. Potentially this could be better for Anthropic. What was not necessarily foreseeable (ok maybe it was) back when that started was that users have invented all kinds of ways to supervise their agents to be as efficient as possible. If they control the client, you can't do that.
vidarh|1 month ago
I think it is more likely that if you stick with Claude Code, then you are more likely to stick with Opus/Sonnet, whereas if you use a third party CLI you might be more likely to mix and match or switch away entirely. It's in their interest to get you invested in their tooling.
KronisLV|1 month ago
I really like doing this, be it with OpenCode or Copilot or Cline/RooCode/KiloCode: I do have a Cerebras Code subscription (50 USD a month for a lot of tokens but only an okayish model) whereas the rest I use by paying per-token.
Monthly spend ends up being somewhere between 100-150 USD total, obviously depending on what I do and the proportion of simple vs complex tasks.
If Sonnet isn’t great for a given task, I can go for GPT-5 or Gemini 3.
mlrtime|1 month ago
I just use claude code proxy or litellm and set the ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL to my proxy and chose another LLM.
j45|1 month ago
dabernathy89|1 month ago
labcomputer|1 month ago
I can easily churn through $100 in an 8 hour work day with API billing. $200/month seems like an incredibly good deal, even if they apply some throttling.
isolli|1 month ago
dpark|1 month ago
casparvitch|1 month ago
ignat980|1 month ago
denysvitali|1 month ago