[paulcole]

> Because if a tool like Claude Code (or any other LLM) suddenly cost $1,000 a month to reflect what it actually costs to run, would people keep paying for it out of pocket? Would their companies?

I wouldn't find it hard to personally justify $200/month or $300/month for the single best LLM tool available to me. Right now I have $100/month spread out over a few different tools and it's a bargain.

[opsmeter]

One thing that surprised our team: cost isn’t just “more usage” — retries and context creep can multiply spend with the same user behavior. We now track cost/request and cost per user-action per endpoint over time, plus a retry ratio. When either drifts after a change, it’s usually a quick fix (backoff, caps, trimming history).

[karmakaze]

I don't think I'd want to pay that much since my personal use is limited and not serious/important. Employer pays for work usage.

I'm curious why do you keep many subscriptions around? Asking because I do too though don't have a good reason to keep anything other than Anthropic/Claude.

[paulcole]

I think right now I have Claude, ChatGPT, MidJourney, and Perplexity. I guess that's not quite $100 now but I used to do Gemini, too.

Personally:

Perplexity has replaced Google searches for me – basically looking things up

ChatGPT/Claude is what I use for generating code (I'm not a programmer but I like scripting tasks at work)

Claude I think is better at writing than ChatGPT

MidJourney is $10 and I like it best for image generation which I do for work and like to keep it around.