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Claude has the worst pricing – but people want it

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Claude has the worst pricing – but people want it

#11

Post by pmontra »

amukbils wrote: post #3
pmontra wrote: post #2

Claude Pro with Sonnet 5 at $20 per month for a limit I never reach is OK. I'm using it 3 days per week full time. I'm also experimenting with DeepSeek 4 and it seems on par. Its API price is much cheaper and it's top up, not a subscription. I still didn't consume the $2 I loaded on my account sometimes in June. However they about to charge double price in what seems to be China's morning and afternoon.

are you using it to write code? $20/mo was never enough and I'm not even full time on coding .. yeah different models are worth experimenting .. but I'm okay with paying higher for the best model .. just need predictability and stability of pricing, which Claude doesn't give, and yet we still use and pay for .. because it's such a good product.

Yes, a Rails project with a Vue frontend.

Re: Claude has the worst pricing – but people want it

#12

Post by [deleted] »

amukbils wrote: post #3
pmontra wrote: post #2

Claude Pro with Sonnet 5 at $20 per month for a limit I never reach is OK. I'm using it 3 days per week full time. I'm also experimenting with DeepSeek 4 and it seems on par. Its API price is much cheaper and it's top up, not a subscription. I still didn't consume the $2 I loaded on my account sometimes in June. However they about to charge double price in what seems to be China's morning and afternoon.

are you using it to write code? $20/mo was never enough and I'm not even full time on coding .. yeah different models are worth experimenting .. but I'm okay with paying higher for the best model .. just need predictability and stability of pricing, which Claude doesn't give, and yet we still use and pay for .. because it's such a good product.

[deleted]

Re: Claude has the worst pricing – but people want it

#13

Post by debdattabasu »

Fable isn't needed except deep RE work. Opus 4.8 xhigh can code anything you throw at it and can code to public interfaces extremely well. I have rarely seen it make code level mistakes. In fact its the only model I feel that can actually code and I can actually trust to code. That's imo quite valuable.

Re: Claude has the worst pricing – but people want it

#18

Post by nnurmanov »

nnurmanov wrote: post #5

This is basically why I built HailMary Fabric. Claude Code is good, but a lot of the cost is repo discovery: finding files, reading candidates, following imports, etc. Fabric indexes the repo locally and gives Claude Code the relevant context up front. Nothing goes to HailMary. Tiny early test on httpx: 58% lower API cost across 2 tasks, both passed tests. Repo is here if anyone wants to try it or poke holes in it: h…

To the comment below, I have no idea why CC subscription did not work, apparently they have some different way to connect? Thanks to the leaked source code, I am going to find it out:)

Re: Claude has the worst pricing – but people want it

#19

Post by muzani »

coldtea wrote: post #4

> I'm frustrated but am also hooked. Kinda of a lesson in startups in a way. It builds bad will, that will have users say "fuck them" on the first chance they get.

I'm convinced a lot of investors were rich minority kids bullied as a youth, looking to bully the rest of world in revenge.

You keep hearing things like, "The definition of a moat is being able to raise prices," and, "Your distribution must scale to 99-100% of the market and you should acquire the remaining ones."

$20 is expensive for me. Netflix and Spotify subscriptions are pretty bloody expensive. And they're saying raise the prices?

These people don't live in the real world, at least not in countries where 90% of people including the middle class don't have disposable income.

Like it or not, AI is going to be a requirement, like shoes, running water, a smartphone, a car, a degree, insulin.

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