A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code • Hacker News Board

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#121

Post by n_ary » Fri, May 09, 2025, 6:33 AM UTC

maccard wrote: post #64

BowBun wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that final number really that crazy? With a well defined goal, you can put out 5-8K per day by writing code the old fashioned way. Also would love to see the code, since in my experience (I use Cursor as a daily driver), AI bloats code by 50% or more with unnecessary comments and whitespace especially when making full classes/files. > I spend a lot of time setting Claude code up for success. Normally I wouldn't po…

5k likes of code a day is 10 lines of code a minute solidly for 8 hours straight. Whatever way you cut that with white space, bracket alignment, that’s a pretty serious amount of code to chunk out.

If I am writing Go, it is easy to generate enough if/else and error checks. When working in java, basic code can bloat to big LoC over several hours(first draft, which is obviously cleaned up later before going to PR). React and other FE frameworks also tend to require huge LoC count(mostly boilerplate and auto completed rather than thoughtfully planned and written). It is not that serious amount as you may think.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#122

Post by Loic » Fri, May 09, 2025, 6:48 AM UTC

lelanthran wrote: post #116

asaddhamani wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know why people expect unlimited usage for limited cost. Copilot hasn’t been good for a long time. They had the first mover advantage but they were too slow to improve the product. It’s still not caught up to cursor or windsurf. Cline leaves it so far in the dust it’s like a decade behind in AI years. So you get what you pay for. Claude is still the gold standard for AI assisted coding. All your Geminis and o…

> $100 is something most people on this forum could make back in 1 day of work. I expect so. The question is "How many days does the limit last for?" Maybe they have a per-day limit, maybe it's per-month (I'm not sure), but paying $100/m and hitting the limit in the first day is not economical.

Right into the announcement, later down, they even explain how to handle the limits:

How Rate Limits Work: With the Max plan, your usage limits are shared across both Claude and Claude Code:

Shared rate limits: All activity in both Claude and Claude Code counts against the same usage limits.

Message variations: The number of messages you can send on Claude varies based on message length, conversation length, and file attachments.

Coding usage variations: Expected usage for Claude Code will vary based on project complexity, codebase size, and auto-accept settings.

On the Max plan (5x Pro/$100), average users:

- Send approximately 225 messages with Claude every 5 hours, OR

- Send approximately 50-200 prompts with Claude Code every 5 hours

On the Max plan (20x Pro/$200), average users:

- Send approximately 900 messages with Claude every 5 hours, OR

- Send approximately 200-800 prompts with Claude Code every 5 hours

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#123

Post by bugglebeetle » Fri, May 09, 2025, 6:51 AM UTC

asaddhamani wrote: post #113

tkzed49 wrote: post #14

The problem is that this is $100/mo with limits. At work I use Cursor, which is pretty good (especially tab completion), and at home I use Copilot in vscode insiders build, which is catching up to Cursor IMO. However, as long as Microsoft is offering copilot at (presumably subsidized) $10/mo, I'm not interested in paying 10x as much and still having limits. It would have to be 10x as useful, and I doubt that.

I don’t know why people expect unlimited usage for limited cost. Copilot hasn’t been good for a long time. They had the first mover advantage but they were too slow to improve the product. It’s still not caught up to cursor or windsurf. Cline leaves it so far in the dust it’s like a decade behind in AI years. So you get what you pay for. Claude is still the gold standard for AI assisted coding. All your Geminis and o…

Gemini 2.5 Pro is better at coding than Claude, it’s just not as good at acting agentically, nor does Google have good tooling to support this use case. Given how quickly they’ve come from far behind and their advantage on context size (Claude’s biggest weakness), this could change just as fast, although I’m skeptical they can deliver a good end user dev tool.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#124

Post by Daviey » Fri, May 09, 2025, 6:55 AM UTC

tippytippytango wrote: post #120

I prefer just paying for metered use on every request. I hope monthly fees don’t carry over from the last era of tech. It’s fine to charge consumers $10 per month. But once it’s over $50 let’s not pretend you are hoping I under utilize the service, and you want me to think I’m over utilizing it. These premium subscriptions are too much for me to pretend that math doesn’t exist.

Doesn't per-call pricing reduce your usage? When I see the price of a session go to >$3, for a handful of interactions I self-limit my usage.

I'd love to have an all-you-can-eat, but $100 p/m isn't compelling enough compared to copy/paste for $20 p/m via chat.

That's not to say the value doesn't exceed $100, I just don't want to pay it.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#125

Post by jumski » Fri, May 09, 2025, 6:58 AM UTC

It is kinda sad that the information about how many tokens are included is not provided - its hard to judge versus pay-as-you-go api usage because of that

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#126

Post by _1tem » Fri, May 09, 2025, 7:08 AM UTC

cye131 wrote: post #26

I'm curious whether anyone's actually using Claude code successfully. I tried it on release and found it negative value for tasks other than spinning up generic web projects. For existing codebases of even a moderate size, it burns through cash to write code that is always slightly wrong and requires more tuning than writing it myself.

Claude Code is the first AI coding tool that actually worked for me on a small established Laravel codebase in production. It builds full stack features for me requiring only minor tweaks and guidance (and starting all over with new prompts). However, after a while I switched to Cursor Agent just because the IDE integration makes the workflow a little more convenient (especially the ability to roll back to previous checkpoints).

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#127

Post by flynumber » Fri, May 09, 2025, 7:14 AM UTC

I_am_tiberius wrote: post #21

Do you still need a phone number to register with claude?

Judging by your username you're in Israel?

If so just get yourself an Israeli mobile virtual number (which can receive SMS)

https://www.flynumber.com/cities/israel/mobile/

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#128

Post by nprateem » Fri, May 09, 2025, 7:16 AM UTC

microtonal wrote: post #119

asaddhamani wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know why people expect unlimited usage for limited cost. Copilot hasn’t been good for a long time. They had the first mover advantage but they were too slow to improve the product. It’s still not caught up to cursor or windsurf. Cline leaves it so far in the dust it’s like a decade behind in AI years. So you get what you pay for. Claude is still the gold standard for AI assisted coding. All your Geminis and o…

Claude is still the gold standard for AI assisted coding. All your Geminis and o3s of the world still don’t match up to Claude. I might be missing something, but you can use Claude 3.7 in Copilot Chat: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/using-github-copilot/ai-m... VS Code with your favorite model in Copilot is rapidly catching up with Cursor, etc. It's not there yet, but the trajectory is good. (Maybe you meant code…

When I tried Claude in copilot it was so obviously crippled as to be useless. I deleted copilot and never went back.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#129

Post by roselan » Fri, May 09, 2025, 7:16 AM UTC

Implicated wrote: post #88

cye131 wrote: post #26

I'm curious whether anyone's actually using Claude code successfully. I tried it on release and found it negative value for tasks other than spinning up generic web projects. For existing codebases of even a moderate size, it burns through cash to write code that is always slightly wrong and requires more tuning than writing it myself.

Just to throw my experience in, it's been _wildly_ effective. Example; I'm wrapping up, right now, an updated fork of the PHP extension `phpredis` because Redis 8 recently was released with support for a new data type, Vector Set but the phpredis extension (which is far more performant that non-extension redis libraries for PHP) doesn't support the new vector-related commands. I forked the extension repo, which is in…

This is a great report. Using a claude.md like that is honestly genius.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#130

Post by nprateem » Fri, May 09, 2025, 7:16 AM UTC

sixtyj wrote: post #117

asaddhamani wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know why people expect unlimited usage for limited cost. Copilot hasn’t been good for a long time. They had the first mover advantage but they were too slow to improve the product. It’s still not caught up to cursor or windsurf. Cline leaves it so far in the dust it’s like a decade behind in AI years. So you get what you pay for. Claude is still the gold standard for AI assisted coding. All your Geminis and o…

Exactly, $100 per month is nothing for professional usage. For hobby projects, it is a lot. From the internet, we got used to get everything for nothing, thus ppl beg for a lower price, even if it doesn't make sense.

It makes perfect sense if the market is cheaper.