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A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

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Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#141

Post by ziofill »

Loic wrote: post #122
lelanthran wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $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…

How many prompts does Claude code send per user prompt? Is it 1:1?

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#142

Post by netdevphoenix »

Does anyone feel like the biggest selling point of LLMs so far is basically for programmers? Feels like most of the products that look like could generate revenue are for programmers.

While you can see them as a productivity enhancing tool, in times of tight budgets, they can be useful to lay off more programmers because a single one is now way more productive than pre-LLM.

I feel that LLMs will increase the barrier to entry for newcomers while also make it easier for companies to layoff more devs as you don't need as many. All in all, I expect salaries for non FAANG devs to decrease while salaries for FAANG devs to increase slightly (given the increased value they can now make).

Any thoughts on this?

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#143

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

netdevphoenix wrote: post #142

Does anyone feel like the biggest selling point of LLMs so far is basically for programmers? Feels like most of the products that look like could generate revenue are for programmers. While you can see them as a productivity enhancing tool, in times of tight budgets, they can be useful to lay off more programmers because a single one is now way more productive than pre-LLM. I feel that LLMs will increase the barrier…

LLM's don't increase programmer productivity. In fact, they actively harm it.

Programmers aren't paid for coding, they're paid for following a formal spec in a particular problem domain. (Something that LLM's can't do at all.)

Improving coding speed is a red herring and a scam.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#144

Post by asaddhamani »

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…

Sonnet in Copilot is crippled, Copilot agent mode is also very basic and failed every time I tried it. It would have been amazing 2 years ago, but now it's very meh.

GitHub is losing money on the subs, but they are definitely trying to reduce the bleed. One way to do that is to cut corners with LLM usage, by not sending as much context, trimming the context window, capping output token limits, these are all things Cursor also does btw, hence why Cline, with almost the same tech (in some ways its even inferior tech) achieves better results. I have hit $20 in API usage within a single day with Cline, Cursor lets you have "unlimited" usage for $20 for a month. So its optimised for saving costs, not for giving you the best experience. At $10 per month for Copilot, they need to save costs even more. So you get a bad experience, you think its the AI that is not capable, but the problem is with the companies burning VC money to corner the market, setting unrealistic expectations on pricing, etc.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#145

Post by throwaway_0351 »

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.

Back when I used dial-up, I experienced a lot of stress when I was connected. I felt I had to be as effective as possible, because we had to pay for every minute spent.

When I switched to DSL the stress went away, and I found myself using internet in different ways than before, because I could explore freely without time pressure.

I think this applies to Claude as well. I will probably feel more free to experiment if I don't have to worry about costs. I might do things I would never think of if I'm only focused on using it as little as possible to save money.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#146

Post by vidarh »

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.

It's great that there's a choice, but for me the Max plan is likely to save me money already, and I suspect my usage would increase significantly if the top-up (I have intentionally not set it to auto-top-up) didn't regularly remind me not to go nuts.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#147

Post by asaddhamani »

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.

I wrote about this on my blog: https://www.asad.pw/llm-subscriptions-vs-apis-value-for-mone...

But basically you get ~300Mn input tokens and ~100Mn output tokens per month with Sonnet on the $100 plan. These are split across 50 sessions you are allowed, each session is 5 hrs starting from the first time you send a message until 5 hrs after the first message. During this time, you get ~6Mn input and ~2Mn output tokens for Sonnet. Claude Code seems to use a mix of Sonnet and Haiku, and Haiku has 2x the limits of Sonnet.

So if you absolutely maxed out your 50 sessions every month, that's $2400 worth of usage if you instead had used the API. So it's a great deal. It's not $100 worth of API credits you're buying, so they don't run out like that. You can exhaust limits for a given session, which is at most a 5 hr wait for your next one, or you can run out of 50 sessions, I don't know how strongly they enforce that limit and I think that limit is BS, but all in all the value for money is great, way better than using the API.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#148

Post by asaddhamani »

ziofill wrote: post #141
Loic wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How many prompts does Claude code send per user prompt? Is it 1:1?

Nope, it can be even a dozen (because agentic). Claude usage limits are actually based on token usage, and Claude Code uses a mix of Haiku and Sonnet. So your limits are split among those two models. I gave an estimation of how much usage you can expect in another comment on this thread, but you will find it hard to max out the $100 plan unless you are using it very, very extensively.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#149

Post by vidarh »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #143
netdevphoenix wrote: post #142

Does anyone feel like the biggest selling point of LLMs so far is basically for programmers? Feels like most of the products that look like could generate revenue are for programmers. While you can see them as a productivity enhancing tool, in times of tight budgets, they can be useful to lay off more programmers because a single one is now way more productive than pre-LLM. I feel that LLMs will increase the barrier…

LLM's don't increase programmer productivity. In fact, they actively harm it. Programmers aren't paid for coding, they're paid for following a formal spec in a particular problem domain. (Something that LLM's can't do at all.) Improving coding speed is a red herring and a scam.

In my 30 years of software development, maybe 5 of them were in places were getting people to provide a formal spec was ever an option.

It's also irrelevant if LLM's can follow them - the way I use Claude Code is to have it get things roughly working, supply test cases showing where it fails, then review and clean up the code or go additional rounds with more test cases.

That's not much different to how I work with more junior engineers, who are slower and not all that much less error-prone, though the errors are different in character.

If you can't improve coding speed with LLM's, maybe your style of working just isn't amenable to it, or maybe you don't know the tooling well enough - for me it's sped things up significantly.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#150

Post by asaddhamani »

mellosouls wrote: post #136
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…

I agree with much of your post, but: 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. Out of date I think in this fast moving space. Sonnet has long been the gold-standard, but that position is looking very shaky at the moment; Gemini in particular has been working wonders for me and others when Sonnet has stumbled. VS Code/Copilot has imp…

In my experience, there are areas where Gemini did well but Claude didn't, same for o1 pro or o3, but for 90% of the work, I find Claude way more trustworthy, better at following instructions, not making syntax mistakes, etc. Gemini 2.5 Pro is way better than all their prior models, but I don't get the hype about it being a coding superstar. It's not bad, but Sonnet is still the primary workhorse. Sonnet is more expensive, so if Gemini was at the same level I'd be happy to save the money, but unfortunately, I've tried it with various approaches, played with the temperature, but in the vast majority of cases Claude does a better job.
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