Earlier quoted context omitted.
Get a subscription and use claude code - that's how you get actual reasonable economics out of it. I use claude code all day on the max subscription and maybe twice in the last two weeks have I actually hit usage limits.
Is it considerably more cost effective than cline+sonnet api calls with caching and diff edits? Same context length and throughput limits? Anecdotally I find gpt4.1 (and mini) were pretty good at those agentic programming tasks but the lack of token caching made the costs blow up with long context.
It uses way less tokens or much more effectively when running locally.