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A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

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Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#41

Post by richardw »

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.

Whoever is paying for your time should calculate how much time you’d save between the different products. The actual product price comparison isn’t as important as the impact on output quality and time taken. Could be $1000 a month and still pay for itself in a day, if it generated >$1000 extra value.

This might mean the $10/month is the best. Depends entirely on how it works for you.

(Caps obviously impact the total benefit so I agree there.)

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#42

Post by maven29 »

dahcryn wrote: post #39
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.

Have I got bad news for you.... Microsoft announced imposing limits on "premium" models from next week. You get 300 "free" requests a month. If you use agent, you consume about 3-4 requests per action easily, I estimate to burn through 300 in about 3-5 working days. Basically anything that isnt gpt4o is premium, and I find gpt4o near useless compared to Claude and Gemini in copilot.

Enforcement of Copilot premium request limits moved to June 4, 2025 https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-07-enforcement-of-copi...

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#43

Post by pier25 »

dahcryn wrote: post #39
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.

Have I got bad news for you.... Microsoft announced imposing limits on "premium" models from next week. You get 300 "free" requests a month. If you use agent, you consume about 3-4 requests per action easily, I estimate to burn through 300 in about 3-5 working days. Basically anything that isnt gpt4o is premium, and I find gpt4o near useless compared to Claude and Gemini in copilot.

> I find gpt4o near useless compared to Claude and Gemini in copilot.

It's a hit and miss IMO.

I like it for C#/dotnet but completely useless for the rest of the stuff I do (mostly web frontend).

I'm not sure about my usage but if I hit those premium limits I'm probably going to cancel Copilot.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#44

Post by keerthiko »

tkzed49 wrote: post #34
ramoz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t resonate with me because I’ve spent over $1,000 on Claude Code at this point and the return is worth it. The spend feels cheap compared to output. In contrast - I’m not interested in using cheaper, less-than, services for my livelihood.

hey, I'm open to that possibility. Maybe I'll grab $5 in API credit and give it a shot (for 5 minutes or a week depending on who you ask)

i got $100 of credit at the start of the year, and have been using +1$ each month, starting at $2 in january using aider at the time. just switched to claude code this week, since it follows a similar UX. agentic CLI code assist really has been growing in usefulness for me as i get faster at reviewing its output.

i use it for very targeted operations where it saves me several roundtrips to code examples and documentation and stack overflow, not spamming it for every task i need to do, i spend about $1/day of focused feature development, and it feels like it saves me about 50% as many hours as i spend coding while using it.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#45

Post by jsheard »

abetaha wrote: post #23

I wonder how successful this pricing model ($100-$200 a month with limits) is going to be. It is very hard to justify, when other tooling in the ~$20/month range offers unlimited usage, and comparable quality.

Is any of the ~$20/month with unlimited usage tooling actually profitable though? It goes without saying that if all else is equal then the product sold at a greater loss will be more popular, but that only works until the vendor runs out of money to light on fire.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#46

Post by broof »

ramoz wrote: post #27
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.

Yes. For small apps, as well distributed systems. You have to puppeteer it and build a meta context/tasking management system. I spend a lot of time setting Claude code up for success. I usually start with Gemini for creating context, development plans, and project tasking outlines (I can feed large portions of codebase to Gemini and rely on its strategy). I’ve even put entire library docsites in my repos for Claude…

Can you share more about what you mean by a meta context/tasking management system? I’m always curious when I see people who have happily spent large amounts on api tokens.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#47

Post by BowBun »

ramoz wrote: post #27
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.

Yes. For small apps, as well distributed systems. You have to puppeteer it and build a meta context/tasking management system. I spend a lot of time setting Claude code up for success. I usually start with Gemini for creating context, development plans, and project tasking outlines (I can feed large portions of codebase to Gemini and rely on its strategy). I’ve even put entire library docsites in my repos for Claude…

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 post this because it's not constructive, but this piece stuck out to me and had me wondering if it's worth the trade-off. Not to mention programmers have spent decades fighting against LoC as a metric, so let's not start using it now!

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#50

Post by ed »

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.

Yes. It costs me a few bucks per feature, which is an absolute no-brainer.

If you don't like what it suggests, undo the changes, tweak your prompt and start over. Don't chat with it to fix problems. It gets confused.

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