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A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

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Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#61

Post by turnsout »

jsheard wrote: post #45
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.

Cursor keeps raising money… I for one personally enjoy burning all those VC dollars. Consider it a very tiny version of wealth redistribution.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#62

Post by debian3 »

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.

The default unlimited model is now gpt 4.1 https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-08-openai-gpt-4-1-is-n...

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#63

Post by zeroq »

richardw wrote: post #41
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…

Just today I had yet another conversation about how BigCo doesn't give a damn about cost.

Just to give you one example - last BigCo I worked for had a schematic for new projects which resulted in... 2k EUR per month cloud cost for serving a single static html file.

At one point someone up top decided that kubes is the way to go and scrambled an impromptu schematic for new projects which could be simply described as a continental class dreadnought of a kubernetes cluster on AWS.

And it was signed off, and later followed like a scripture.

Couple stories lower we're having hard time arguing for 50 EUR budget for a weekly beer for the team, but the company is A fine with paying 2K EUR for a landing page.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#64

Post by maccard »

BowBun wrote: post #47
ramoz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#65

Post by coverj »

BowBun wrote: post #47
ramoz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 po…

are people really committing 5k lines a day without AI assistance even once a month?

I don't think I've ever done this or worked with anyone who had this type of output.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#66

Post by stavros »

keerthiko wrote: post #44
tkzed49 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 documenta…

What do you prefer, between Aider and CC? I use Aider for when I want to vibe code (I just give the LLM a high-level description and then don't check the output, because it's so long), and Cursor when I want to AI code (I tell the AI to do low-level stuff and check every one of the five lines it gives me).

AI coding saves me a lot of time writing high-quality code, as it takes care of the boilerplate and documentation/API lookups, while I still review every line, and vibe coding lets me quickly do small stuff I couldn't do before (e.g. write a whole app in React Native), but gets really brittle after a certain (small) codebase size.

I'm interested to hear whether Claude Code writes less brittle code, or how you use it/what your experience with it is.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#67

Post by 0x6c6f6c »

pier25 wrote: post #59
lkbm wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your employer spends $20k a month on you (salary + everything else), $200 a month breaks even at around a 1% boost in productivity.

Maybe if you're working in FAANG...

Lots of jobs where employers pay that much per head, not just FAANG. Honestly FAANG is probably spending double that for senior+ level engineers.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#69

Post by conradkay »

pier25 wrote: post #59
lkbm wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your employer spends $20k a month on you (salary + everything else), $200 a month breaks even at around a 1% boost in productivity.

Maybe if you're working in FAANG...

Average US salary for SWE is 10-12k/month. Fully-loaded cost (what they spend) is 1.5-2x salary so that's not an unrealistic number

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#70

Post by _bin_ »

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…

I'd be really interested in seeing the source for this, if it's an open-source project, along with the prompts and some examples. Or other source/prompt examples you know of.

A lot of people seem to have these magic incantations that somehow make LLMs work really well, at the level marketing and investor hype says they do. However, I rarely see that in the real world. I'm not saying this is true for you, but absent vaguely replicable examples that aren't just basic webshit, I find it super hard to believe they're actually this capable.

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