I do quite a bit of coding with Claude but am perfectly fine on the $20/mo plan. You people who just let agents go for hours on end... I'm not sure you're doing it right.
My rough sense based on personal experience is that token consumption heavily depends on what you're doing with it. I fit pretty comfortably into $20/mo on my personal projects. At work my individual requests were averaging more than $1 apiece and I was doing well over 20 of those per day.
At work, my most expensive calls were asking questions about the (criminally underdocumented after 6 months of vibecoding) codebase, Plan mode, and asking it to diagnose and fix bugs for me.
It seems like actually generating code is one of the cheaper things you can do with it. But that cost grows with the size of the codebase you're working in, and how much stuff you have in your agents/ directory and AGENTS.md files.
Both of which can be pretty outrageously bloated if you're working at a company that's all in on AI coding. At work I recently did some git hacking to hide the team's shared skills directory and replace it with my own personal, heavily stripped-down version. It did wonders for both my context utilization and the quality of results I've been getting out of the agent.
There are multiple camps of people, and everyone thinks the other camps are doing it wrong.
- full autonomous camp
- developer augmentation camp
- no-ai camp
The trouble I see with all of it is that the future seems unpredictable at the moment. The costs related to AI are low enough at the moment that full autonomous seems to be possible, but we have reasons to believe that costs will rise significantly, which may change that calculus. The no-AI camp is in ostrich mode, and is betting on this all going away once the bubble pops. The developer augmentation camp treats it like just another tool, which is somewhere in the middle.
The trouble is that even if there is a clear advantage today, the ground truth of costs built in is probably not stable.
Yeah I agree with this. I have my own preferences (augmentation, which is obviously right, because it's my camp and I wouldn't be in that camp if it were the wrong one, duh!), but I'm glad there are so many people doing so many different things and debating each other about it. That kind of messiness is the only way to figure this out.
I have agents going pretty much nonstop for hobby projects. This is great value for me because I get to see a lot of things I'm interested in come to life. It's very token-inefficient though and if usage limits were reduced much this wouldn't be worth doing.
For my actual job though, I don't let agents go for hours on end and I care about the code. I spend between $1000 and $2000 per month there. Of course we pay API pricing. I wonder how much you're getting for that $20 in API pricing, it could be 10x or even 50x. At least on the max plans it can be that high if you are hitting usage limits, I don't know about the 20.
20/month buy enough intelligence to build comprehensive plans for dirt cheap models to execute. My observation is that unambiguous specs create high quality code regardless of model, and cheap models are more obedient than SOTA.
I may be wrong, I just describe what works for me. Exhaustive documentation and frequent checkpoints with SOTA on subscription, and execution with cheap Chinese models on openrouter. It is not easy to overspend.
Depends on what you're doing. For example, I'm having one chat extend/optimize a (mildly-novel) CUDA program. Opus 5.5 (high/xhigh) is very efficient, but a single thread would still cost me the Pro plan usage in ~2 days (less if I were just running it unattended). This is one mostly-bounded program, and it's not even that large.
In fact, before 5.5, I would have just used Fable instead.
The trick is having enough speculative explorations going on at once so that you can see if the ones going off for hours on end strike gold while doing so or not, then being prepared to either cut them off or get them back to the point, and repeat.
If you don't have at least some workloads doing that you're missing out on the biggest wins from the current phase of the technology.
Many businesses are on Enterprise plans where usage is all billed per token, rather than having a flat rate seat with rate limits. You may find it interesting to look at your token usage and calculate what you'd be paying monthly if you paid API rates instead.
