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Comment by eschluntz | Hacker News Reader

It is API billing like AWS - you pay for what you use. Every time you exit a session we print the cost, and in the middle of a session you can do /cost to see your cost so far that session!

You can track costs in a few ways and set spend limits to avoid surprises: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/agents-and-tools/claude-c...

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What I really want (as a current Pro subscriber) is a subscription tier ("Ultimate" at ~$120/month ?) that gives me priority access to the usual chat interface, but _also_ a bunch of API credits that would ensure Claude and I can code together for most of the average working month (reasonable estimate would be 4 hours a day, 15 days a month).

i.e I'd like my chat and API usage to be all included under a flat-rate subscription.

Currenty Pro doesn't give me any API credits to use with coding assistants (Claude Code included ?) which is completely disjointed. And I need to be a business to use the API still ?

Honestly, Claude is so good, just please take my money and make it easy to do the above !

I don’t think you need to be a business to use the API? At least I’m fairly certain I’m using it in a personal capacity. You are never going to hit $120/month even with full-time usage (no guarantees of course, but I get to like $40/month).

Careful -- a solo dev using it professionally, meaning, coding with it as a pair coder (XP style), can easily spend $1500/week.

$1500 is 100 million output tokens, or 500 million input tokens for Claude 3.7.

The entire LOTR trilogy is ~.55 million tokens (1,200 pages, published).

If you are sending and receiving the text equivalent of several hundred copies of the LOTR trilogy every week, I don't think you are actually using AI for anything useful, or you are providing far too much context.

You don't need to be a business to use the API.

You can do this yourself. Anyone can buy API credits. I literally just did this with my personal credit card using my gmail based account earlier today.

1. Subscribe to Claude Pro for $20 month

2. Separately, Buy $100 worth of API credits.

Now you have a Claude "ultimate" subscription where the credits roll over as an added bonus.

As someone who only uses the APIs, and not the subscription services for AI, I can tell you that $100 is A LOT of usage. Quite frankly, I've never used anywhere close to $20 in a month which is why I don't subscribe. I mostly just use text though, so if you do a lot of image generation that can add up quickly

I don't think you can generate images with claude. just asked it for pink elephant: "I can't generate images directly, but I can create an SVG representation of a pink elephant for you." And it did it :)

That is a good idea. For something like Claude Code, $100 is not a lot, though.

Which is theoretically great, but if anyone can get an Aussie credit card to work, please let me know.

I haven’t had an issue with Aussie cards?

But I still hit limits, I use Claudemind with jetbrains stuff and there is a max of input tokens (j believe), I am ‘tier 2’ but doesn’t look like I can go past this without an enterprise agreement

No issue with AU credit card here. Is a credit card and not a debit card though

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