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Comment by dimal | Hacker News Reader

How are people using Claude Code day to day without spending a lot? I tried it on a moderately complex task and it chewed through tokens at an alarming rate. I quickly spent $2 and hadn’t even arrived at an adequate solution yet. I’ve heard other people say they’ve spent $10-20 in a coding session. I don’t see how that’s sustainable for me, so I’ve stuck with my $20/month Cursor subscription.

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They use a plan - Pro and Max are static plans with different caps over 5 hour sessions.

Pro isn't a static plan. Pro subs can access Claude Code but are paying via API metering. I have it setup at home and, while I haven't used it much, it can quickly add up.

What I did do, because my personal projects aren't too complex, is moved the model from Opus to Sonnet which is about 1/5 the cost.

For day-to-day stuff I have ProxyAI (on IntelliJ, continue.dev works for this too) pointed at Mistral's Codestra for auto-complete and to Claude 4 for chat.

Claude Code is just for giving the bot tasks to do without me being deeply involved in the work.

(edit) I just saw that pro is getting a rate-limited option for Claude code for the sonnet model only. I haven't tried it out but will give it a go sometime. https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/11145838-using-cla...

Pro is indeed a static CC plan as of yesterday. It won't automatically switch over, you have to re-login inside of Claude Code.

Normally to make a new smallish feature it costs me about $0.40.

The core suggestion is to point specifically at the files you want it to read and use as a reference, otherwise it might go read some huge file for no reason. Also the tokens used depend on the size of the project.

Generally, if I'm doing something I can box, I'd use chatgpt and copy it in myself. If I want something matching the style, I'd use a guided Roo Code.

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