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Comment by serf | Hacker News Reader

200 bucks a month isn't enough. Fine. Make a plan that is enough so that I will be left alone about time limits and enforced breaks.

NOTHING breaks flow better than "Woops! Times up!"; it's worse than credit quotas -- at least then I can make a conscious decision to spend more money or not towards the project.

This whole 'twiddle your thumbs for 5 hours while the gpus cool off' concept isn't productive for me.

'35 hours' is absolutely nothing when you spawn lots of agents, and the damn thing is built to support that behavior.

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> '35 hours' is absolutely nothing when you spawn lots of agents, and the damn thing is built to support that behavior.

I wouldn't call "spawning a lot of agents" to be a typical use case of the personal plan.

That was always in the domain of switching to a pay as you go API. It's nice that they allowed it on the fixed rate plans, but those plans were always advertised as higher limits, not unlimited.

It’s literally recommended in “Best practices”: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-pract...

API has fewer limits, and practically limitless. Claude is also on Aws and gcp, where you get more quotas (probably credits as well) and different rate limits.

This. Optimize for the good actors, not the bad ones.

Just use the API

Just buy multiple Max subscriptions.

It's quite possible changing plans to something that's enough to make them profitable would push everyone to a competitor

Slowly bringing up prices as people get dependent sounds like a pretty decent strategy if they have the money to burn

Changing plans? They could just keep the old plans and add a new one, like OAIs 2k/month plan

I use the API. Just pay-per-use. Refill it $100 at a time.

Use the API.

The API is far more expensive. For Opus 4 it's almost priced in a way that says "don't use this".

That’s not what the parent commenter asked though, they wanted a price for not being concerned about limits. The API pricing is that.

I doubts thats what they want. They want a static fixed price, $5k a month for example and never have to think about it.

Even if you used the API 24x7 for a single session (no parallel requests) I doubt you'd be able to hit $5k/mo in usage for Claude 4 Sonnet.

Take the API and assume 24/7 usage (or whatever working hours are). That’s your fixed cost.

It’s more likely that this sum is higher than they want. So really it’s not about predictability.

The way these work is they're net profitable given all users, so you have to recategorize users in one of two ways:

- a user subsidizing other users

- a user subsidized by other users

I don't know what OP prefers, but given that people are saying "woof, API pricing too expensive", it sounds like the latter.

The problem, of course, is the provider has to find a market where the one sustains the other. Are there enough users who would pay > $200/mo without getting their money's worth in order to subsidize users paying the same rate, but using more than the average? I think the non-existence of a higher-tier plan says there probably isn't, but I don't want to give too much credence to markets, economics, etc.

I use Claude Code authenticated via the API (Anthropic Console). There's no limits for me. And I also assume API-metered requests are prioritized, so it's faster as well.

The API does have limits but they’re determined by your monthly spend. I did a trial of tier 1 spend and did hit the limits, but on on tier two spending it was much much better.

https://docs.anthropic.com/en/api/rate-limits#requirements-t...

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