Get a subscription and use claude code - that's how you get actual reasonable economics out of it. I use claude code all day on the max subscription and maybe twice in the last two weeks have I actually hit usage limits.
I find the token/credit restrictions on Opus to be near useless even when using Claude Code. I only ever switch to it so get another model's take on the issue. Five minutes of use and I have hit the limit.
We have the $200 plans for work and despite only using Opus, we rarely hit the limits. CCUsage suggests the same via API would have been ~$2000 over the last month (we work 5 hours a day, 4 days a week, almost always with Claude).
Same context length and throughput limits?
Anecdotally I find gpt4.1 (and mini) were pretty good at those agentic programming tasks but the lack of token caching made the costs blow up with long context.
Unfortunately there's no easy tool to inspect usage. I started a project to parse the Claude logs using Claude and generate a Chrome trace with it. It's promising but it was taking my tokens away from my core project.
Do you mostly use opus?
It uses way less tokens or much more effectively when running locally.
Also there's a cli argument that lets you specify the model. try `claude --help`.
Maybe I'm out of touch, but I'm not handing out my phone number to sign up for random SaaS tools.
I wouldn't be surprised if asking for a phone number lowers the fraud rate enough to compensate for the added friction.
[0] Incidentally, this is also why many AI API providers ask for your money upfront (buy credits) unless you're big enough and/or have existing relationship with them.