I've started looking into this. I'm unsure how exactly to interpret the "cost" data that can be added to statusline, but I'm on the Pro plan and have noticed that it's reporting ~$100 cost across projects I've used it on. For a week, which means I'm getting ~$200 worth for $20 in a month. That's immense value even if it's fairly off, and unless there are people paying for a subscription and using for a couple days in a month... don't want to contemplate it too much TBH given that I'm benefiting so much.

'Hand wavy' is one of my LLMs favourite terms.

There’s a lot of articles about it. It costs them $500+ for heavy users. They do this to capture market share and also to train their agent loops with human reinforcement learning.

https://ezzekielnjuguna.medium.com/why-anthropic-is-practica...