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Comment by liorwn | Hacker News Reader

I built this after noticing a $65 charge for what felt like a $10 session. Turns out, context compaction was hiding 80% of my token usage. Real cost, no visibility.

claudetop is a status line for Claude Code that shows your burn rate, cache efficiency, model cost comparison, and smart alerts (like "TRY /fast" when Opus is overkill for the task). Plugin system for extensibility — Spotify, CI status, calendar, etc.

Single bash script, zero dependencies beyond jq. One-command install.

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I am always a hit confused when people talk about these charges... are you not using the subscriptions with the flat rates? I am on the $100 a month plan, and am constantly using clause code and never coming close to my limits. Maybe I am just not using it at the levels of some people...

I have noticed the same with the $100/mo plan, I hit the limt only once with heavy usage. Then when I use my employer's AWS Bedrock it's not uncommon for my spend to $50/day of serious work. It doesn't make much sense.

Anthropic is subsidizing Claude Code. It makes lots of sense.

The paid plans require you to use their interfaces or tooling. The main reason I pay per token is so I have tooling freedom. I'm not keen to let Big AI decide how I interact with this game changing technology.

I haven't yet been blocked by their tooling. All the current tools I use seem to work fine with the claude code interface, can just call it with -p.

$100 is for casual usage. To use it for work requires $200/mi plus extra usage.

CC does all of my work and I have hit the $100/mo Max plan limit only once, and I probably could have just called it quits for the day at that point.

Are you saying that is the Claude rules for the subscription or saying because work uses more of it?

How many agents are you using at once?

Try this mcp for agents https://github.com/itsamruth/subagent-reuse

3 or 4? Plus whatever sub agents they spawn...

I pay per token using an API (Vertex)

1. Higher limits and quota, goes up with more spend

2. I don't think it gets quant nerf's during busy times, since you are paying directly

3. With Gemini flash + CC prompts, it's nearly as good, so less spend and latency. I don't know how people deal with the delays between turns. I get to iterate much faster for most tasks

I don't seem to have any delays between turns with my Claude subscription, so not sure what you mean there.

Your second point seems like a guess.

For your first point, I bumped to the $100 plan because i was hitting limits with the $20 one, but haven't hit the limit with the new one yet...

I mean the 10-30s to wait for a frontier model to respond when the lite/flash models are just fine for almost all tasks

Please type things yourself. Or at least prompt your LLM of choice to sound less canned.

41 minute old account. "I built post". LLM sounding everything. I'd be surprised if there was a real person behind this at all.

/authentic-writer skill: No em dashes or emojis. add in a few typos and bad grammmer. Avoid it's not not X but Y. imagine you're a mere human and your pinky finger is very tired so you forget to uppercase sometimes.

> like "TRY /fast" when Opus is overkill for the task

In fact using /fast in this case would only increase spending. /fast mode uses the same opus but consumes $$$$ faster to produce tokens faster )

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/fast-mode

I asked Claude Opus yesterday if it could put my token cost (and tokens remaining) into the status bar and it insisted there was no way to get this information.

ETA: ah, this isn't getting real time cost from an Anthropic API or anything. It's estimating it based on token usage and a JSON config file that specifies token cost.

I believe there is a new HN guideline asking people not to post AI slop as comments.

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