I pay for my own AI provider subscriptions because keeping work and personal strictly separated is important for me. I do know some people who secretly pay $200/month for Claude and use it at their job even though it's not approved. I do not recommend doing that, but it shows that some people value this for their work.

For developers earning more than $10K per month, spending less than 1% of salary on tooling to make the job easier is easy to justify.

It took about two weeks of really running it through its paces, and constantly slamming against the limit on it to convince me I had to upgrade to at least the 100/month sub, and at this point I wouldn’t blink to bump that to the 200/month if necessary.

I 100% believe we’re in a bubble, and that this level of compute isn’t sustainable at this price point, but for as long as I have it, I’m going to run it at the redline.

I’m a solo dev working on a project that I’ve just gone full-time on, after about 1.5 years of part time work. It’s a codebase that I laid the groundwork in, and has very well established systems, standards, and constraints.

The work I’m using Claude to do is the exact work I would be doing myself, but it does it at somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-10x the pace I could have. I don’t know that I could get the same rate of production if I managed a team of 2-3 programmers. Right now, it’s literally almost perfect at taking my iterative suggestions, and implementing them at that accelerated pace.

Honestly the hardest part is dealing with the fact that at the end of the day, I have to understand this codebase perfectly (solo dev and all that), so I have to take in changes to it that are also 5-10x the rate my normal intuition would. But, again, the plus side is that it’s implementing them essentially exactly as I would have, as it has ~20k lines of code that I wrote to use as an example.

If I were to hire even one other programmer, I’d be paying well north of 5k/month, and I’d not only be managing a super computer programmer tool, but an actual human being as well. $100/month might as well be free comparatively.

I'm not who you were replying to, but:

My work pays for $100/mo Claude, I pay another $100 to bring it up to $200/mo level because:

    - Partly: I got in the habit back when work was only paying $20 and I was paying the $180.
    - It is not worth it to me to spend braincells trying to optimize my use to slip into the $100 plan, I give everything "Opus, effort max" and with the $200/mo plan I never run out ($100 I'll run out mid-morning).
    - I run a *lot* of experiments, including work-related and personal, to try to understand and improve my AI use skills.
    - I also use it for a lot of personal things, right now I'm using it to help me plan a backyard studio and ADU.

edit: Formatting, ccusage

However, Anthropic can and will charge much more for enterprise customers.

I don't think a majority of people will find it actually useful in the long run. I do game development as a hobby outside of work and every artist I know is outright hostile towards any sort of AI, to the point that they are dropping out of any community that so much as allows any mention of AI workflows.

I know that OpenAI is at least exploring "AI as entertainment" (Sora) but it has yet to be seen if that will be widely accepted or profitable. I've also been reading about teens talking to chatbots more and more rather than talking to real people, which seems like it will only end in mental health disasters.

"Disney cancels $1B deal with OpenAI after video platform Sora is shut down: 'The future is human'" https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/disney...

And if I recall correctly the AI datacenter deal isn'tdoing Oracle stock any favours.

I have a lot of deep/long running skills that eat tokens, and my process is plan>implement>review/fix loop

So I can have anywhere from 6-12 agents going at a time.

With one account I got limited often.