There's your answer
I don’t think everyone here is using Claude/GPT/… to create indie games?
If you’re using it for work then waiting another week/day/hour is a business expense, effectively.
Maybe it's like this guy I know who purchased a new-ish Bugatti but all the service is done by a local mechanic, during his time off, in a barn.
At that price difference, lots of things that are viable to do in whatever harness the subscription allows are simply impractical via API, you'd be spending a whole developer's salary just for the benefit of using a different harness.
I tried for example Deepseek V4 Pro for a bit (via API pricing), but it's _more expensive_ than Sol via subscription, even though $1.7/Mtok is a lot less than 20$/Mtok.
> At that price difference, lots of things that are viable to do in whatever harness the subscription allows are simply impractical via API, you'd be spending a whole developer's salary just for the benefit of using a different harness.
Could you elaborate on that?
Off topic: You did the ISBN visualization thing! Awesome!
More. On CC I'm currently burning ~$5k a day (according to claudes own metrics) and I use up the weekly quota in about 3-4 days. Meaning I'm eating $20k worth of tokens for a $200 sub.
Current session I have running in the background, spinning up tests mostly
Total cost: $660.33
Total duration (API): 22h 36m 33s
Total duration (wall): 8h 33m 58s
Total code changes: 7662 lines added, 177 lines removed
Usage by model:
claude-haiku-4-5: 6.0k input, 38 output, 0 cache read, 0 cache write ($0.0062)
claude-opus-5: 322.9k input, 5.1m output, 702.9m cache read, 19.3m cache write ($606.64)
claude-opus-4-8: 742 input, 883.5k output, 38.6m cache read, 2.0m cache write ($53.68)