Hey everyone,

I’m a solo founder building my first web app and I’ve been using Claude Code Pro for coding and debugging. Lately, I’ve been constantly hitting the 5-hour daily usage limit, which is slowing me down a lot.

I’m thinking about upgrading to the Max plan ($200 NZD / ~$120 USD per month) for unlimited/extended access. I have no steady income right now, but I’ve freed up some budget

I want to hear from people who have experience:

• Is the Max plan actually worth it for someone hitting daily limits on Pro?

• Will it save enough time and frustration to justify the cost?

• Any tips to get the most value out of the Max plan as a solo builder?

Basically, I’m trying to figure out if it’s a worthwhile investment in speed/productivity for my first project.

Thanks in advance!

I absolutely love Claude Code and have been a Max subscriber for a while. Regardless, the buzz around the new weekly limit and release made me curious whether Claude's $200/month Max subscription was actually a good deal compared to paying for API usage, so I built a network instrumentation tool to capture and analyze my actual Claude Code usage.

Methodology:

- Captured network logs during 1% of my weekly rate limit (I'm still early in my weekly reset so didn't want to spend too much)

- I'm using Sonnet only for this instrumentation as I don't see the difference between Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.1

- Analyzed token usage and calculated costs using official pricing

- Projected monthly costs at full usage

The Results, for 1% of weekly limit:

- 299 total API requests

- 176 Sonnet requests (164K tokens + 13.2M cache reads)

- 123 Haiku requests (50K tokens - mostly internal operations)

- Total cost: $8.43

This is around $840/week with Sonnet, which I believe isn't even half the previous limit.

Monthly projection (full usage):

- Claude API: $3,650/month

- OpenAI API (GPT-5 + mini): $1,715/month

Key Findings

1. Claude Max is 18.3x cheaper than paying for Claude API directly

2. GPT-5 is 2.1x cheaper than Claude API at the token level

TL;DR: Is this still a good deal? If Claude is still the best model for coding, I would say yes. But compared to ChatGPT Pro subscription, the weekly limit hits hard. Will I keep my Claude subscription for now? Yes. Will that change soon if Anthropic still isn't transparent and doesn't improve their pricing? Of course.

Interesting Notes

- Haiku is used internally by Claude Code for things like title generation and topic detection - not user-facing responses

- Cache reads are HUGE (13.2M tokens for Sonnet) and significantly impact costs

If you are curious about the analysis, I open-sourced the entire analysis here https://github.com/AgiFlow/claude-instrument

--- Edited: Published a separated post on how I use Claude Code. This is part of the reason why I like Sonnet 4.5 which is amazing when it come to instruction following.

Well I have spent the day trying out the new Claude 3.7. I have used it to make an app that pulls reddit post and there comments for money making deals. These are added to a database and then analysed via ChatGPT so that the methods are summarised into a step by step and also certain trustworthy scores are applied. The entire process is amazing!
This evening I got an invite to use the new Claude Code. I added 5 dollars to my account for testing. I loaded up the project that I made today as I wanted to make a simple change. To add a completed or reject button to each of the posts that I have pulled and analysed. These simple 2 add on have cost me a total of $2.30 and it tool about 19mins, there were a number of bugs that arose and Claude Code needed some new prompts to fix them. I think the tool is incredible but it certainly comes at a cost. As a result of this I don't think I will be including Claude Code into my work toolbox any time soon as at this price I will ended up making less losing money.
My hope is this will kick of another competitive war between all the other players driving down the price.

Since Cursor has changed their pricing and now it is basically useless with their $20USD plan, I was thinking about trying Claude Code. But I don't know if it is better to use it with the API charging credits on Anthropic console or directly buying the Pro plan subscription for $20USD. Can someone who has tried it tell me which is the cheaper way?

I know, I probably shouldn't say anything because this is absolutely subsidized launch pricing to drive up interest and I'm going to jinx it and they'll eventually slow down the gravy train but damn. I saw someone else post their $20 in 2 days breaking even and thought I might as well share my own experience - I broke even day 1. I've actually only gotten rate limited once, and it was for about an hour and a half on that first day when I burned $30 in equivalent API use.

I'm a heavy roo code user via API and get everything for free at work so I generally look for the right tool for the job more than anything else, and while I still think roo modes shine where claude code hasn't quite nailed yet, it's a very solid product. In my own time, I had been going more gemini heavy in roo because sonnet struggles with big context and have mad love for that beautiful month of free 2.5 pro exp... and I was willing to overlook a lot of the 05-06 flaws. Jury is still out on 06-05, but I decided to give the $20 plan a shot and see if claude code would cut my API bills and damn. It did almost immediately. First day was 06/06, the 06/01 and 06/05 were using my direct anthropic API. This is not an ad, it's good shit and you might as well get some VC funded discount claude code usage while it's still out there.

I will mainly use it alongside cursor, I love claude’s models especially in anything that requires any tool use its so good and seamless

I will use it alongside cursor just want to know what I will get and if it will be good enough, I can do with 40-50 messages every 5 hours that’s really good for me especially alongside cursor

And before you say “just get the 100$ one this one won’t do anything” I can’t afford it

Hey everyone,
I’ve been using Cursor, but I already hit the usage limit halfway through the month, even though I’m actually coding less than before their pricing change.

I’m thinking of switching to Claude Code. For those using it, is the $20/month plan enough for your regular coding needs?

For context, I’m a full-on vibe coder. I do everything with AI and rely on it heavily. So I’m curious if Claude can keep up with that style of workflow.

Any insights would be appreciated!

It just works.

No awkward small talk, no endless friction. I chat with it like I’d talk to a real teammate..

Complete thoughts, half-baked ideas, even when I’m pissed off and rambling. No need to rephrase everything like I’m engineering a scientific prompt. It gets it. Then it builds.

I dropped Claude for a couple months when the quality dipped (you probably noticed it too). Tried some alternatives. Codex was solid when it first came out, but something was missing. Maybe it was the slower pace, or just how much effort it took to get anywhere. Nothing gave me the same sense of momentum I’d had with Claude.

Fast-forward to this week: My Claude membership lapsed on the 1st. Cash flow has been tight approaching christmas, so I held off renewing the max plan.

In the meantime, I leaned on Cursor (which I already pay for), Google’s Antigravity, and Grok’s free model via Cursor—spreading out options to keep things moving. All useful in their way. But I was neck-deep in a brutal debugging session on a issue that demanded real understanding and iteration. Using Codex and GPT-5.1 (via Cursor Plus, full access to everything).

Should’ve been plenty. Nope. It felt broken for momentum—told me something flat-out couldn’t be done, multiple times. I even pointed it to the exact docs proving it could. Still, pushback. Slow, and weirdly toned.

This wasn’t a one-off; new chats, fresh prompts, every angle I could try. The frustration built fast. I don’t feel I have time for essay-length prompts just to squeeze out a single non-actionable answer just for some poetic, robotic deflection..

On Cursor, the “Codex MAX High Reasoning” model—supposedly their top-tier, free for a limited time? Sick, right? Ha, far from it. Feels like arguing with a smiling bureaucrat who insists you’re wrong. (For this specific case) , Endless back-and-forth, “answers” instead of solutions.

Look, I’ve been deep in this AI-for-dev workflow for a year now.. theres no more one offs or other models to try out in this space. The differences are crystal clear. The fix for my two-hour headache? Cursor’s free Auto mode. No “frontier model” hype, no hand-holding. I was just fed up, flipped it on, and boom. it spotted the issue and nailed it. First try.

That was the breaking point. Thought about the last few weeks with my basic GPT sub on my phone for daily use: it ain’t the same.

I’ve cycled through them all: Claude, Codex, GPT-5.1, Cursor’s party pack, Gemini, Grok. Each shines in their own way.

Gemini’s solid but bombs on planning, tool use, and gets stuck in loops constantly. Gpt is cringe. Only way I can put it. Grok is fire for speed and unfiltered chats.

When you’re building and can’t afford to micromanage your AI? Claude reacts. It helps. Minimal babysitting required. Meanwhile, GPT-5.1? Won’t generate basic stuff half the time. Used to crank out full graphics, life advice, whatever—now it dodges questions it once handled effortlessly. (The refusal policy creep is absurd.) Even simple tasks are hit or miss. No flow, just this nagging sense it’s trapped in an internal ethics loop. The inconsistency has tanked my trust. it’s too good at sounding confident now, which makes the letdowns sting more. One case: Instead of fixing the obvious code smell staring it in the face, it’ll spit back, “I added a helper to your x.ts file so that bla bla bla.” Cute, but solve the damn problem… instead of acting like its normal.

Yeah, it’s evolving, they all are. but after testing everything, Claude’s still the undisputed king for coding. (Speech aside: I stick with GPT-4o for brainstorming; it’s weirdly less locked down than 5.1 and crushes creativity.)

Bottom line: Claude isn’t flawless, and this isn’t some promo speech or AI rat race hype. But from everything this past year, and for anyone whos interested in knowing the differences or, needing a partner that moves with you instead of against you. It’s Claude every time. So yeah, I’m renewing. And I’ll keep paying unless something truly better crashes the party.

Cheers antrhopic, renewing my membership feels like christmas lol.

Just tried Claude Code for the first time today and figured I would start with $5. I installed Claude Code for the first time on my machine, so everything should be 100% default settings.

My initial prompt was create a docker container that simulates a robotic lawnmower that can be controlled with a keyboard using ROS2 and Webots. I would like to be able to access Webots via a web browser using something like NoVNC.

I started in a completely empty project folder, and within 10 minutes my $5 was completely gone, and the amount of code generated was relatively minimal.

I checked my API usage and it shows that I used 12,140,970 tokens in and 36,683 tokens out using Claude Sonnet 4. Does it seem possible to use 12,140,970 input tokens in a brand new project in that short amount of time? Or is there something else going on here?

EDIT:

I understand that a subscription price will be cheaper, but I'm more worried about the tokens— at 12+M tokens in 10 minutes, am I going to reach a subscription limit in a short period of time? Like is Claude somehow mistaking other files on my system for context?

Considering leaving Cursor for Claude Code due to their recent changes, but I am quite cost conscious and wondering if I should go to GitHub Copilot instead (although I found Copilot to be quite buggy).

Are people who leave Cursor and go to Claude Code actually making cost savings or is it more of a spite thing?

I’ve tried Windsurf and Cursor a few times before, but never stuck with them for long. Recently, I gave Claude Code a shot, and while it’s undeniably useful, I burned through $10 in credits way faster than expected.

At this point, the monthly subscription fees for AI-powered IDEs like Cursor and Windsurf are starting to seem like a bargain. Is Claude Code just expensive, or am I using it inefficiently?

I recently installed Claude Code and was redirected to the subscription page on claude.ai with the 24 USD price. I noticed it was more expensive than ChatGPT Pro. Then I searched for the website on my own and got to claude.com with the 17 USD price.

Can someone please help me understand the difference between the two domains and subscription pages. I can't seem to find anything and I think in 2025 this should be more explicit and simplify (I like to think I am not a complete idiot).

I hear use cases on the 100$ max subscription that sonnet is almost limitless for claude code, but has anyone actually tried the 20$ pro subscription yet and felt any limits? How long does it take for me to get rate limited on a medium/large scaled laravel/react app if I try to use sonnet semi-regularly? Of course if I give it the right files that I need for the job where I can use it, but I need to know if it is really worth using sonnet for the pro subscription or should I go for the max subscription.

Thanks!

I saw on their Developer Guide they claim “Claude Code consumes tokens for each interaction. The average cost is $6 per developer per day, with daily costs remaining below $12 for 90% of users.” Yet right below that, they also claim “On average, Claude Code costs ~$50–60 per developer per month with Sonnet 4.”

That would suggest each session consumes a lot of tokens, but most users just don’t use Claude Code that often. So we're looking at overall low-frequency usage.

This doesn’t really align with my own experience.. Something feels off here…