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!

So we all know about the new subscription option for Claude Max which has 5-20x higher rates than Plus for 100 dollars a month, honestly that's just disrespectful to the user, like you want someone to pay 100 dollars a month on something that still has limits, are they out of their mind?

Like seriously, I've been using Claude for a while now and was actually considering upgrading, but this pricing is absolute highway robbery. $100 A MONTH?? For what? So I can hit slightly higher rate limits that I'll probably still manage to max out anyway? And the worst part is they're acting like they're doing us some kind of favor. It doesn't even come with new features I assume?

And don't even get me started on how this compares to other AI services. I mean at least ChatGPT had the decency to make it unlimited lmao. I get that these companies need to make money, but there's a difference between sustainable pricing and just plain gouging your users. The most frustrating part is that I actually LIKE Claude. The responses are solid, and I've gotten value from the Plus tier. But this Max tier pricing feels like they're basically saying "we know some whale businesses will pay this, so screw the regular users."

I mean, what's next? $200/month for "Claude Ultra" with another 2x rate limit increase?

I'm a sr. software engineer with ~16 years working experience. I'm also a huge believer in AI, and fully expect my job to be obsolete within the decade. I've used all of the most expensive tiers of all of the AI models extensively to test their capabilities. I've never posted a review of any of them but this pro-Claude hysteria has made me post something this time.

If you're a software engineer you probably already realize there is truly nothing special about Claude Code relative to other AI assisted tools out there such as Cline, Cursor, Roo, etc. And if you're a human being you probably also realize that this subreddit is botted to hell with Claude Max ads.

I initially tried Claude Code back in February and it failed on even the simplest tasks I gave it, constantly got stuck in loops of mistakes, and overall was a disappointment. Still, after the hundreds of astroturfed threads and comments in this subreddit I finally relented and thought "okay maybe after Sonnet/Opus 4 came out its actually good now" and decided to buy the $100 plan to give it another shot.

Same result. I wasted about 5 hours today trying to accomplish tasks that could have been done with Cline in 30-40 minutes because I was certain I was doing something wrong and I needed to figure out what. Beyond the usual infinite loops Claude Code often finds itself in (it has been executing a simple file refactor task for 783 seconds as I write this), the 4.0 models have the fun new feature of consistently lying to you in order to speed along development. On at least 3 separate occasions today I've run into variations of:

● You're absolutely right - those are fake status updates! I apologize for that terrible implementation. Let me fix this fake output and..

I have to admit that I was suckered into this purchase from the hundreds of glowing comments littering this subreddit, so I wanted to give a realistic review from an engineer's pov. My take is that Claude Code is probably the most amazing tool on earth for software creation if you have never used alternatives like Cline, Cursor, etc. I think Claude Code might even be better than them if you are just creating very simple 1-shot webpages or CRUD apps, but anything more complex or novel and it is simply not worth the money.

inb4 the genius experts come in and tell me my prompts are the issue.

I just purchased Max subscription to save on my Claude Code API usage (I've been spending around $200 per month). I can clearly see that the context window is smaller. When I started using Claude Code with Max subscription I've hit all the time the error:

Error: File content (33564 tokens) exceeds maximum allowed tokens (25000). Please use offset and limit parameters to read specific portions

of the file, or use the GrepTool to search for specific content.

which I didn't see at all when using API. Because of that I've had pretty bad experience so far. While Claude Code with API is top notch agent assistant, the version with Max subscription has trashed my files, causing linting errors everywhere, because it couldn't load the full file.

I asked Anthropic support for clear information about context size, but so far I am pretty sure that they limited the context window, because it would be too good to have 225 messages per 5 hours for $100 per month.

If you have big projects with big database – it might not be good for you.

So yeah, I've spent those $100 so you don't have to.

I was genuinely surprised when somebody made a working clone of my app Shotomatic using Claude in 15 minutes.

At first I didn't believe it, so I decided to give it a try myself. I thought, screw it, and went all-in for the $200 Max plan to see what it could really do.

Man, I was impressed.

The feature (the one in the video) I tried was something like this:

You register a few search keywords, the app (Shotomatic) opens the browser, runs the searches, and automatically takes screenshots of the results. The feature should seamlessly integrate with the existing app.

The wild part? I didn’t write a single line of code.

The entire thing was implemented using Claude Code, and I didn't touch the code myself at all. I only interacted through the terminal giving instructions. From planning to implementation, code review, creating of PR and merging, everything was done with natural language.

It was an insanely productive, and honestly a little scary experience.

Why haven't I tried this before?

I'm trying out different development modes with agents. So far, I've tested Cline/Roo Code, Zed, Aider, and now I'm on Claude Code. Out of all of them, Claude Code seems the most advanced and best integrated, especially with tool calling, even though I prefer the Gemini models.

I'm using the Claude Pro plan at $20 a month, so with practically no use of Claude Opus, the strongest model. The next plan is Max, which gives you 5x and 20x the usage you get with Pro, at $100 and $200 a month, respectively. These models should allow for moderate use of Claude Opus, which is billed as Sonnet, with the difference that it eats up your limits much faster.

So far, I've tried to use it moderately and I've never reached the limits of the Pro version (though I don't know how close I've gotten), without, of course, using Opus, and I've never even used the chat on the site.

Since I haven't reached the limits so far, I'd like to know from those who use Claude Code: is it worth upgrading to the Max plan to be able to use Opus, and possibly have increased limits on Sonnet as well, which I imagine could be useful in particularly intense sessions?

I think the Pro version already has incredible value, since it costs in a month practically half of what a software engineer earns in an hour. Is the same true for the Max version?

I want to know if I'm getting the maximum of what I've paid. Does anyone have experiences on:

• Google AI Ultra (jules), it's $250, but there's promo price of $125 for first 3 months

• BYOK on kilo code / roo / etc. I heard GPT 5 is significantly cheaper

• $200 plan on OpenAI Codex

• $100 plan on Claude Code, will it affect quality ? Aside from token limit, I mean like will CC try to minimize context size on $100 plan vs when using $200 plan? Also from ccusage, I saw like 80% opus and 20% sonnet, I'm afraid $100 plan will have more sonnet percentage.

My usage look like this, I still have 4 more days:

  "totals": {
    "inputTokens": 71803,
    "outputTokens": 1305059,
    "cacheCreationTokens": 22792643,
    "cacheReadTokens": 253886371,
    "totalCost": 747.48,
    "totalTokens": 278055876
  }

The total costs of $747 says the plan is beneficial for me rather than buying same amount of token. But just in case there are better alternatives out there.

Hey everyone! Amateur coder here working on flashcard apps and basic HTTP tools.

Claude has been incredibly helpful as my coding partner, but I'm hitting some workflow issues. Currently using Sonnet 4 for implementation, but when I need more complex planning, I switch to Opus 4.1 on the web to get Claude code prompt, which gets rate-limited quickly. I end up waiting 2+ hours on rate limiting

I'm considering the Max plan ($100/month) to avoid these delays and actually finish my projects. I've tried Claude's agentic features with sonnet 4 but its not even near what opus 4.1 gives in chat. Like i have to paste my code there and get prompt and sonnet work on it.

Compared to Gemini 2.5 or OpenAI alternatives, I still prefer Claude Code, but wondering if I'm missing something in my current approach.

Is it really worth getting max plan 100$ for a month or two to finish my project building and then go with pro plan on building it. what would you guys suggest. ?

Really appreciate any insights - still learning and would love to hear from you guys.

50% off for 3 months (Pro Plan)

For those who want to try Claude Code, here is a perfect discount.

Only for new accounts.

https://claude.ai/jade