Comment by pmxi
Comment by pmxi 12 hours ago
> If you are a heavy user, you should use pay-as-you go pricing
if you’re a heavy user you should pay for a monthly subscription for Claude Code which is significantly cheaper than API costs.
Comment by pmxi 12 hours ago
> If you are a heavy user, you should use pay-as-you go pricing
if you’re a heavy user you should pay for a monthly subscription for Claude Code which is significantly cheaper than API costs.
Am I alone in spending $1k+/month on tokens? It feels like the most useful dollars i've ever spent in my life. The software I've been able to build on a whim over the last 6 months is beyond my wildest dreams from a a year or two ago.
I’m unclear how you’re hitting $1k/mo in personal usage. GitHub Copilot charges $0.04 per task with a frontier model in agent mode - and it’s considered expensive. That’s 850 coding tasks per day for $1k/mo, or around 1 per minute in a 16hr day.
I’m not sure a single human could audit & review the output of $1k/mo in tokens from frontier models at the current market rate. I’m not sure they could even audit half that.
You don't audit and review all $1k worth of tokens!
The AI might write ten versions. Versions 1-9 don't compile, but it automatically makes changes and gets further each time. Version 10 actually builds and seems to pass your test suite. That is the version you review!
—and you might not review the whole thing! 20 lines in, you realize the AI has taken a stupid approach that will obviously break, so you stop reading and tell the AI it messed up. This triggers another ~5 rounds of producing code before something compiles, which you can then review, hopefully in full this time if it did a good job.
Do people actually use GitHub copilot?
At any rate, I could easily go through that much with Opus because it’s expensive and often I’m loading the context window to do discovery, this may include not only parts of a codebase but also large schemas along with samples of inputs and outputs.
When I’m done with that, I spend a bunch of turns defining exactly what I want.
Now that MCP tools work well, there is also a ton of back and forth that happens there (this is time efficient, not cost efficient). It all adds up.
I have Claude code max which helps, but one of the reasons it’s so cheap is all of the truncation it does, so I have a different tool I use that lets me feed in exactly the parts of a codebase that I want to, which can be incredibly expensive.
This is all before the expenses associated with testing and evals.
I’m currently consulting, a lot of the code is ultimately written by me, and everything gets validated by me (if the LLM tells me about how something works, I don’t just take its word for it, I go look myself), but a lot of the work for me happens before any code is actually written.
My ability (usually clarity of mind and patience) to review an LLMs output is still a gating factor, but the costs can add up quickly.
> Do people actually use GitHub copilot?
I use it all the time. I am not into claude code style agentic coding. More of the "change the relevant lines and let me review" type.
I work in web dev, with vs code I can easily select a line of code that's wrong which I know how to fix but honestly tired to type, press Ctrl+I and tell it to fix. I know the fix, I can easily review it.
Gpt 4.1 agent mode is unlimited in the pro tier. It's half the cost of claude, gemini, and chatgpt. The vs code integration alone is worth it.
Now that is not the kind of AI does everything coding these companies are marketing and want you to do, I treat it like an assistant almost. For me it's perfect.
I trust Copilot way more than any agentic coder. First time I used Claude it went through my working codebase and tried to tell me it was broken in all these places it wasn't. It suggested all these wrong changes that if applied would have ruined my life. Given that first impression, it's going to take a lot to convince me agentic coding is a worthwhile tool. So I prefer Copilot because it's a much more conservative approach to adding AI to my workflow.
> Am I alone in spending $1k+/month on tokens?
I would if there were any positive ROI for these $12k/year, or if it were a small enough fraction of my income. For me, neither are true, so I don’t :).
Like the siblings I would be interested in having your perspective on what kind of thing you do with so many tokens.
If freelancing and if I am doing 2x as much as previously with same time, it would make sense that I am able to make 2x as much. But honestly to me with many projects I feel like I was able to scale my output far more than 2x. It is a different story of course if you have main job only. But I have been doing main job and freelancing on the side forever now.
I do freelancing mostly for fun though, picking projects I like, not directly for the money, but this is where I definitely see multiples of difference on what you can charge.
Define heavy... There's a band where the max subscription makes most sense. Thread here talks $1000/month, the plan beats that. But there's a larger area beyond that where you're back to having to use API or buy credits.
A full day of Opus 4.1 or GPT 5 high reasoning doing pair programming or guided code review across multiple issues or PRs in parallel will burn the max monthly limits and then stop you or cost $1500 in top up credits for a 15 hour day. Wait, WTF, that's $300k/year! OK, while true, misses that that's accomplishing 6 - 8 in parallel, all day, with no drop in efficacy.
At enterprise procurement cost rates, hiring a {{specific_tech}} expert can run $240/hr or $3500/day and is (a) less knowledgable on the 3+ year old tech the enterprise is using, (b) wants to advise instead of type.
So the question then isn't what it costs, it's what's the cost of being blocked and in turn blocking committers waiting for reviews? Similarly, what's the cost of a Max for a dev that doesn't believe in using it?
TL;DR: At the team level, for guided experts and disbelievers, API likely ends up cheaper again.