Comment by Terretta

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.