Comment by lurking_swe 2 days ago
part of me sympathizes, but part of me also rolls my eyes. Am i the only one that’s configuring limits on spend and also alerts? Takes 2 seconds to configure a “project” in OpenAI or Claude and to scope an api key appropriately.
Not doing so feels like asking for trouble.
Can you get meaningful work done with CC at $20 at a time? I load $20 at a time onto the API for general chatting purposes and it lasts a few months at a time. I've always avoided trying CC because I got the impression people were burning $100+/mo, which is beyond my personal hobby budget.
/Not a software engineer perspective working on side projects
I guess if you're letting it vibe code huge chunks. I'm doing mostly handwritten code for my current project with a little bit of "I don't want to deal with this, Claude can handle it" and I've spent $1.26 this month for my 446 lines of code.
But yes I suppose at that rate, if Gastown or Beads or whatever is 300,000 lines of code (just to use a project known to be fully vibe coded with rough LOC reported), that would be over $800.
Don't let it vibe code hundreds of thousands of lines of code I guess.
I was doing that initially, but I think the subscriptions are generally worth it for personal projects. $20/mo is good if you're like me and you can do this stuff maybe a couple nights a week, I haven't run into the limitations on that yet. The $100+ subscriptions are needed if you're doing it every day. YMMV
I keep a master llm.md file and rotate between Claude Code (Pro), Antigravity Opus, Antigravity Flash, and OpenCode Kimi. I don't actually mind hitting limits.. though I'm least happy when Opus goes away.
My entire process is to build a generic llm.md file that all the tools can use and record to. I don't want to be tied completely to any one solution. You can get pretty far without spending a lot on tokens. I can run almost continually, and presently I'm the bottleneck anyway.
For Claude Code, I now pay the $20/mo subscription for pro because I was spending more using it via API credits.
Even if I had to reload manually very often, I still would not enable auto reload. These APIs are crazy expensive and I'm not looking for a surprise bill.
I'm successful with personal projects (reverse engineering USB devices, sledding spot finder, silly stuff) on the $20/mo Claude plan. I rarely use Opus except for planning larger things.
not only that, but clawdbot/moltbot/openclaw/whatever they call themselves tomorrow/etc also tells you your token usage and how much you have left on your plan while you're using it (in the terminal/console). So this is pretty easily tracked...
That's what I did, which is why I abandoned my experiment this quickly.
I'd find it hard to write such an article about how this is the next best thing since sliced bread without mentioning it spending so much money.