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.
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'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.
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.
/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.