The problem is that this is $100/mo with limits. At work I use Cursor, which is pretty good (especially tab completion), and at home I use Copilot in vscode insiders build, which is catching up to Cursor IMO.
However, as long as Microsoft is offering copilot at (presumably subsidized) $10/mo, I'm not interested in paying 10x as much and still having limits. It would have to be 10x as useful, and I doubt that.
Aurornis · 9m ago
> The problem is that this is $100/mo with limits
Limits are a given on any plan. It would be too easy for a vibe coder to hammer away 8 hours a day for 20 days a week if there was nothing stopping them.
The real question is whether this is a better value than pay as you go for some people.
htrp · 55s ago
> 8 hours a day for 20 days a week
Your vibe coders are on a different dimension than mine.
richardw · 49m ago
Whoever is paying for your time should calculate how much time you’d save between the different products. The actual product price comparison isn’t as important as the impact on output quality and time taken. Could be $1000 a month and still pay for itself in a day, if it generated >$1000 extra value.
This might mean the $10/month is the best. Depends entirely on how it works for you.
(Caps obviously impact the total benefit so I agree there.)
dahcryn · 53m ago
Have I got bad news for you.... Microsoft announced imposing limits on "premium" models from next week. You get 300 "free" requests a month. If you use agent, you consume about 3-4 requests per action easily, I estimate to burn through 300 in about 3-5 working days.
Basically anything that isnt gpt4o is premium, and I find gpt4o near useless compared to Claude and Gemini in copilot.
> I find gpt4o near useless compared to Claude and Gemini in copilot.
It's a hit and miss IMO.
I like it for C#/dotnet but completely useless for the rest of the stuff I do (mostly web frontend).
I'm not sure about my usage but if I hit those premium limits I'm probably going to cancel Copilot.
ramoz · 1h ago
Doesn’t resonate with me because I’ve spent over $1,000 on Claude Code at this point and the return is worth it. The spend feels cheap compared to output.
In contrast - I’m not interested in using cheaper, less-than, services for my livelihood.
tkzed49 · 1h ago
hey, I'm open to that possibility. Maybe I'll grab $5 in API credit and give it a shot (for 5 minutes or a week depending on who you ask)
keerthiko · 44m ago
i got $100 of credit at the start of the year, and have been using +1$ each month, starting at $2 in january using aider at the time. just switched to claude code this week, since it follows a similar UX. agentic CLI code assist really has been growing in usefulness for me as i get faster at reviewing its output.
i use it for very targeted operations where it saves me several roundtrips to code examples and documentation and stack overflow, not spamming it for every task i need to do, i spend about $1/day of focused feature development, and it feels like it saves me about 50% as many hours as i spend coding while using it.
tkzed49 · 1h ago
I'll add on to this: I don't really use agent modes a lot. In an existing codebase, they waste a lot of my time for mixed results. Maybe Claude Code is so much better at this that it enables a different paradigm of AI editing—but I'd need easy, cheap access to try it.
warp · 1h ago
You don't need a max subscription to use Claude Code. By default it uses your API credits, and I guess I'm not a heavy AI user yet (for my hobby projects), but I haven't spent more than $5/month on Claude Code the past few months.
F7F7F7 · 1h ago
I burned $30 in Claude Code in just under an hour. I was equally frustrated and impressed. So much so I ended up a $200 MAX subscriber.
hombre_fatal · 1h ago
The money starts adding up fast as your context fills up since it's resending the whole accumulated context back through the api every time.
They're good about telling you how full your context is, and you can use /compact to shrink it down to the essentials.
But for those of us who aren't Mr. MoneyBags like you all, keeping an eye on context size is key to keeping costs low.
koakuma-chan · 1h ago
The problem with it is that it uses a 30k~ token system prompt (albeit "cached"), and very quickly the usage goes up to a few million. I can easily spend over $10 a day.
EnPissant · 1h ago
I spent $5 in 10 minutes when I tried it.
christophilus · 1h ago
For me, it was $10 in 2 hours. That’s super cheap if it saves me significant time. Jury’s out on that, though.
koakuma-chan · 1h ago
> but I'd need easy, cheap access to try it.
You can try it for cheap with the normal pay-as-you-go way.
cye131 · 1h ago
I'm curious whether anyone's actually using Claude code successfully. I tried it on release and found it negative value for tasks other than spinning up generic web projects. For existing codebases of even a moderate size, it burns through cash to write code that is always slightly wrong and requires more tuning than writing it myself.
thegeomaster · 18m ago
Absolutely stellar for 0-to-1-oriented frontend-related tasks, less so but still quite useful for isolated features in backends. For larger changes or smaller changes in large/more interconnected codebases, refactors, test-run-fix-loops, and similar, it has mostly provided negative value for me unfortunately. I keep wondering if it's a me problem. It would probably do much better if I wrote very lengthy prompts to micromanage little details, but I've found that to be a surprisingly draining activity, so I prefer to give it a shot with a more generic prompt and either let it run or give up, depending on which direction it takes.
ramoz · 1h ago
Yes. For small apps, as well distributed systems.
You have to puppeteer it and build a meta context/tasking management system. I spend a lot of time setting Claude code up for success. I usually start with Gemini for creating context, development plans, and project tasking outlines (I can feed large portions of codebase to Gemini and rely on its strategy). I’ve even put entire library docsites in my repos for Claude code to use - but today they announced web search.
They also have todos built in which make the above even more powerful.
The end result is insane productivity - I think the only metric I have is something like 15-20k lines of code for a recent distributed processing system from scratch over 5 days.
meesles · 37m ago
Is that final number really that crazy? With a well defined goal, you can put out 5-8K per day by writing code the old fashioned way. Also would love to see the code, since in my experience (I use Cursor as a daily driver), AI bloats code by 50% or more with unnecessary comments and whitespace especially when making full classes/files.
> I spend a lot of time setting Claude code up for success.
Normally I wouldn't post this because it's not constructive, but this piece stuck out to me and had me wondering if it's worth the trade-off. Not to mention programmers have spent decades fighting against LoC as a metric, so let's not start using it now!
dttze · 58s ago
You'll never see the code. They will just say how amazingly awesome it is, how it will fundamentally alter how coding is done, etc... and then nothing. Then if you look into who posts it, they work in some AI related startup and aren't even a coder.
broof · 39m ago
Can you share more about what you mean by a meta context/tasking management system? I’m always curious when I see people who have happily spent large amounts on api tokens.
ed · 26m ago
Yes. It costs me a few bucks per feature, which is an absolute no-brainer.
If you don't like what it suggests, undo the changes, tweak your prompt and start over. Don't chat with it to fix problems. It gets confused.
999900000999 · 5m ago
Worth it, but I’m chilling until the next major model release.
It still double downs on non working solutions
pier25 · 32m ago
$200/month?
Do people really get that much value from these tools?
I use Github's Copilot for $10 and I'm somewhat happy for what I get... but paying 10x or 20x that just seems insane.
lkbm · 41s ago
If your employer spends $20k a month on you (salary + everything else), $200 a month breaks even at around a 1% boost in productivity.
dham · 35m ago
Both Anthropic and OpenAI don't have Linux desktop clients (to use MCP), so yea I'll skip.
esha_manideep · 51m ago
Claude's limits are so vague - its not clear if buying Claude Max is cheaper than just using the API. Has anyone benchmarked this?
slrainka · 1h ago
Agent mode without rails is like a boat without a rudder.
What worked for me was coming up with an extremely opinionated way to develop an application and then generating instructions (mini milestones) by combining it with the requirements.
These instructions end up being very explicit in the sequence of things it should do (write the tests first), how the code should be written and where to place it etc. So the output ended up being very similar regardless of the coding agent being used.
F7F7F7 · 1h ago
I've tried every variation of this very thing. Even managed to build a quick and dirty ticketing system that I could assign to the LLM of my choosing. WITH context. Talking Graph Codebase's diagrams, mappings, tree structure of every possibility, simple documentation, complex documentation, a bunch of OSS to do this very thing automatically etcetcetc.
In the codebase I've tried modularity via monorepo, or faux microservices with local apis, monoliths filled with hooks and all the other centralized tricks in the book. Down to the very very simple. Whatever I could do to bring down the context window needed.
Eventually.....your return diminish. And any time you saved is gone.
And by the time you've burned up a context window and you're ready to get out. Now you're expeciting it to output a concise artifact to carry you to the next chat so you don't have to spend more context getting that thread up to speed.
Inevitably the context window and the LLMs eagerness to touch shit that it's not supposed (the likelihood of which increases with context) always gets in the way.
Anything with any kind of complexity ends up in a game of too much bloat or the LLM removing pieces that kill other pieces that it wasn't aware about.
/VENT
slrainka · 16m ago
So, relying on a large context can be tricky. Instead I’ve tried to get to a ER model quickly. And from there build modules that don’t have tight dependencies.
the new Claude code “max plan” would last me all of [1] 5mins… I don’t get why people are excited about this. High powered tools aren’t cheap and aren’t for the consumer…
If that's the case you should stop using it, because there's no way you see any ROI when you spend that much to just do some coding stuff.
It would be cheaper to your company to literally pay your salary while you do nothing.
postalrat · 1h ago
I'd love to see your math.
pclmulqdq · 1h ago
It's pretty simple: that usage in 5 min is probably at least $10 worth of API credits in that time (maybe $100).
A year has 2000 working hours, which is 24000 5-minute intervals. That means the company spending at least $240,000 on the Claude API (conservatively). So they would be better off having $100-200k you do nothing and hiring someone competent for that $240k.
F7F7F7 · 1h ago
Claude Max is less than a 1/2 percentage point of a Jr. Devs average salary. If you can't make that work then....
abetaha · 1h ago
I wonder how successful this pricing model ($100-$200 a month with limits) is going to be. It is very hard to justify, when other tooling in the ~$20/month range offers unlimited usage, and comparable quality.
jsheard · 41m ago
Is any of the ~$20/month with unlimited usage tooling actually profitable though? It goes without saying that if all else is equal then the product sold at a greater loss will be more popular, but that only works until the vendor runs out of money to light on fire.
light_hue_1 · 58m ago
This isn't flat pricing. It's exactly the same API credits but you prepay for the month and lose anything you don't use.
Whether it turns out to be cheaper depends on your usage.
I thought Claude Code was absurdly expensive and not at all more capable than something like chatgpt combined with copilot.
justanotheratom · 1h ago
I am sure this is worth every dime, but my workflow is so used to Cursor now (cursor rules, model choice, tab complete, to be specific), that I can't be bothered to try this out.
s17n · 1h ago
If you're using Cursor with Claude it's gonna be pretty much the same thing. Personally I use Claude Code because I hate the Cursor interface but if you like it I don't think you're missing much.
justanotheratom · 1h ago
I don't enjoy the interface as such, rather the workflows that it enables.
jbellis · 2h ago
One of my problems developing Brokk (AI coding for large codebases, https://brokk.ai) is that everyone is used to Cursor-style pricing of $20ish a month, but Brokk is designed around long-form prompts, it's a lot closer to a leash for Claude Code than it is to a Cursor or a Copilot, and the bill is a lot closer to CC too. (But of course Brokk is vendor neutral; you can absolutely mix o3 with GP2.5 with S3.7.)
So maybe Anthropic setting this precedent will solve my problem!
owebmaster · 1h ago
> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
nah, there are low powered tools and there’s high powered tools. If people want $20/month happy meal toys in business that business will get left behind. Ignore the consumer market, make Bugatti’s instead - https://ghuntley.com/redlining
ps - catchup for social zoom beers?
jbellis · 1h ago
you're right about the context limits
i pinged what i think is the right ghuntley on linkedin, rizzler looks like the next feature i'm building for brokk :)
However, as long as Microsoft is offering copilot at (presumably subsidized) $10/mo, I'm not interested in paying 10x as much and still having limits. It would have to be 10x as useful, and I doubt that.
Limits are a given on any plan. It would be too easy for a vibe coder to hammer away 8 hours a day for 20 days a week if there was nothing stopping them.
The real question is whether this is a better value than pay as you go for some people.
Your vibe coders are on a different dimension than mine.
This might mean the $10/month is the best. Depends entirely on how it works for you.
(Caps obviously impact the total benefit so I agree there.)
Basically anything that isnt gpt4o is premium, and I find gpt4o near useless compared to Claude and Gemini in copilot.
It's a hit and miss IMO.
I like it for C#/dotnet but completely useless for the rest of the stuff I do (mostly web frontend).
I'm not sure about my usage but if I hit those premium limits I'm probably going to cancel Copilot.
In contrast - I’m not interested in using cheaper, less-than, services for my livelihood.
i use it for very targeted operations where it saves me several roundtrips to code examples and documentation and stack overflow, not spamming it for every task i need to do, i spend about $1/day of focused feature development, and it feels like it saves me about 50% as many hours as i spend coding while using it.
They're good about telling you how full your context is, and you can use /compact to shrink it down to the essentials.
But for those of us who aren't Mr. MoneyBags like you all, keeping an eye on context size is key to keeping costs low.
You can try it for cheap with the normal pay-as-you-go way.
You have to puppeteer it and build a meta context/tasking management system. I spend a lot of time setting Claude code up for success. I usually start with Gemini for creating context, development plans, and project tasking outlines (I can feed large portions of codebase to Gemini and rely on its strategy). I’ve even put entire library docsites in my repos for Claude code to use - but today they announced web search.
They also have todos built in which make the above even more powerful.
The end result is insane productivity - I think the only metric I have is something like 15-20k lines of code for a recent distributed processing system from scratch over 5 days.
> I spend a lot of time setting Claude code up for success.
Normally I wouldn't post this because it's not constructive, but this piece stuck out to me and had me wondering if it's worth the trade-off. Not to mention programmers have spent decades fighting against LoC as a metric, so let's not start using it now!
If you don't like what it suggests, undo the changes, tweak your prompt and start over. Don't chat with it to fix problems. It gets confused.
It still double downs on non working solutions
Do people really get that much value from these tools?
I use Github's Copilot for $10 and I'm somewhat happy for what I get... but paying 10x or 20x that just seems insane.
What worked for me was coming up with an extremely opinionated way to develop an application and then generating instructions (mini milestones) by combining it with the requirements.
These instructions end up being very explicit in the sequence of things it should do (write the tests first), how the code should be written and where to place it etc. So the output ended up being very similar regardless of the coding agent being used.
In the codebase I've tried modularity via monorepo, or faux microservices with local apis, monoliths filled with hooks and all the other centralized tricks in the book. Down to the very very simple. Whatever I could do to bring down the context window needed.
Eventually.....your return diminish. And any time you saved is gone.
And by the time you've burned up a context window and you're ready to get out. Now you're expeciting it to output a concise artifact to carry you to the next chat so you don't have to spend more context getting that thread up to speed.
Inevitably the context window and the LLMs eagerness to touch shit that it's not supposed (the likelihood of which increases with context) always gets in the way.
Anything with any kind of complexity ends up in a game of too much bloat or the LLM removing pieces that kill other pieces that it wasn't aware about.
/VENT
Using Gemini 2.5 for generating instructions
This is the guide I use
https://github.com/bluedevilx/ai-driven-development/blob/mai...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/live/khr-cIc7zjc?si=oI9Fj33JBeDlQEYG
It would be cheaper to your company to literally pay your salary while you do nothing.
A year has 2000 working hours, which is 24000 5-minute intervals. That means the company spending at least $240,000 on the Claude API (conservatively). So they would be better off having $100-200k you do nothing and hiring someone competent for that $240k.
Whether it turns out to be cheaper depends on your usage.
I thought Claude Code was absurdly expensive and not at all more capable than something like chatgpt combined with copilot.
So maybe Anthropic setting this precedent will solve my problem!
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
ps - catchup for social zoom beers?
i pinged what i think is the right ghuntley on linkedin, rizzler looks like the next feature i'm building for brokk :)