I finally bit the bullet and got a $200 Claude subscription last month. It's been a busy month and I've used it a lot. More than is healthy, more than I sustainably could for more than a few weeks. I've managed to hit a 5 hour limit exactly once (20 minutes before it refreshed) and I've never hit more than 80% of a weekly limit.
But if I did - and I could imagine having some specific highly parallelizable work like writing a bazillion unit tests where I send out 40 subagents at a time - then the solution would be to buy two subscriptions. Not switch to API billing.
While that sounds impressive, a $200 subscription is still not pocket change. Do you have any approximation of the amount of tokens you use on average, and how much would it cost on a per-million-of-token billing?
Good question. I bought the subscription on 16th of January. I used a tool called ccusage.com. Assuming it's accurate, since then I would have racked up $1976.64 in API charges. There's been one single day that would have cost $324.82.
But if I did - and I could imagine having some specific highly parallelizable work like writing a bazillion unit tests where I send out 40 subagents at a time - then the solution would be to buy two subscriptions. Not switch to API billing.