7 ms·

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 ins

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.

tkzed49 1y 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.
- koakuma-chan 1y 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.
- warp 1y 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.
  - EnPissant 1y ago
    I spent $5 in 10 minutes when I tried it.
    - christophilus 1y 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 1y 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.
  - F7F7F7 1y 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 1y 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.
    - logankeenan 1y ago
      I’ve been wanting to try Claude Code. What makes it such a difference maker compared to existing AI tools?
    - PeterStuer 1y ago
      Can I assume you are still running into rate limits?
- divan 1y ago
  AI Agent should be treated like a human developer. If you bring a new human developer to your codebase and give them a task it will take a lot of time to read and understand the codebase before making proper solution. If you want to use AI agent regularly it makes sense to have some sort of memory of the codebase. And it seems like community realizes it and invents different solutions. RooCode has task orchestration built in already, there is a claude task-manager that allows splitting and remembering tasks so AI agent can pick it up quicker, there are different solutions with files like memory bank. Windsurf cursor upgraded their .widsurf/rules functionality to allow more solutions like that for instructing AI agents about the codebase/tasks. Some people even write their own scripts that feed every file to LLM and store the summary description in the separate file that AI agent tool can use instead of searching codebase. I'm eager to see how some of these solutions will become embedded into every AI agent solution. It's one of the missing stones to make AI agents order of magnitude more efficient and productive.
ramoz 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
    - stavros 1y ago
      What do you prefer, between Aider and CC? I use Aider for when I want to vibe code (I just give the LLM a high-level description and then don't check the output, because it's so long), and Cursor when I want to AI code (I tell the AI to do low-level stuff and check every one of the five lines it gives me). AI coding saves me a lot of time writing high-quality code, as it takes care of the boilerplate and documentation/API lookups, while I still review every line, and vibe coding lets me quickly do small stuff I couldn't do before (e.g. write a whole app in React Native), but gets really brittle after a certain (small) codebase size. I'm interested to hear whether Claude Code writes less brittle code, or how you use it/what your experience with it is.
      - 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
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dahcryn 1y 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.
- maven29 1y ago
  Enforcement of Copilot premium request limits moved to June 4, 2025 https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-07-enforcement-of-copilot-premium-request-limits-moved-to-june-4-2025/ https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-07-enforcement-of-copi...
- pier25 1y ago
  > 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.
- debian3 1y ago
  The default unlimited model is now gpt 4.1 https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-08-openai-gpt-4-1-is-now-generally-available-in-github-copilot-as-the-new-default-model/ https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-08-openai-gpt-4-1-is-n...
richardw 1y 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.)
- zeroq 1y ago
  Just today I had yet another conversation about how BigCo doesn't give a damn about cost. Just to give you one example - last BigCo I worked for had a schematic for new projects which resulted in... 2k EUR per month cloud cost for serving a single static html file. At one point someone up top decided that kubes is the way to go and scrambled an impromptu schematic for new projects which could be simply described as a continental class dreadnought of a kubernetes cluster on AWS. And it was signed off, and later followed like a scripture. Couple stories lower we're having hard time arguing for 50 EUR budget for a weekly beer for the team, but the company is A fine with paying 2K EUR for a landing page.
- guappa 1y ago
  C-suites love to pretend they can do and indeed do these calculations. They don't. They toss a coin.
- sensanaty 1y ago
  I've seen the books as to how much we spend on all the various AI shit. I can guarantee, that at least in our co, that AI is a massive waste of money. But it doesn't really matter, because the C-level has been consumed by the hype like nothing I've ever seen. It could cost an arm and a leg and they'd still be pushing for it because the bubble is all-consuming, and anyone not touting AI use doesn't get funding from other similarly clueless and sucked-in VCs.
Aurornis 1y 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 1y ago
  > 8 hours a day for 20 days a week Your vibe coders are on a different dimension than mine.
  - DonHopkins 1y ago
    Wow, and I thought the Beatles were exaggerating how long a week was! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kle2xHhRHg4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kle2xHhRHg4
  - cornel_io 1y ago
    I've often run multiple Claude Code sessions in parallel to do different tasks. Burns money like crazy, but if you can handle wrangling them all there's much less sitting and waiting for output.
- PeterStuer 1y ago
  What's the problem if you aren't selling the service as a loss leader and that 'vibe coder' is paying into their account upfront? Only reason I can see is you're lacking agregate capacity and are unwilling or unable to build out faster. Is that the case?
selcuka 1y ago
> I'm not interested in paying 10x as much and still having limits. It would have to be 10x as useful I don't think this is the right way to look at it. If CoPilot helps you earn an extra $100 a month (or saves you $100 worth of time), and this one is ~2x better, it still justifies the $100 price tag.
- rafaelmn 1y ago
  At 10-20$ a month that calculation is trivial to make. At a 100$ I'm honestly not getting that much value out of AI, especially not every month, and especially not compared to cheaper versions.
edmundsauto 1y ago
I think this thinking is flawed. First, it presupposes a linear value/cost relationship. That is not always true - a bag that costs 100x as much is not 100x more useful. Additionally, when you’re in a compact distribution, being 5% better might be 100x more valuable to you. Basically, this assumes that the marginal value is associated with cost. I don’t think most things, economically, seem to match that pattern. I will sometimes pay 10x the cost for a good meal that has fewer calories (nutritional value) I am glad people like you exist, but I don’t think the proposition you suggest makes sense.
asaddhamani 1y ago
I don’t know why people expect unlimited usage for limited cost. Copilot hasn’t been good for a long time. They had the first mover advantage but they were too slow to improve the product. It’s still not caught up to cursor or windsurf. Cline leaves it so far in the dust it’s like a decade behind in AI years. So you get what you pay for. Claude is still the gold standard for AI assisted coding. All your Geminis and o3s of the world still don’t match up to Claude. I started using Claude code once it became a fixed price with my Claude max subscription. And it’s taken a little getting used to vs Cline, but I think it’s closer to Cline in performance rather than cursor (Cline being my personal gold standard). $100 is something most people on this forum could make back in 1 day of work. $100 per month for the value is nothing and for what it’s worth I have tried to hit the usage limit and the only thing that got me close was using their deep research feature. I’ve maxed out Claude code without hitting limits.
- lelanthran 1y ago
  > $100 is something most people on this forum could make back in 1 day of work. I expect so. The question is "How many days does the limit last for?" Maybe they have a per-day limit, maybe it's per-month (I'm not sure), but paying $100/m and hitting the limit in the first day is not economical.
  - Loic 1y ago
    Right into the announcement, later down, they even explain how to handle the limits: How Rate Limits Work: With the Max plan, your usage limits are shared across both Claude and Claude Code: Shared rate limits: All activity in both Claude and Claude Code counts against the same usage limits. Message variations: The number of messages you can send on Claude varies based on message length, conversation length, and file attachments. Coding usage variations: Expected usage for Claude Code will vary based on project complexity, codebase size, and auto-accept settings. On the Max plan (5x Pro/$100), average users: - Send approximately 225 messages with Claude every 5 hours, OR - Send approximately 50-200 prompts with Claude Code every 5 hours On the Max plan (20x Pro/$200), average users: - Send approximately 900 messages with Claude every 5 hours, OR - Send approximately 200-800 prompts with Claude Code every 5 hours
uludag 1y ago
I always imagined that these $10/mo plans are essentially loss leaders and that in the long run, the price should be much higher. I'm not even sure if that $100/mo plan pays for its underlying costs.
- wyre 1y ago
  I think their free tiers are by definition of loss leaders, but I think you're right, all of there offerings are loss leaders. I know I can get more from my $20 using Claude Pro than I can using their API Workbench. It is such a competitive space that I don't think its unrealistic for these companies to ever be cash positive because all cash they have needs to be spent on competing in this space.

tkzed49 1y 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.

koakuma-chan 1y 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.
warp 1y 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.
- EnPissant 1y ago
  I spent $5 in 10 minutes when I tried it.
  - christophilus 1y 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 1y 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.
- F7F7F7 1y 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 1y 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.
  - logankeenan 1y ago
    I’ve been wanting to try Claude Code. What makes it such a difference maker compared to existing AI tools?
  - PeterStuer 1y ago
    Can I assume you are still running into rate limits?
divan 1y ago
AI Agent should be treated like a human developer. If you bring a new human developer to your codebase and give them a task it will take a lot of time to read and understand the codebase before making proper solution. If you want to use AI agent regularly it makes sense to have some sort of memory of the codebase. And it seems like community realizes it and invents different solutions. RooCode has task orchestration built in already, there is a claude task-manager that allows splitting and remembering tasks so AI agent can pick it up quicker, there are different solutions with files like memory bank. Windsurf cursor upgraded their .widsurf/rules functionality to allow more solutions like that for instructing AI agents about the codebase/tasks. Some people even write their own scripts that feed every file to LLM and store the summary description in the separate file that AI agent tool can use instead of searching codebase. I'm eager to see how some of these solutions will become embedded into every AI agent solution. It's one of the missing stones to make AI agents order of magnitude more efficient and productive.

ramoz 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
  - stavros 1y ago
    What do you prefer, between Aider and CC? I use Aider for when I want to vibe code (I just give the LLM a high-level description and then don't check the output, because it's so long), and Cursor when I want to AI code (I tell the AI to do low-level stuff and check every one of the five lines it gives me). AI coding saves me a lot of time writing high-quality code, as it takes care of the boilerplate and documentation/API lookups, while I still review every line, and vibe coding lets me quickly do small stuff I couldn't do before (e.g. write a whole app in React Native), but gets really brittle after a certain (small) codebase size. I'm interested to hear whether Claude Code writes less brittle code, or how you use it/what your experience with it is.
    - 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

dahcryn 1y 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.

maven29 1y ago
Enforcement of Copilot premium request limits moved to June 4, 2025 https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-07-enforcement-of-copilot-premium-request-limits-moved-to-june-4-2025/ https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-07-enforcement-of-copi...
pier25 1y ago
> 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.
debian3 1y ago
The default unlimited model is now gpt 4.1 https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-08-openai-gpt-4-1-is-now-generally-available-in-github-copilot-as-the-new-default-model/ https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-08-openai-gpt-4-1-is-n...

richardw 1y 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.)

zeroq 1y ago
Just today I had yet another conversation about how BigCo doesn't give a damn about cost. Just to give you one example - last BigCo I worked for had a schematic for new projects which resulted in... 2k EUR per month cloud cost for serving a single static html file. At one point someone up top decided that kubes is the way to go and scrambled an impromptu schematic for new projects which could be simply described as a continental class dreadnought of a kubernetes cluster on AWS. And it was signed off, and later followed like a scripture. Couple stories lower we're having hard time arguing for 50 EUR budget for a weekly beer for the team, but the company is A fine with paying 2K EUR for a landing page.
guappa 1y ago
C-suites love to pretend they can do and indeed do these calculations. They don't. They toss a coin.
sensanaty 1y ago
I've seen the books as to how much we spend on all the various AI shit. I can guarantee, that at least in our co, that AI is a massive waste of money. But it doesn't really matter, because the C-level has been consumed by the hype like nothing I've ever seen. It could cost an arm and a leg and they'd still be pushing for it because the bubble is all-consuming, and anyone not touting AI use doesn't get funding from other similarly clueless and sucked-in VCs.

Aurornis 1y 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 1y ago
> 8 hours a day for 20 days a week Your vibe coders are on a different dimension than mine.
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  Wow, and I thought the Beatles were exaggerating how long a week was! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kle2xHhRHg4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kle2xHhRHg4
- cornel_io 1y ago
  I've often run multiple Claude Code sessions in parallel to do different tasks. Burns money like crazy, but if you can handle wrangling them all there's much less sitting and waiting for output.
PeterStuer 1y ago
What's the problem if you aren't selling the service as a loss leader and that 'vibe coder' is paying into their account upfront? Only reason I can see is you're lacking agregate capacity and are unwilling or unable to build out faster. Is that the case?

selcuka 1y ago

> I'm not interested in paying 10x as much and still having limits. It would have to be 10x as useful I don't think this is the right way to look at it. If CoPilot helps you earn an extra $100 a month (or saves you $100 worth of time), and this one is ~2x better, it still justifies the $100 price tag.

rafaelmn 1y ago
At 10-20$ a month that calculation is trivial to make. At a 100$ I'm honestly not getting that much value out of AI, especially not every month, and especially not compared to cheaper versions.

edmundsauto 1y ago

I think this thinking is flawed. First, it presupposes a linear value/cost relationship. That is not always true - a bag that costs 100x as much is not 100x more useful. Additionally, when you’re in a compact distribution, being 5% better might be 100x more valuable to you. Basically, this assumes that the marginal value is associated with cost. I don’t think most things, economically, seem to match that pattern. I will sometimes pay 10x the cost for a good meal that has fewer calories (nutritional value) I am glad people like you exist, but I don’t think the proposition you suggest makes sense.

asaddhamani 1y ago

I don’t know why people expect unlimited usage for limited cost. Copilot hasn’t been good for a long time. They had the first mover advantage but they were too slow to improve the product. It’s still not caught up to cursor or windsurf. Cline leaves it so far in the dust it’s like a decade behind in AI years. So you get what you pay for. Claude is still the gold standard for AI assisted coding. All your Geminis and o3s of the world still don’t match up to Claude. I started using Claude code once it became a fixed price with my Claude max subscription. And it’s taken a little getting used to vs Cline, but I think it’s closer to Cline in performance rather than cursor (Cline being my personal gold standard). $100 is something most people on this forum could make back in 1 day of work. $100 per month for the value is nothing and for what it’s worth I have tried to hit the usage limit and the only thing that got me close was using their deep research feature. I’ve maxed out Claude code without hitting limits.

lelanthran 1y ago
> $100 is something most people on this forum could make back in 1 day of work. I expect so. The question is "How many days does the limit last for?" Maybe they have a per-day limit, maybe it's per-month (I'm not sure), but paying $100/m and hitting the limit in the first day is not economical.
- Loic 1y ago
  Right into the announcement, later down, they even explain how to handle the limits: How Rate Limits Work: With the Max plan, your usage limits are shared across both Claude and Claude Code: Shared rate limits: All activity in both Claude and Claude Code counts against the same usage limits. Message variations: The number of messages you can send on Claude varies based on message length, conversation length, and file attachments. Coding usage variations: Expected usage for Claude Code will vary based on project complexity, codebase size, and auto-accept settings. On the Max plan (5x Pro/$100), average users: - Send approximately 225 messages with Claude every 5 hours, OR - Send approximately 50-200 prompts with Claude Code every 5 hours On the Max plan (20x Pro/$200), average users: - Send approximately 900 messages with Claude every 5 hours, OR - Send approximately 200-800 prompts with Claude Code every 5 hours

uludag 1y ago

I always imagined that these $10/mo plans are essentially loss leaders and that in the long run, the price should be much higher. I'm not even sure if that $100/mo plan pays for its underlying costs.

wyre 1y ago
I think their free tiers are by definition of loss leaders, but I think you're right, all of there offerings are loss leaders. I know I can get more from my $20 using Claude Pro than I can using their API Workbench. It is such a competitive space that I don't think its unrealistic for these companies to ever be cash positive because all cash they have needs to be spent on competing in this space.