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Thanks for the input! I'm checking on Claude Code Max now - from what I'm seeing, even the $200/month plan has weekly rate limits (240-480 hours of Sonnet 4, 24
by nthypes 11mo ago
Thanks for the input! I'm checking on Claude Code Max now - from what I'm seeing, even the $200/month plan has weekly rate limits (240-480 hours of Sonnet 4, 24-40 hours of Opus 4 per week).. so not quite unlimited tokens either, though definitely more predictable billing.
$638/6 weeks won't make me broke, but here's my main issue: for me it's about the value-to-token ratio feeling off.
What bugs me most is that many of those 340M tokens feel wasteful? Like the LLM will use 50k tokens exploring dead ends before finding a solution that could have been expressed in 5k tokens. The productivity gain is real, but it feels like I'm paying 10x more than what should be "fair" for the actual value delivered.
Maybe this is just the current state of AI coding - the models need that exploration space to get to the answer. Or maybe I need to get better at constraining the context and being more surgical with my prompts.
For me as a founder, it's less "can I afford this" and more "does this pricing model make sense long-term?" If AI coding becomes a $5-6k/year baseline expense per developer, that changes a lot of unit economics, especially for early-stage companies.
Are you finding Claude Code Max more token-efficient for similar tasks, or is it just easier to stomach because the billing is flat?
- mnky9800n 11mo agoi think when you are testing out ideas you cannot also be thinking about how efficient that is. it doesn't make a lot of sense unless the problem you are trying to solve is efficiency. So like, I get your point, but I don't think anyone is wasting tokens, the LLM explores different solutions and arrives at ones that work. You seem to not want to pay for the tokens used on bad solutions, but they were useful to find the actual solutions. I also think that there are plenty of software licenses that we pay for in my work that are multiple times 5-6k/year and yet all our software is much cheaper than the salaries that cover our developers. Good developer tools are always worth it imo.