I can't even get through my Claude Max quota, and that's only 200/mo. And I code every day and use it for various other pretty-intensive tasks.
I can't even get through my Claude Max quota, and that's only 200/mo. And I code every day and use it for various other pretty-intensive tasks.
only $200/mo…$200 a month is a used car payment.
I guarantee you that price will double by 2027. Then it’ll be a new car payment!
I’m really not saying this to be snarky, I’m saying this to point out that we’re really already in the enshittification phase before the rapid growth phase has even ended. You’re paying $200 and acting like that’s a cheap SaaS product for an individual.
I pay less for Autocad products!
This whole product release is about maximizing your bill, not maximizing your productivity.
I don’t need agents to talk to each other. I need one agent to do the job right.
$200/month is peanuts when you are a business paying your employees $200k/year. I think LLMs make me at least 10% more effective and therefore the cost to my employer is very worth it. Lots of trades have much more expensive tools (including cars).
> I think LLMs make me at least 10% more effective
I know this was last year but...
https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
As company owner the math is simple:
If I pay $3k/month to a developer and a $200/month tool makes them 10% more productive I will pay it without thinking.
Not saying $200/mo isn't a lot, but I think you're underestimating used car payments these days. The average US used car payment is above $500 now.
I pay $200/month, don’t come near the limits (yet), and if they raised the price to $1000/month for the exact same product I’d gladly pay it this afternoon (Don’t quote me on this Anthropic!)
If you’re not able to get US$thousands out of these models right now either your expectations are too high or your usage is too low, but as a small business owner and part/most-time SWE, the pricing is a rounding error on value delivered.
As a business expense to make profit, I can understand being ok with this price point.
But as an individual with no profit motive, no way.
I use these products at work, but not as much personally because of the bill. And even if I decided I wanted to pursue a for profit side project I’d have to validate it’s viability before even considering a 200$ monthly subscription
I'm paying $100 per month even though I don't write code professionally. It is purely personal use. I've used the subscription to have Claude create a bunch of custom apps that I use in my daily life.
This did require some amount of effort on my part, to test and iterate and so on, but much less than if I needed to write all the code myself. And, because these programs are for personal use, I don't need to review all the code, I don't have security concerns and so on.
$100 every month for a service that writes me custom applications... I don't know, maybe I'm being stupid with my money, but at the moment it feels well worth the price.
You can do it for $40 month. What I'm doing:
- $20 for Claude Pro (Claude Code) - $20 for ChatGPT Plus (Codex) - Amp Free Plan (with ads and you get about $10 of daily value)
So you get to use 3 of the top coding agents for $40 month.
Some tools are not meant for individuals. That 100k software defined radio isn’t meant for you either.
We’re gonna see an economic boom any minute.
I'm curious: what concrete value have you extracted using these tools that is worth US$thousands?
"Rounding error" lol, you can hire an actual full time human in India for $1000/month.
wouldn’t hire one for $15/month…
with the US salaries for SWEs $1000/month is not a rounding error for all but definitely for some. say you make $100/hr and CC saves you say 30hrs / month? not rounding error but no brainer. if you make $200+/hr it starts to become a rounding error. I have multiple max accounts at my disposal and at this point would for sure pay $1000/month for max plan. it comes down to simple math
> I’m saying this to point out that we’re really already in the enshittification phase before the rapid growth phase has even ended. You’re paying $200 and acting like that’s a cheap SaaS product for an individual.
Traditional SaaS products don't write code for me. They also cost much less to run.
I'm having a lot of trouble seeing this as enshittification. I'm not saying it won't happen some day, but I don't think we're there. $200 per month is a lot, but it depends on what you're getting. In this case, I'm getting a service that writes code for me on demand.
I could write an essay about how almost everything you wrote either is extremely incorrect or is extremely likely to be incorrect. I am too lazy to, though, so I will just have to wait for another commenter to do the equivalent.
Why not make your AI tool do it for you?
That's one of 3 possible futures.
1. 1-3 LLM vendors are substantially higher quality than other vendors and none of those are open source. This is an oligarchy and the scenario you described will play out.
2. >3 LLM vendors are all high quality and suitable for the tasks. At least one of these is open source. This is the "commodity" scenario, and we'll end up paying roughly the cost of inference. This still might be hundreds per month, though.
3. Somewhere in between. We've got >3 vendors, but 1-3 of them are somewhat better than the others, so the leaders can charge more. But not as much more than they can in scenario #1.
If you can’t get $200 of value out of Claude Code Max, then you need to really step up your game. That’s user error.