$100 / month will get you rate limited to much to rely on with the Claude plans. People still report getting rate limited on the $200 / plan.
Also not everyone wants to use Claude Code, so if they're paying API pricing it's more likely thousands of dollars a month. If you can get the same results by spending a fraction of that, why wouldn't you?
Managing context size and efficient token usage is a skill.
I have an Anthropic API key for work, and if I use sonnet/opus all day for agent coding, it ends up costing about ~$25.
I am going to need more cpu/ram to run multiple agents in parallel to spend much more than that.
I got rate limited within an hour on the $200 while working on a single feature.
That was the breaking point, I cancelled my subscription.
As it happens I had a low coding workload over the past two weeks so I've been noodling around in PI mostly with Gemini Flash api. I like it - I even agree it's a much better harness than CC. However, the lock in is real. Even without switching models which each have their own quirks, I expect my work speed to drop drastically for at least a week or two even if I was focused on it fully. But after the learning period I think pi will be faster. The danger of course is that CC is fairly on rails while with PI you could end up spending all your time tinkering with the harness.
And people report getting limited on the $200 plan is putting it very mildly.
You can't do any serious work on it without rationing your work and kneecapping your workflows, to the point where you design workflows around anthropic usage limit woodoo rather than what actually works.
Without this, I run into WEEKLY usage limits on $200 plan, working on a single codebase, one feature at a time, on just day 3.
Thats crazy to pin your entire workflow on. Sorry boss, I can't work today I'm being rate limited by Anthropic :/