Crazy value for money now with the banked resets. At my $COMPANY, we have claude enterprise at API pricing. I've blown through $10k already this month, opting for Opus 4.8 w/ Sonnet 5 agents where possible. On my codex pro plan, I am 5.6 sol'ing my way everyday with the odd ultra mode. Point being my real API usage here must be very unsustainable!
API pricing itself might have extreme margins compared to the real cost. Anyway, in my testing the Pro 20x $200 plan gives you about $2200 API-equivalent weekly usage if you're only using GPT 5.6 Sol, so quite close to $9k-$10k/month API-equivalent, it's a bit inconsistent with cache costs.
It's very interesting that for Anthropic the $100 and $200 plans only differ 2x in weekly limits, the 5 hour limit differences are more severe. But for OpenAI, Pro 20x is, well, 4x of Pro 5x for only 2x cost. So, for example, 100% of weekly usage for Codex on a Plus ($20) account is just 5% of weekly usage for Codex on Pro 20x.
And you can calculate how much extra usage you can get from resets, and especially banked resets by purposefully using the whole quota and using your banked reset - they expire 30 days after they're given out, so if you don't use one, it just disappears.
Edit:
The $200 plan is explicitly 4x the $100 plan[1] only for "per session". That's so vague. I initially pushed back against your claim, but reading now Anthropic is not at all clear, in fact.
[1] https://support.claude.com/en/articles/11049741-what-is-the-...
Empirically it is quite easy to validate that the "20x" plan is misleading and only give you twice the weekly limits of the "5x" plan, and many people on r/ClaudeAI, etc can verify that.
Anthropic is also the one often playing games with:
* The "+30% tokens" tokeniser, alongside also gating token counting behind an API (versus the MIT tiktoken for OpenAI), so who knows if it's really a new tokeniser or of it's just a disguised price increase.
* Prompt injections appended to API (not just Claude.ai or Claude Code!), such as <ethics_reminders>, or LCRs (long conversation reminders), which you never asked but still pay for with expensive API. You can detect this because your input_tokens, as reported by the Messages response, sometimes don't match, and are higher than your actual input.
(Alternatively, for testing purposes, create a tool like `telemetry_log_anthropic_reminder` or something and instruct your system prompt to require Claude to call the tool anytime it detects any Anthropic/Claude reminder masquerading in the user input -- mostly reliable; but misses some reminders).
In particular, the long conversational reminders, when incorrectly triggered by a classifier and (almost silently, unless you track tokens) appended to an API / agentic coding session, can ruin your agent's performance; and it often fires repeatedly once the classifier kicks in.
If you're using Anthropic API, you need to set up metrics/logging for how often they are appending things to your prompt without your knowledge.
So far I have not empirically observed prompt injection by the OpenAI API, only Anthropic APIs.
I just upgraded from Pro to Max 5x and I’m getting about 3.5x not 5x
How do you spend so much? Our company also has Claude enterprise pricing. I have a monthly limit of $800, I use Opus for everything, and I'm around the limit after the month. Genuinely can't imagine spending 12 times as many tokens without intentionally trying to waste money.
I am not trying to tokenmaxx, but I will work on 2-3 tickets simultaneously in seperate terminals (worktrees). Also having Claude triage and check logs etc. - plus the odd bit of project planning in Claude desktop/cowork. We also have a triage agent skill for the work I’m doing which fans out. All in all deadlines looming so it’s been a case of pump out the work and prove the product. I suppose if you’re in more a BAU state this kind of usage is overkill.
Curious, does Anthropic force companies of a certain size like yours to their Enterprise plans? Or was it by choice for the enterprise features?
Because with a Premium Team seat I run 2-3 vscodes with Opus 4.8 Max all day and never seem to hit my limits.
Yes, past 150 seats you have to switch to Enterprise (IIRC)
Yes Team is max 150 users (except maybe grandfathered accounts).
The solution is to use individual Max plans, but then you miss Enterprise management features.
> then you miss Enterprise management features
On the flip side you gain $9,800 a month.
Yeah makes sense to me
> Point being my real API usage here must be very unsustainable!
I think it’s funny that everyone anchors to the API pricing as the real cost.
Most likely is that their API costs are printing profits. They can sell the subscription plans at a slight loss because it gets more people like you hooked on GPT models at home and suggesting them at work, where the real money is made.
I think their subscription plans go mostly unused when averaged across all subscribers, too. Some customers are getting great deals by maxing out 100% every week, but most probably use much less.
The reset game is an addictive challenge that gets the hardcore users more hooked on their products because you feel pressured to use it as much as you can before the next unpredictable surprise reset lands.
Idk, Kimi K3 is not that much cheaper than Opus and it’s probably a smaller model. We’ll know for certain when commodity providers price it, but I expect it to be the same price.
It really depends on caching[1] and active parameters, and some dark arts really only possible at Hyperscalers they also have better access to 288GB VRAM B300s[2] that really makes a difference in cache space.
K3 may be bit smaller/ similar in total parameter count than Opus, but Opus (and GPT) definitely has become a lot more efficient in the last 6 months or so, hence more or less forced upgrades. I expect the active parameter count and cache performance is quite different.
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Opus is still almost twice as expensive (if tokens were equal) at $5/$15 compared to K3 at $3/$15. Tokens are not equal though, Anthropic's tokenizer is much less dense than other frontier lab's so the actual price difference is like 3x.
Kimi uses more reasoning tokens and is generally more inefficient with its usage, that doesn't impact token cost economics for the provider though . It does for us as buyers thus the need to evaluating by Cost per task rather than unit pricing.
On pure tokens/$ - there is definitely room for a price war if operators start going by pure unit costs. Both probably want(ed) to have good enough numbers in preparing for the IPO.
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[1] the pricing kind of reflect this already - 10x diff for uncached input.
[2] Moonshot does not have access latest gen GPUs so their unit economics is likely hampered a bit for high parameter models.
Commodity providers aren't a good indicator. They have margins too.
Remember they ~doubled the price going from GLM 5 to GLM 5.2, despite same [1] cost of inference.
[1] GLM 5.2 is actually slightly more efficient, thanks to baked in indexer cache.
These models are more fungible than you think, so these prices tend towards the cost to serve.
On openrouter GLM 5.2 is ~3x cheaper than 5.0.
Here it's only Microsoft (ghcp) allowed, and 39$ per month is considered ludicrous with no way to increase. Ah Europe
Sounds less a Europe thing and more a "your company" thing. Our company gives Claude Premium to everyone.
not a Europe thing
My usage sky rocketed with GPT 5.6 sol thanks to all these resets. I'm pretty sure this is not sustainable for me.
Kicking myself that I didn't use one of my 4 resets which just expired, but then again, they reset our usage anyway. We are just blasting away with 5.6-Sol-ultra, doing a project I wouldn't have otherwise done (basically drastically editing someone's novel for them and adding illustrations).
$10,000 in less than three weeks is incredible. The bean counters sure have a blind spot for AI…
That’s less than the fully loaded cost of hiring another engineer.
If someone is making the case that it’s helping the team get twice as much work done without hiring more people (which I’m neither agreeing with or disagreeing with) then the bean counters would actually prefer it. Hiring people is messy and expensive. Spending on API costs is a dial that you can turn down later if you need to, without laying anyone off and paying severance.
Well someone would actually have to make that case. So far nobody has been able to.
Did you ever hired another dev and made the case that he really 2x yourself?
> At my $COMPANY, we have claude enterprise at API pricing. I've blown through $10k already this month, opting for Opus 4.8 w/ Sonnet 5 agents where possible.
A very happy gambler of tokens at the Anthropic casino, running up costs on the house at no cost to them, but to $COMPANY paying.
Does the company actually gets any value close to your salary + benefits + ~15k$ you gonna burn this month?
Yes I honestly think if we pull it off the revenue would easily pay off. Otherwise an expensive experiment, but with fewer staff so the damage is less than it used to be and a verdict much faster.
yes but as a normal user your data and traces are being used to train AI which helps enterprise customers.
This is the Kimi and GLM effect.
Open Source is coming.
* open-weights
(sorry for nitpicking, i think it's important to emphasize - only OLMo has been the most most prominent fully open source release)
You're using Opus 4.8 and then Sonnet 5 which is both worse and more expensive in practice than Opus.
Price shock in 3...2...1...
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