Comment by eschluntz

5 months ago

It is API billing like AWS - you pay for what you use. Every time you exit a session we print the cost, and in the middle of a session you can do /cost to see your cost so far that session!

You can track costs in a few ways and set spend limits to avoid surprises: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/agents-and-tools/claude-c...

What I really want (as a current Pro subscriber) is a subscription tier ("Ultimate" at ~$120/month ?) that gives me priority access to the usual chat interface, but _also_ a bunch of API credits that would ensure Claude and I can code together for most of the average working month (reasonable estimate would be 4 hours a day, 15 days a month).

i.e I'd like my chat and API usage to be all included under a flat-rate subscription.

Currenty Pro doesn't give me any API credits to use with coding assistants (Claude Code included ?) which is completely disjointed. And I need to be a business to use the API still ?

Honestly, Claude is so good, just please take my money and make it easy to do the above !

  • I don’t think you need to be a business to use the API? At least I’m fairly certain I’m using it in a personal capacity. You are never going to hit $120/month even with full-time usage (no guarantees of course, but I get to like $40/month).

  • You can do this yourself. Anyone can buy API credits. I literally just did this with my personal credit card using my gmail based account earlier today.

    1. Subscribe to Claude Pro for $20 month

    2. Separately, Buy $100 worth of API credits.

    Now you have a Claude "ultimate" subscription where the credits roll over as an added bonus.

    As someone who only uses the APIs, and not the subscription services for AI, I can tell you that $100 is A LOT of usage. Quite frankly, I've never used anywhere close to $20 in a month which is why I don't subscribe. I mostly just use text though, so if you do a lot of image generation that can add up quickly

    • I don't think you can generate images with claude. just asked it for pink elephant: "I can't generate images directly, but I can create an SVG representation of a pink elephant for you." And it did it :)

Which is theoretically great, but if anyone can get an Aussie credit card to work, please let me know.

  • I haven’t had an issue with Aussie cards?

    But I still hit limits, I use Claudemind with jetbrains stuff and there is a max of input tokens (j believe), I am ‘tier 2’ but doesn’t look like I can go past this without an enterprise agreement