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Comment by artdigital

4 days ago

Claude Code is just way too expensive.

These days I’m using Amazon Q Pro on the CLI. Very similar experience to Claude Code minus a few batteries. But it’s capped at $20/mo and won’t set my credit card on fire.

10 comments

artdigital

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aitchnyu  4 days ago

Is it using one of these models? https://openrouter.ai/models?q=amazon

Seems 4x costlier than my Aider+Openrouter. Since I'm less about vibes or huge refactoring, my (first and only) bill is <5 usd with Gemini. These models will halve that.

  • artdigital  3 days ago

    No, Amazon Q is using Amazon Q. You can't change the model, it's calling itself "Q" and it's capped to $20 (Q Developer Pro plan). There is also a free tier available - https://aws.amazon.com/q/developer/

    It's very much a "Claude Code" in the sense that you have a "q chat" command line command that can do everything from changing files, running shell commands, reading and researching, etc. So I can say "q chat" and then tell it "read this repo and create a README" or whatever else Claude Code can do. It does everything by itself in an agentic way. (I didn't want to say like 'Aider' because the entire appeal of Claude Code is that it does everything itself, like figuring out what files to read/change)

    (It's calling itself Q but from my testing it's pretty clear that it's a variant of Claude hosted through AWS which makes sense considering how much money Amazon pumped into Anthropic)

    • dingnuts  3 days ago

      > the entire appeal of Claude Code is that it does everything itself, like figuring out what files to read/change

      how is this appealing? I think I must be getting old because the idea of letting a language model run wild and run commands on my system -- that's unsanitized input! --horrifies me! What do you mean just let it change random files??

      I'm going to have to learn a new trade, IDK

      2 replies →

monsieurbanana  4 days ago

> Upgrade apps in a fraction of the time with the Amazon Q Developer Agent for code transformation (limit 4,000 lines of submitted code per month)

4k loc per month seems terribly low? Any request I make could easily go over that. I feel like I'm completely misunderstanding (their fault though) what they actually meant.

Edit: No I don't think I'm misunderstanding, if you want to go over this they direct you to a pay-per-request plan and you are not capped at $20 anymore

  • artdigital  3 days ago

    You are confusing Amazon Q in the editor (like "transform"), and Amazon Q on the CLI. The editor thing has some stuff that costs extra after exceeding the limit, but the CLI tool (that acts similar to Claude Code) is a separate feature that doesn't have this restriction. See https://aws.amazon.com/q/developer/pricing/?p=qdev&z=subnav&..., under "Console" see "Chat". The list is pretty accurate with what's "included" and what costs extra.

    I've been running this almost daily for the past months without any issues or extra cost. Still just paying $20