Comment by viraptor
13 days ago
Do people actually get value out of the monthly plans? I've been using API access to both Claude and OAI and end up paying less, while I keep hearing about people being rate limited with lower usage. Am I missing something here? The only one that made sense to me was Cursor, but that comes with extra features and model switching.
Claude Code is only useable from a subscription.
Other than that, API + custom UI seems better since you're paying for the usage instead of competing with other flat-fee users for what seem to be overprovisioned resources (claude.ai was always throwing https 500 or 'sorry we're too busy' errors for me until I switched to API).
Not sure if it's cheaper though - I never checked.
It's insane how bad the first party chat apps are though. That's reason enough to use the API.
This was once true, I think, but it is no longer true. If you set an API key in your environment, Claude Code will work.
This did not when I tried it a few days ago but I also noticed it lets you use your API key after logging in through the web interface. I'll need to try again, really annoying that you can't just set $ANTHROPIC_API_KEY and have it work
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> Claude Code is only useable from a subscription.
incorrect, you can pay per API call instead if you want.
TFA says:
> Pro and Max plan subscribers have access to use Claude Code directly in the terminal.
Claude Code can spend from your API balance, but you still need a subscription to authenticate with the @anthropic-ai/claude-code tool.
Or has that changed and it's not being communicated well here?
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I use APIs for coding with Aider (gemini 2.5 pro is my preferred model), but still subscribe to ChatGPT plus because being able to use better models like O3 and 4.1 in chat, plus unlimited image generation, Realtime voice/video, Deep Research and Codex (as a backup agent while I'm manually driving Aider) ends up being worth the price.