Comment by janalsncm
5 days ago
I never strongly considered open weight models before getting throttled all the time from Claude. I bought a 1 year pro subscription but my bet is I won’t renew it.
The Claude “usage” UX is very bad. At the most basic level, there is no way to know what you’re actually paying for if you buy a “pro” plan or a “max” plan. Dario will take your $200 but he will give you a secret number of tokens in return.
I have no way of knowing what the numerator or denominator are for the usage progress bars. Plus they change them all the time. There’s no way to audit it. So if there was a malicious script siphoning usage it would be really hard to detect.
Yeah I recently downgraded my subscription. The paternalism is out of control. Secret weights, secret guardrails, secret stenography, secret dumbing-down of triggers, secret token allowances.
If you use Claude Code, there are plenty of projects/tools that let you see what your usage would have cost at API rates, then you can cross-reference that to your "usage" in Claude. I run through enough token in a few days for the subscription to pay for itself.
But I agree that advertised visibility into this would be nice, so we could compare the different providers up-front.
1) There is no way to cross reference actual usage because Anthropic won’t tell you how much they think you used.
2) It’s not a nice-to-have, it is a basic accounting question of how much of a product you are getting.
3) Even if it did work, it should be a first-party feature not a third-party add on.
You can easily figure this out though.
A 20x plan gives you between 8-10B tokens per week (99+% of which are cache_read), and has been for the past ~3 months (since I started tracking it). I have not seen any quota movement despite their claims to be raising or lowering usage limits.
I mean if you want to spend $200, and get a guaranteed amount of tokens in return you should be using the API.
I agree there should be more transparency what 20x gets you that 5x doesn't.
Though I also imagine it's a tough problem when you could be using Dispatch, Cowork, design, chat, code, etc. All of which use different contexts, models, and resources. I'd argue they actually need to either simplify their offerings, or charge more for upsells (charge for cloud-based agents, upcharge for design outcomes, etc).
If products use different amounts of tokens, that’s fine. That’s fundamental to the products. But that’s the numerator, which they aren’t telling you.
I’m also saying the denominator isn’t clear. One day it might be a million. Tomorrow 2 million. The next day 800k. Who knows.
I agree that would improve transparency but it'd also lock us and Anthropic into a situation where changing that would require new plans, prices, notifications, legal, etc. I think the fact that we don't see tokens shows just how subsidized the plan is. Which is mostly the point. They want us getting used to just using the product, not tracking tokens (for whatever behavior that builds later on).
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