When you buy a subscription plan, you’re buying use of the harness, not the underlying compute / tokens. Buying those on their own is way more expensive. This is probably because:

* Subscriptions are oversubscribed. They know how much an “average” Claude Code user actually consumes to perform common tasks and price accordingly. This is how almost all subscription products work.

* There is some speculation that there is cooperative optimization between the harness and backend (cache related etc).

* Subscriptions are subsidized to build market share; to some extent the harnesses are “loss leader” halo products which drive the sales of tokens, which are much more profitable.