I think in many cases the token bloat comes from using a fleet of autonomous agents that "collaborate" over a problem. Using one coherent agent loop with a human involved might not feel as futuristic but it's more effective and efficient (right now).

We have two wildly different cohorts of people. Those who see these tools as a technological curiosity and those who see them as a means to a specific end. I know that if I finish a task with a certain set of constraints that I will get paid a certain amount of money. I'd much rather be HITL on one very good agent loop if there is real money on the table. If you are mostly having fun, being curious, or exploring (which is fine!) then the cost of subscriptions might feel safer. Running an IRL version of factorio can get very expensive.

I also think the API tokens perform better but I have zero evidence other than observing the quality of my work product relative to that of my peers. I have almost a religious fervor about using prepaid tokens now. I am still using GPT5.5 in my copilot with custom model configuration for most heavy lifting in visual studio. It is more than sufficient. My average monthly token cost is <$100. Paying for a subscription would be more expensive because I have a predictable and controllable amount of demand.

This is analogous to variable vs fixed rate electricity. Paying the real time wholesale price is a massive economic advantage if you can figure out how to control the demand side of the house.

The current crop of flash models are more comparable to sonnet than opus but they are very affordable.

The reality is that the subscriptions are heavily subsidized. Pretty much every sub that's not run by one of the money-burning frontier labs has had to drop it or dramatically increase prices and lower limits in the last few months. Cheap tokens are an acquisition tool, not a real product. It sounds dramatic but it really is the drug dealer sales funnel.

At some point they're going to drop the real prices in your lab and you're going to have to figure out how to pay that much or pay someone else a lot less. Better to get a handle on it now.

> I still don't understand how people justify the cost of using API keys vs. subscription

Like a big white truck or a 600mm lens, expensive gear should be purchased by an employer. I think most folks talking about API access are getting it through work/self-employment.

Anthropic needs to retune their personal plans. Opus is the Amelia Bedelia of models. Maddening! I shelled out $100 for Fable to drive Opus and finish a personal project, but that's probably my last time loading up on usage credits. I put a second $100 towards API credits so I could dink around with API access and understand conversations like these.

For a lot of large scale day to day work, deepseek / zai models (the latter comes with a subscription) can be very cost effective and very competitive actually.

Another thing of note is that when coding at 'scale' to my surprise over time with memory aggregation across users/sessions these models can be better than the evals would have you believe because they seem to be differently/less (?) RL'ed (aka actually listen to instructions), which results in them being more fastidious about writing memories and benefiting from them, especially over time. These are of course mostly subjective opinions but they were surprising, and not what we were expecting.

Relevant: the proxy we wrote and use: https://yapp.latchlabs.dev is partially open sourced: still working on releasing more of our memories stuff.

I'm with you there. I'm on expensive plans with everyone because I run out of tokens and rotate/use the models that are best in their niche...

CLI Model Pct Remaining Reset Date claude all models 15% 3d claude Fable 50% 3d grok all models 0% 4d agy Gemini 36% 5d agy Claude and GPT models 0% 5d codex codex 0% 6d

And I also just used two of my three get-another-week-free tokens for codex.

If you've got an agentic swarm, or are working on multiple big projects at once, or have agents parsing data... you burn through tokens fast. The last four days in API would have cost me well over $3k.

They are betting on people don't max out their subscription.

Someone who pays $20 a month may only use 10% of their max budget.

The drug dealer gives you a free hit because it is profitable for him in the long term for you to be addicted to his product, not because he is your friend.

Any org with more than 150 employees needs to pay API prices for the enterprise subscription.

Check out Lattis, getlattis.ai

We (some friends and I) built it because we wanted to understand how these things worked and also had max accounts. It has since grown into a ton more, but is still in essence a very full featured local proxy.

Asked Pi what I used last 3 days.

    ┌─────────────────┬─────────┐
    │ UTC day         │ Cost    │
    ├─────────────────┼─────────┤
    │ Oct 16          │ $2.72   │
    ├─────────────────┼─────────┤
    │ Oct 17          │ $300.82 │
    ├─────────────────┼─────────┤
    │ Oct 18          │ $208.72 │
    ├─────────────────┼─────────┤
    │ Oct 19 (so far) │ $208.29 │
    └─────────────────┴─────────┘

Oct 16 I switched machine

Excludes work done on local and Claude Chrome plugin.

People using API keys heavily, are either making enough money from whatever they're doing to afford Anthropic's high prices, or are using a mix of locally hosted and cloud-based models. E.g. using a cloud model as a planner/orchestrator, with a local model as a subagent that follows the orchestrator's designs/instructions.

I am on the 25 dollar plan and I never even come close to hitting the weekly limit. Still manage to ship quite a bit. Not sure how folks hit their Claude limits. I have handle on the codebase though.

I had a subscription for a few months. I found that at the end of every week I would succumb to the sunk cost fallacy and try to squeeze all the usage out of my subscription. I'd rather pay a little extra in LLM cost to not have that issue.

I think businesses are footing the majority of that bill right now due to regulatory requirements, but for individuals that price increase is def coming. Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but enjoy it while it lasts :')

You might not have a choice. For example, if you want to get a guarantee from Anthropic that they don't train bases on your prompts, you will need an enterprise deal, which is pay-by-token.

There are tools like Paseo that call the existing CLIs meaning you can keep using the subsidized subscriptions while still having access to the json stream.