Context: I'm an Founder & CTO building an AI-First CRM product.
Here's what happened:
October: Started the month thinking "I'll stay within the Pro limits, no problem." By mid-month, Cursor hit me with a $280 invoice. By month end? $348.56 total in on-demand charges. I literally maxed out the $400 limit.
November: It's only November 12 and I've already been invoiced $289.38:
Cost per request: Claude 4.5 Sonnet Thinking ranges from $0.02 to $0.06 depending on context size. Doesn't sound like much until you realize you're hitting it 200+ times per day.
I tried 7 different models (GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Cheetah, etc.) thinking I'd save money. Claude still ate 85% of my budget because, honestly, it's the best.
Am I more productive? Absolutely. Is it worth $638 every 6 weeks? Idk. That's $5,500+ annually just for code assistance.
So I'm curious:
What are YOU spending? Am I an outlier or is this the new normal?
Have you changed behavior to cut costs? (Using faster models? Being more selective? Bringing your own API keys?)
At what price point would you stop? $100/month? $500? $1000?
Is anyone actually staying within the included limits? Or is that just marketing?
I feel like we're in this weird phase where the value is obvious but the pricing model hasn't stabilized.
Would love to hear how others are navigating this.
mnky9800n•2mo ago
nthypes•2mo ago
$638/6 weeks won't make me broke, but here's my main issue: for me it's about the value-to-token ratio feeling off.
What bugs me most is that many of those 340M tokens feel wasteful? Like the LLM will use 50k tokens exploring dead ends before finding a solution that could have been expressed in 5k tokens. The productivity gain is real, but it feels like I'm paying 10x more than what should be "fair" for the actual value delivered.
Maybe this is just the current state of AI coding - the models need that exploration space to get to the answer. Or maybe I need to get better at constraining the context and being more surgical with my prompts.
For me as a founder, it's less "can I afford this" and more "does this pricing model make sense long-term?" If AI coding becomes a $5-6k/year baseline expense per developer, that changes a lot of unit economics, especially for early-stage companies.
Are you finding Claude Code Max more token-efficient for similar tasks, or is it just easier to stomach because the billing is flat?
mnky9800n•2mo ago