Doesn't per-call pricing reduce your usage? When I see the price of a session go to >$3, for a handful of interactions I self-limit my usage.

I'd love to have an all-you-can-eat, but $100 p/m isn't compelling enough compared to copy/paste for $20 p/m via chat.

That's not to say the value doesn't exceed $100, I just don't want to pay it.

> Doesn't per-call pricing reduce your usage?

Yes, and thats why phone contracts migrated from "$0.0X per minute" to "$X for up to 500 minutes", and finally "$X for unlimited calls".

When the service you provide has near zero marginal cost, you'd prefer the customer use it as much as possible, because then it'll provide more value to them and they'll be prepared to pay more.

Sort of, but in a good way, if I’ve spent $15 on a problem and it’s not solved, it reminds me to stop wasting tokens and think of a better strategy. On net it makes me use less tokens, but more for efficiency. I mostly love that I don’t need to periodically do math on a subscription to see if I’m getting a good deal this month.

Back when I used dial-up, I experienced a lot of stress when I was connected. I felt I had to be as effective as possible, because we had to pay for every minute spent.

When I switched to DSL the stress went away, and I found myself using internet in different ways than before, because I could explore freely without time pressure.

I think this applies to Claude as well. I will probably feel more free to experiment if I don't have to worry about costs. I might do things I would never think of if I'm only focused on using it as little as possible to save money.

My first use of the internet was dial-up e-mail only exchange via UUCP to a local BBS that exchanged mail every 6 hours (might have been 4), and so to be as effective as possible, I'd prepare all my e-mails including mails to the e-mail<->web gateway at CERN so I could exchange a big batch right before the time slot. Often their exchange took long enough that if I sent the messages to the CERN bot first, I'd get the response included when I downloaded the replies after they'd exchanged with their upstream. Then I had a 6 hour window to figure out what to include in the next batch...

100% with you that how you access something can add constraints and stress - in my case there while we paid per minute, the big factor was the time windows. To maximise utility you wanted to include something useful in as many of the exchanges as possible.

With Claude Code as it is now, I often clear context more often than ideal because it will drive up cost. I could probably add a lot more details to CLAUDE.md in my repos, but it'll drive up tokens as well.

Some of it I'll still do because it affects speed as well, but it'll be nice not to have to pay attention to it.

It's great that there's a choice, but for me the Max plan is likely to save me money already, and I suspect my usage would increase significantly if the top-up (I have intentionally not set it to auto-top-up) didn't regularly remind me not to go nuts.