The $100 already gives plenty of usage and is more than worth it, and I'm definitely not an affluent SV developer. I've only ever hit the 5h limit once in the last month, although I rarely run more than 3 agents at once, and I don't use ridiculously expensive tools like Gas Town.

"Opus 4.6 is available on the $20 plan too"

Anthropic’s $20 plan gives you such a pittance of tokens that it’s borderline unusable for anything more than a few scripts or a toy app. If $20 is all you have you’d do _much_ better going with chatgpt

The Codex plan for the $20 ChatGPT plan goes much further than Claude's $20 plan, but it's still not enough if you plan to work full-time with it.

My usage is in the $60 tier, but that doesn't exist so I have to cough up $100. And then get all shaky if I don't use up my weekly quota.

Do you mostly just hit the session limits? If so I know it's not ideal but you could wait an hour or two for that to reset. Not sure if that would work for you but just a suggestion

I get to 80% when on a single session and cap out a hour off the rest if I’m working on two.

But I like to have that forced hour to stop, it’s moment to take a breath.

It depends on the kind of work though, some things are more token intensive.

That's simply not true at all.

Are you kidding me? Even developer salaries in the Philippines can afford that or at least the plan below it. If I used the Anthropic API, my monthly spend would be $4k a month. The Claude Max plan is the best bargain around.

> 200 USD/month is a number only really affluent programmers (e.g. in the Silicon Valley) can perhaps pay easily.

Not true, I live in USA PNW and my last remote job paid $12k/mo. I have been jobless for over a month now (currently waiting for the next HN "who wants to be hired"), but I still have enough savings to easily afford to continue that plan for a while.

I don't think it really has to do with affluence but more the job market and economy you're in. Countries with lower salaries or higher costs of living will have less buying power.