[HN Gopher] A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code
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       A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code
        
       Author : namukang
       Score  : 41 points
       Date   : 2025-05-08 21:12 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (support.anthropic.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (support.anthropic.com)
        
       | jbellis wrote:
       | One of my problems developing Brokk (AI coding for large
       | codebases, https://brokk.ai) is that everyone is used to Cursor-
       | style pricing of $20ish a month, but Brokk is designed around
       | long-form prompts, it's a lot closer to a leash for Claude Code
       | than it is to a Cursor or a Copilot, and the bill is a lot closer
       | to CC too. (But of course Brokk is vendor neutral; you can
       | absolutely mix o3 with GP2.5 with S3.7.)
       | 
       | So maybe Anthropic setting this precedent will solve my problem!
        
         | ghuntley wrote:
         | nah, there are low powered tools and there's high powered
         | tools. If people want $20/month happy meal toys in business
         | that business will get left behind. Ignore the consumer market,
         | make Bugatti's instead - https://ghuntley.com/redlining
         | 
         | ps - catchup for social zoom beers?
        
           | jbellis wrote:
           | you're right about the context limits
           | 
           | i pinged what i think is the right ghuntley on linkedin,
           | rizzler looks like the next feature i'm building for brokk :)
        
             | ghuntley wrote:
             | This is me - speak soon.
             | https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoffreyhuntley
        
         | owebmaster wrote:
         | > Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post
         | your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the
         | site should be for curiosity.
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        
       | ghuntley wrote:
       | the new Claude code "max plan" would last me all of [1] 5mins...
       | I don't get why people are excited about this. High powered tools
       | aren't cheap and aren't for the consumer...
       | 
       | [1] https://www.youtube.com/live/khr-cIc7zjc?si=oI9Fj33JBeDlQEYG
        
         | iLoveOncall wrote:
         | If that's the case you should stop using it, because there's no
         | way you see any ROI when you spend that much to just do some
         | coding stuff.
         | 
         | It would be cheaper to your company to literally pay your
         | salary while you do nothing.
        
           | postalrat wrote:
           | I'd love to see your math.
        
       | justanotheratom wrote:
       | I am sure this is worth every dime, but my workflow is so used to
       | Cursor now (cursor rules, model choice, tab complete, to be
       | specific), that I can't be bothered to try this out.
        
         | s17n wrote:
         | If you're using Cursor with Claude it's gonna be pretty much
         | the same thing. Personally I use Claude Code because I hate the
         | Cursor interface but if you like it I don't think you're
         | missing much.
        
           | justanotheratom wrote:
           | I don't enjoy the interface as such, rather the workflows
           | that it enables.
        
       | tkzed49 wrote:
       | The problem is that this is $100/mo with limits. At work I use
       | Cursor, which is pretty good (especially tab completion), and at
       | home I use Copilot in vscode insiders build, which is catching up
       | to Cursor IMO.
       | 
       | However, as long as Microsoft is offering copilot at (presumably
       | subsidized) $10/mo, I'm not interested in paying 10x as much and
       | still having limits. It would have to be 10x as useful, and I
       | doubt that.
        
         | tkzed49 wrote:
         | I'll add on to this: I don't really use agent modes a lot. In
         | an existing codebase, they waste a lot of my time for mixed
         | results. Maybe Claude Code is so much better at this that it
         | enables a different paradigm of AI editing--but I'd need easy,
         | cheap access to try it.
        
           | koakuma-chan wrote:
           | > but I'd need easy, cheap access to try it.
           | 
           | You can try it for cheap with the normal pay-as-you-go way.
        
           | warp wrote:
           | You don't need a max subscription to use Claude Code. By
           | default it uses your API credits, and I guess I'm not a heavy
           | AI user yet (for my hobby projects), but I haven't spent more
           | than $5/month on Claude Code the past few months.
        
             | EnPissant wrote:
             | I spent $5 in 10 minutes when I tried it.
        
             | koakuma-chan wrote:
             | The problem with it is that it uses a 30k~ token system
             | prompt (albeit "cached"), and very quickly the usage goes
             | up to a few million. I can easily spend over $10 a day.
        
       | I_am_tiberius wrote:
       | Do you still need a phone number to register with claude?
        
       | abetaha wrote:
       | I wonder how successful this pricing model ($100-$200 a month
       | with limits) is going to be. It is very hard to justify, when
       | other tooling in the ~$20/month range offers unlimited usage, and
       | comparable quality.
        
       | slrainka wrote:
       | Agent mode without rails is like a boat without a rudder.
       | 
       | What worked for me was coming up with an extremely opinionated
       | way to develop an application and then generating instructions
       | (mini milestones) by combining it with the requirements.
       | 
       | These instructions end up being very explicit in the sequence of
       | things it should do (write the tests first), how the code should
       | be written and where to place it etc. So the output ended up
       | being very similar regardless of the coding agent being used.
        
       | cye131 wrote:
       | I'm curious whether anyone's actually using Claude code
       | successfully. I tried it on release and found it negative value
       | for tasks other than spinning up generic web projects. For
       | existing codebases of even a moderate size, it burns through cash
       | to write code that is always slightly wrong and requires more
       | tuning than writing it myself.
        
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       (page generated 2025-05-08 23:00 UTC)