> just buy credits for each API

I’ve always considered doing that but do you come out ahead cost wise?

I've been using Claude 3.5 over API for about 4 months on $100 of credit. I use it fairly extensively, on mobile and my laptop, and I expected to run out of credit ages ago. However, I am careful to keep chats fairly short as it's long chats that eat up the credit.

So I'd say it depends. For my use case it's about even but the API provides better functionality.