> My opinion is all of these tools should completely get rid of the "pay 20/month, 200/month", etc just to get access.

I think that you should just subscribe to a preset allotment of tokens at a certain price, or a base tier with incremental usage costs for models that aren’t tiny (like paid per minute “long distance calling”).

I use an LLM tool that shows the cost associated with each message/request and most are pennies each. There’s a point where the friction of paying is a disincentive to using it. Imagine you had to pay $0.01 every time you Google searched something? Most people would never use the product because trying to pay $0.30/mo for one day a month of usage is annoying. And no one would want to prepay and fund an account if you weren’t familiar with the product. No consumer likes micro transactions

No one wants to hear this, but the answer is advertising and it will change the game of LLMs. Once you can subsidize the lowest end usage, the incentive for businesses to offer these $20 subscriptions will change, and they’d charge per-usage rates for commercial users.

> you should just subscribe to a preset allotment of tokens at a certain price

The problem is that there's no way to gauge or control token usage.

I have no idea why Claude Code wrote that it consumed X tokens now, and Y tokens later, and what to do about it