> budget for $1000-1500/month for a senior engineer going all-in on AI development.

Is this another case of someone using API keys and not knowing about the claude MAX plans? It's $100 or $200 a month, if you're not pure yolo brute-force vibe coding $100 plan works.

https://www.anthropic.com/max

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vincent_builds 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Author here, quick clarification on pricing: the $1000-1500/month is for Teams/Enterprise with higher rate limits, not the consumer MAX plans. Consumer MAX ($200/month) works for lighter usage but hits limits quickly with parallel agents and large codebases.

For context: that's 1-2% of a senior engineer's fully loaded cost. The ROI is clear if it delivers even 10% productivity gain (we're seeing 2-3x on specific tasks).

You're right that many devs can start with MAX plans. The higher tier becomes necessary when running multiple parallel contexts and doing systematic exploration (the "3-attempt pattern" burns tokens fast).

I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't think it was value for money. I've always been a cost-conscious engineer who weighs cost/value, and with Claude, I am seeing the return.

	▲	imron a day ago \| parent [-]
		> The ROI is clear if it delivers even 10% productivity gain What if what feels like a productivity gain is actually a productivity loss? https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware... (see link in the article to a study showing developers thought AI gave them a 20% gain in productivity, but measuring this showed they instead had a 20% loss)

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reissbaker 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah $1k-1.5k seems absurdly high. The $200/month 20x variant of the Max plan covers an insane amount of usage, and the rate limits reset every five hours. Hard to imagine needing it so badly that you're blowing through that rate limit multiple times a day, every day... And if you are, I think switching to per-token payment would probably cost a lot more than $1k.

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rolls-reus 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The MAX plan is a consumer plan, it’s not available with Teams or Enterprise. They introduced a premium team plan ($150) with Claude code access but not sure how much usage that bundles.