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.

> 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)