Why would you spend $200 a day on Opus if you can pay that for a month via the highest tier Claude Max subscription? Are you using the API in some special way?

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jefffoster 12 hours ago | parent [-]

At a guess an Enterprise API account. Pay per token but no limits.

It’s very easy to spend $100s per dev per day.

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simonw 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The $200/month plan doesn't have limits either - they have an overage fee you can pay now in Claude Code so once you've expended your rate limited token allowance you can keep on working and pay for the extra tokens out of an additional cash reserve you've set up.

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merlincorey 9 hours ago | parent [-]

> The $200/month plan doesn't have limits either... once you've expended your rate limited token allowance... pay for the extra tokens out of an additional cash reserve you've set up

You're absolutely right! Limited token allowance for $200/month is actually unlimited tokens when paying for extra from a cash reserve which is also unlimited, of course.

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simonw 9 hours ago | parent [-]

I think you may have misunderstood something here.

When paying for Claude Max even at $200/month there are limits - you have a limit to the number of tokens you can use per five hour period, and if you run out of that you may have to wait an hour for the reset.

You COULD instead use an API key and avoid that limit and reset, but that would end up costing you significantly more since the $200/month plan represents such a big discount on API costs.

As-of a few weeks ago there's a third option: pay for the $200/month plan but allow it to charge you extra for tokens when you reach those limits. That gives you the discount but means your work isn't interrupted.

Extra Usage for Paid Claude Plans: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/12429409-extra-usage-...

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merlincorey 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Thank you for the explanation, but I did fully understand that is what you were saying.

What I don't fully understand is how you can characterize that as "not limited" with a straight face; then again, I can't see your face so maybe you weren't straight faced as you wrote it in the first place.

Hopefully you could see my well meaning smile with the "absolutely right" opening, but apparently that's no longer common so I can understand your confusion as https://absolutelyright.lol/ indicates Opus 4.5 has had it RLHF'd away.

	▲	simonw 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		When I said "not limited" I meant "no longer limits your usage with a hard stop when you run out of tokens for a five hour period any more like it did until a few weeks ago". That's why I said "not limited" as opposed to "unlimited" - a subtle difference in word choice, I'll give you that.

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9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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falcor84 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Oh, I wasn't arguing that it isn't "easy to spend $100s per dev per day". I was just asking what the use-case for that is.