I was continually hitting quota on the $20/mo Claude sub. I started doing the "pay for extra tokens" thing when I did hit it, but just upgrading proved to be far more cost effective. I upgraded to the $200/mo Max subscription and have been using almost exclusively Opus and barely get to 25% quota in any session (a couple times I got over 50% but I was having it go wild in concurrent sessions). I could probably downgrade to the $100/mo one and be fine, though.

Sounds like a lot, but in the few weeks I've had it, I was able to complete two projects I had given up on due to not having time in the past. I re-jiggered some other monthly subscriptions so the net cost wasn't ultimately that much more than what I was paying previously. I also weighed it against buying something like a DGX Spark for local inference, but ultimately I don't want to mess with serving models (and the ones available just aren't as good, realistically), I just want a good one that works.

I probably can't justify much more than $200/mo, but for what I get out of it, I'm happy to pay it. I've done more in the past few weeks on side projects than I had in a couple years.