You should definitely stick to the $200 plan, and not try the $10 coding plans with open weight models and higher limits. Anthropic needs your money to stay solvent, and you'll sleep better knowing you're using SOTA.

(Zero reason to defend Anthropic.)

I’ve gone that route. I really wanted to stop using Claude, but Deepseek v4 Pro and Kimi 2.6 didn’t do the job. For a lot of coding tasks or well-specced plans, maybe… but then that’s a plan made by Opus anyway.

Even Sonnet is sometimes not worth the trouble. Opus is very thorough and reviews its own mistakes quite well. Catches a lot of edge cases.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t try other things — I did! —, but it’s more or less okay that people just like Claude Code subscriptions? The back and forth I had with Kimi on a small feature came out to ~1.8€, which is 10% of my Claude subscription each month. And that was a single session. CC with Serena uses tokens fairly well.