For whoever else is having the same problems, worth voting these kind of issues. There needs to be more transparency over what goes on with our subscriptions.
That’s why I switched to Codex. It’s so much more generous and in my experience, just as good. Also, optimizing your setup for working with agents can easily make a 5x difference.
I’ve moved away from Claude and toward open-source models plus a ChatGPT subscription.
That setup has worked really well for me: the subscription is generous, the API is flexible, and it fits nicely into my workflow. GPT-5.4 + Swival (https://swival.dev) are now my daily drivers.
Something similar is happening with GitHub Copilot too. It's impossible to know what a "request" is and some change in the last couple of months has seen my request usage go up for the same style of work. Toss in the bizarre and impossible to understand rate limiting that occurs with regular usage and it's pretty obvious that these companies are struggle to scale.
I had used Claude Code max as my daily driver last year and this sort of drama was par for the course. It's why I migrated entirely to Codex, despite liking Claude, the harness, more.
There's this honeymoon period with Claude you experience for a month or two followed by a trough of disillusionment, and then a rebound after a model update (rinse and repeat). It doesn't help that Anthropic is experiencing a vicious compute famine atm.
This past week was a nightmare in trying to get Claude to do any useful work. I've cancelled my subscription and everybody else here having problems should too. I don't think Anthropic cares about anything else.
so basically the anthropic employee who responded says those 1h caches were writes were almost never accessed, so a silent 5m cache change is for our best interest and saves cost. (justifying why they did this silently)
however his response gaslights us because in the OPs opening post his math demonstrates this is not true, it shows reads 26x more so at least in his case the cache is not doing what the anthropic employee describes.
clearly we are being charged for less optimization here and being given the message (from my perspective by anthropic) that if you are in a special situation your needs don't matter and we will close your thread without really listening.
It's a bit shocking to me how opaque the pricing for the subscription services by the frontier labs is. It's basically impossible for people to tell what they're actually buying, and difficult to even meaningfully report or compare experiences.
Constant complaints about Anthropic. Not much on OAI/Codex. It seems people should just use OAI and come back when they realize compute isn’t free elsewhere.
Unless the agent code is open-sourced, there is hardly any transparency in how the agent is spending your tokens and how does it calculate the tokens. It's like asking your lawyer why they charged some amount.
Some months ago, I created a software for this reason, it has no success, but the thing is that communities could reduce tokens consumption, not all is LLM, you can share things from API calls between agents. Even my idea was no success I think it is a good concept share things each others, if you have some interest it's called tokenstree.com
I spend full 20x the week quota in less than 10 hours. How is that possible? Well try to mass translate texts in 30 languages and you will hit limits extremely quick.
Anecdotal, but after playing with the API this week (building a minimal harness for an OS where Claude Code isn't supported), the API felt faster to respond. It did seem like maybe the Max subscriptions are lower priority than API requests. (I hadn't enabled priority service on the API either.)
I don't have metrics, so I could be imagining this, or finally noticing extra lag of the Claude Code client. On the other hand, the API was giving me range anxiety, I won't be pushing a 300k context window into that anytime soon, like I occasionally need to do in Claude Code.
Yeah perplexity used to be great but they've also clamped down on the 20€ plan. Only one deep research query was enough to block me until the end of the month.
The thing is, if it's going to be this expensive it's not going to be worth it for me. Then I'll rather do it myself. I'm never going to pay for a €100 subscription, that's insane. It's more than my monthly energy bill.
Maybe from a business standpoint it still makes sense because you can use it to make money, but as a consumer no way.
I'm afraid the music may be slowly fading at this party, and the lights will soon be turned on. We may very well look back on the last couple years as the golden era of subsidized GenAI compute.
For those not in the Google Gemini/Antigravity sphere, over the last month or so that community has been experiencing nothing short of contempt from Google when attempting to address an apparent bait and switch on quota expectations for their pro and ultra customers (myself included). [1]
While I continue to pay for my Google Pro subscription, probably out of some Stockholm Syndrome, beaten wife level loyalty and false hope that it is just a bug and not Google being Google and self-immolating a good product,
I have since moved to Kiro for my IDE and Codex for my CLI and am as happy as clam with this new setup.
IMO we are currently in the ENIAC era of LLMs. Perhaps there will be a brief moment where things get worse, but long term the cost of these things will go way down.
> I'm afraid the music may be slowly fading at this party, and the lights will soon be turned on. We may very well look back on the last couple years as the golden era of subsidized GenAI compute.
Indeed. Anthropic is just leading the pack switching to juicy corporate users who are happy to pay thousands per month per dev and leave the fans behind. And now OpenAI is following suit. They lowered significantly the limits for the Plus $20 plan and answered concerns with vague confusing tweets about promotions.
All this is pushed by the fastest rising demand (Codex growing +50% monthly) while having a serious bottleneck building data centers and getting parts (permits, energy, memory, flash, etc).
Users on reddit and Discord are trying to switch to open models or Chinese alternatives. But there's no real replacement.
Claude has gotten noticeably worse for me too. It goes into long exploration loops for 5+ minutes even when I point it to the exact files to inspect. Then 30 minutes later I hit session limits. Three sessions like that in a day, and suddenly 25% of the weekly limit is gone.
I ended up buying the $100 Codex plan. So far it has been much more generous with usage and more accurate than Claude for the kind of work I do.
That said, Codex has its own issues. Its personality can be a bit off-putting for my taste. I had to add extra instructions in Agents.md just to make it less snarky. I was annoyed enough that I explicitly told it not to use the word “canonical.”
On UI/UX taste, I still think current Codex is behind the Jan/Feb era of Claude Code. Claude used to have much better finesse there. But for backend logic, hard debugging, and complex problem-solving, Codex has been clearly better for me. These days I use Impeccable Skillset inside Codex to compensate for the weaker UI taste, but it still does not quite match the polish and instinct Claude Code used to have.
I used to be a huge Claude Code advocate. At this point, I cannot recommend it in good conscience.
My advice now is simple: try the $20 plans for Codex and Cursor, and see which one matches your workflow and vibes best
When they bumped the context size up to 1m tokens they made it much easier to blow through session limits quickly unless you manually compact or keep sessions short.
I also gave up on my Claude Code subscription. It's running out in 2 weeks and I have canceled it. My current MAX session got rate-limited in 2 hours of work and that's just absurd.
Codex seems to give the $20 plan for free for 1 month and that's what I signed up for.
Let's see how it compares when I can't use my Claude max sub for 3 more hours.
I’ve been wondering whether this is less a “model got worse” problem and more an constraints problem.
If the files and task boundary are already known, letting the system keep exploring/replanning inside one accumulating context seems like the wrong default. It makes the agent pay over and over to rediscover what it should already know, and every extra turn increases the chance it wanders into a different approach.
I’m processing some images(custom board game images -> JSON) with a common layout and basic structure and I exhausted my quota after just 30 images(pleb Pro account). I have 700 images to process…
What I did instead is tune the prompt for gemma 4 26b and a 3090. Worked like a charm. Sometimes you have to run the main prompt and then a refinement prompt or split the processing into cases but it’s doable.
Now I’m waiting for anyone to put up some competition against NVIDIA so I can finally be able to afford a workstation GPU for a price less than a new kidney.
184 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadFair transactions involve fair and transparent measurements of goods exchanged. I'm going to cancel my subscription this month.
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/46829
I’ve moved away from Claude and toward open-source models plus a ChatGPT subscription.
That setup has worked really well for me: the subscription is generous, the API is flexible, and it fits nicely into my workflow. GPT-5.4 + Swival (https://swival.dev) are now my daily drivers.
Now a single question consistently uses around 15% of my quota
There's this honeymoon period with Claude you experience for a month or two followed by a trough of disillusionment, and then a rebound after a model update (rinse and repeat). It doesn't help that Anthropic is experiencing a vicious compute famine atm.
however his response gaslights us because in the OPs opening post his math demonstrates this is not true, it shows reads 26x more so at least in his case the cache is not doing what the anthropic employee describes.
clearly we are being charged for less optimization here and being given the message (from my perspective by anthropic) that if you are in a special situation your needs don't matter and we will close your thread without really listening.
How is this normal?
CC accepts http endpoints so doesn’t require anything too complicated
I don't have metrics, so I could be imagining this, or finally noticing extra lag of the Claude Code client. On the other hand, the API was giving me range anxiety, I won't be pushing a 300k context window into that anytime soon, like I occasionally need to do in Claude Code.
The thing is, if it's going to be this expensive it's not going to be worth it for me. Then I'll rather do it myself. I'm never going to pay for a €100 subscription, that's insane. It's more than my monthly energy bill.
Maybe from a business standpoint it still makes sense because you can use it to make money, but as a consumer no way.
For those not in the Google Gemini/Antigravity sphere, over the last month or so that community has been experiencing nothing short of contempt from Google when attempting to address an apparent bait and switch on quota expectations for their pro and ultra customers (myself included). [1]
While I continue to pay for my Google Pro subscription, probably out of some Stockholm Syndrome, beaten wife level loyalty and false hope that it is just a bug and not Google being Google and self-immolating a good product, I have since moved to Kiro for my IDE and Codex for my CLI and am as happy as clam with this new setup.
[1] https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/24937
Indeed. Anthropic is just leading the pack switching to juicy corporate users who are happy to pay thousands per month per dev and leave the fans behind. And now OpenAI is following suit. They lowered significantly the limits for the Plus $20 plan and answered concerns with vague confusing tweets about promotions.
All this is pushed by the fastest rising demand (Codex growing +50% monthly) while having a serious bottleneck building data centers and getting parts (permits, energy, memory, flash, etc).
Users on reddit and Discord are trying to switch to open models or Chinese alternatives. But there's no real replacement.
I have only been running local models and we are finally at the point with gemma4 and Qwen3.5 where they can start doing coding work.
And the quota can't change.
I ended up buying the $100 Codex plan. So far it has been much more generous with usage and more accurate than Claude for the kind of work I do.
That said, Codex has its own issues. Its personality can be a bit off-putting for my taste. I had to add extra instructions in Agents.md just to make it less snarky. I was annoyed enough that I explicitly told it not to use the word “canonical.”
On UI/UX taste, I still think current Codex is behind the Jan/Feb era of Claude Code. Claude used to have much better finesse there. But for backend logic, hard debugging, and complex problem-solving, Codex has been clearly better for me. These days I use Impeccable Skillset inside Codex to compensate for the weaker UI taste, but it still does not quite match the polish and instinct Claude Code used to have.
I used to be a huge Claude Code advocate. At this point, I cannot recommend it in good conscience.
My advice now is simple: try the $20 plans for Codex and Cursor, and see which one matches your workflow and vibes best
Be aware Codex is currently doing a 2x usage promo. So 5x is actually 10x and 20x is actually 40x until the end of May.
Codex seems to give the $20 plan for free for 1 month and that's what I signed up for.
Let's see how it compares when I can't use my Claude max sub for 3 more hours.
If the files and task boundary are already known, letting the system keep exploring/replanning inside one accumulating context seems like the wrong default. It makes the agent pay over and over to rediscover what it should already know, and every extra turn increases the chance it wanders into a different approach.
What I did instead is tune the prompt for gemma 4 26b and a 3090. Worked like a charm. Sometimes you have to run the main prompt and then a refinement prompt or split the processing into cases but it’s doable.
Now I’m waiting for anyone to put up some competition against NVIDIA so I can finally be able to afford a workstation GPU for a price less than a new kidney.