Leadership at this crop of tech companies is more like followership. Whether it's 'no politics', or sudden layoffs, or 'founder mode', or 'work from home'... one CEO has an idea and three dozen other CEOs unthinkingly adopt it.
Several comments in this thread have used Anthropic's lower pricing as a criticism, but it's probably moot: a month from now Anthropic will release its own $200 model.
This is just pricing the same model to higher limits at a volume discount (which makes the pricing per usage lower, not higher). To actually "release a $200 model" they'd have to make something expensive to run like a ChatGPT 4.5 and then have the only plan which can use it worth a damn be that price. Given how bad 4.5 flopped in terms of performance I doubt many will go that route though, it'd have to be different kinds of services not in the current plan instead.
o1-pro (and high limit Deep Research) is technically the $200/mon offering. 4.5 is kind of a dud IMO, even in creative uses. That said gemini-2.5-pro is nearly as good if not better than o1-pro and now that Gemini has a Deep Research equivalent I'm finding it hard to justify the $200/mon sub.
My current dream is a model that's good at coding with a ~10m token content window. I understand Llama 4 has a window approximately that size, but I'm hearing mixed results on its coding capacity.
If it had deep research and this, with a large number of API requests, I'd consider $200/month.
Has anyone found the output at these large context windows usable at all?
IME the quality of all models goes down considerably after just a few thousand tokens. The chances of hallucinating, mixing up prompts, forgetting previous prompts, etc., are much more likely as context size increases. I couldn't imagine a context of 1M tokens, let alone 10M, being usable at all. Not to mention that any query is going to come to a crawl just to move that amount of data around (which still annoyingly happens on every query...).
So usually at around 10K tokens I ask it to summarize what was discussed, or I manually trim down the current state, and start a new fresh chat from there. I've found this to work much better than wasting my time fighting bad output. This is also cheaper if you're on a metered plan (OpenRouter, etc.).
I just subscribed to the free trial yesterday, and I've been hooked tbh. I haven't subscribed to any of the other LLM companies so far. I hope something else comes out within a month because I really don't want to spend 22 Euro per month for it.
I mean I've tried it with Gemini 2.5 Pro + Roo and then tried Claude 3.7 + Roo on the same task and Gemini blew Claude away. Haven't spent anymore OpenRouter credits, because Gemini was so much better.
Yeah AI Studio is free with decent rate limits, though obviously more developer focused: https://aistudio.google.com/
The official Gemini app works well for me too and there's a nice free tier and it's free if you have a newer Pixel phone. Otherwise $20/month for the Advanced tier. There's no $200/month option.
There's also Google's https://idx.dev - which is a webide/vscode dealio and you can use gemini in agentic mode (mix of 2.0/2.5 but if you use your own gemini key you can guarantee 2.5 Pro i think)
edit, well it now appears to be https://firebase.studio/ - that is a recent change I haven't used it since it changed its name..
I mostly use LLMs on PC, as I use LLMs mainly for coding.
Does AI Studio allow you to have projects with project files and whatnot?
How about its context window length, more or less than Claude's?
I am also interested in open-source alternatives to the web interface that claude.ai has, I know there are some but I have forgotten their names, would be cool to have a list here.
The best open source UI I know of is https://openwebui.com/ - you can point it at any OpenAI API compatible endpoint and both Gemini and Anthropic offer those now.
You can use the Gemini API for free with quite generous allowances, including for 2.5 Pro.
AI studio is only developer focused if you’re not working on AI, which is a prohibited use case according to the Gemini API / AI Studio “Additional Terms”
I have been a heavy user of Claude but cancelled my Pro subscription yesterday. The usage limits have been quietly tightened up like crazy recently and 3.7 is certainly feeling dumber lately.
But the main reason I quit is the constant downtime. Their status page[0] is like a Christmas tree but even that only tells half the story - the number of times I have input a query only to have Claude sit, think for a while then stop and return nothing as if I had never submitted at all is getting ridiculous. I refuse to pay for this kind of reliability.
Also cancelled Claude Pro due to a combination of unreasonable amounts of downtime and Gemini 2.5 just doing a better job for me.
I'd estimate there's probably like another 6 months to a year where I'll jump around to whatever 'cloud' LLM is currently winning on quality of the model (in terms of usefulness as a coding assistant) and just basic UI/availability and then I'll build a locally hosted system and just use that.
I certainly don't have anything like brand loyalty to any of them, so I'm down for a race to the bottom.
At 99.38+ uptime - seems like the reds in the xmas tree are OR'd into the bars rather averaged in, making them look worse than they actually are, which is refreshingly honest to see in an uptime monitor.
I cancelled my OpenAI plan. Gemini 2.5 Pro is extremely good compared to OpenAI and Anthropic models. Unless things change, I don't see why I need to pay those subscription fees?
A ten pound bag of russet potatoes costs $2-3 here (high CoL SoCal), and that's >3,000 kcal. A four pound bag of pinto beans is $4, that's >5,000 kcal. That's four days of 2,000 kcal per day for $7. Likewise 32,000 kCal of rice at Costco is $24 so it gets even cheaper when you buy those 20-40 pound bags. That goes for quinoa, lentils, and all kinds of other staples. Base caloric requirements are really cheap to cover with the basics, and should cost $50-60/mo. The rest can be spent on fresh meat, veggies, and fruit.
Under $200/mo is relatively easy to achieve as long as you know how to cook or can tolerate a repetitive diet. Stretching it to $250-300/mo takes it up a notch and makes it a very balanced and varied diet with whatever fruit and vegetables you want. I only run it up to $300/mo when I buy higher quality meats at Costco and eat an avocado a day.
Definitely highly location dependent. In Hungary we spend ~3 times that for 2 people. And I definitely don't buy the cheapest. So to me, $200 looks realistic.
They upgraded Gemini Deep Research to use the 2.5 model a few days ago and the stylist shot up - I've seen a bunch of people comparing the new version favorably to OpenAI's, I agree that it's as good and maybe even better now.
I really like Claude and have the money to spend on something like this if I wanted to but it's not compelling at all.
No new models, no new capabilities, just higher limits. Which I know some people are asking/begging for but that's not been an issue for me. If I needed more I'd probably use the API.
I only continue to pay because some of the features in Claude Web are better than what I've seen elsewhere but their latest web redesign is making me seriously reconsider that stance. It's /bad/, breaks scrolling while it's generating a response, break copy/paste/selection, etc. It's incredibly hostile and I have to assume anyone seriously using Claude internally is using a different client.
The API gets overloaded and you get blocked out as well; yesterday I had to go look up a bunch of bash runes on stackoverflow because Claude's API was busy in the one day a year* I happened to be writing bash scripts. (Maybe I should have tried out Gemini for a change.)
Part of the promise here isn't just usage, but priority: you pay your $200/mo, and (I presume) you never have to worry about being locked out.
I use the free model and API, when I look at the pricing page I see (for the extant $20 Pro plan)
- More usage
- Access to Projects to organize chats and documents
- Ability to use more Claude models
- Extended thinking for complex work
What does "more usage" mean? It doesn't say anywhere what the free tier usage limits are. What are "more" models? It also doesn't make clear what models are available with each tier (except for "extended thinking" which is a separate bullet point)
The only thing I can reason is that they want to keep this vague so that they don't have to update their marketing copy each time they update their offerings, but that's absurd.
I mean how CF has advertises "unlimited bandwidth" and "unmetered DDOS protection" on their free and flat-rate paid plans, which abruptly turns into not-unlimited pay-per-gigabyte if they decide you're using them too much, but you're not allowed to know where that line is so you can plan around it. It's a fun surprise where they suddenly ask you to pay 10x more out of nowhere.
Can you point to a single example of CF doing this to a legitimate entity that wasn't obviously abusing their plan? Every time this comes up it's always some shady website that's getting the limited treatment.
And it's not "unlimited bandwidth", it's "unlimited bandwidth with restrictions". That's an important and critical distinction. I'm not sure I understand the position that somehow CF needs to subsidize every customer.
Nobody said CF needs to subsidize every customer. The rules need to be clear though, not secret. Same with anthropic's usage limits, since they're not public they can degrade the service you're paying for at any point in time with no notice.
I'd much rather have "unlimited" bandwidth with restrictions and the current ambiguous enforcement than clearly defined limits and strict enforcement which penalizes all customers. The current model benefits considerably more people than the alternative.
5x what though? Even if we assume this is the true figure, everyone who uses Claude regularly knows that usage limits fluctuate over the course of days and weeks.
In the near future, everyone will have an intelligence meter in their hall and pay IQCoin to the National Intelligence Utility based on how much intelligence they use each month.
"more" usage likely means that they have a limited number of GPUs, and what models you get access to depends on how much you've used them recently, but also on how busy the GPUs are at this moment.
This is also how batching works for API users. If you don't need the results immediately, you can give them a batch with an attached 24-hour deadline, and they'll slot you in whenever they expect low usage, in exchange for better prices.
On the other hand, the free options are better than ever. I've only used the free versions of ChatGPT, Claude, and ImageFX and have been impressed by how much you get without spending a dime. The only real limitation I regularly feel is not being able to upload something like a 1GB CSV file for analysis, but I guess that's a fair restriction for a free web tool.
I am impressed by the free version of ChatGPT, not so much with Claude's (claude.ai). I love Claude Pro, more so than the paid version of GPT, but damn, the free version of Claude is awful, you reach the limit extremely quickly. The free version of ChatGPT works quite well.
A bit off-topic, but I wonder when Cursor is going to see a massive price increase. I've tried Aider (granted, this was when GPT4 prices were still much higher) and spent $10 in one hour easily. Now I use cursor a LOT (100h focussed programming time per month) and mostly stay within my $20 monthly fee. I think they must be losing money on customers like me.
Are they an LLM wrapper or do they have own models? I feel Sonnet 3.7 should cost $30 per month for regular coding, and Refact.ai pricing (10$, 20$, 30$ - most popular, 40$, 50$ and above for higher prepaid limits) reflects that.
it is already super expensive if you want to get an actual work done using their max model. On a midsize project, it cost ca. €200 for my vibe coding tests to get something reasonable done (each call, each tool costs 0.05c). Their normal claude window is super short, and almost unusable for serious work. Stack was python and Nuxt.
Have you tried Roo Code or Cline instead? I never felt the need to use Cursor after trying them and they're just extensions, so it's easy to install and use your own API key.
I currently pay for Claude and I still find it best for coding but it's definitely bit unreliable at times and I find it rate limited or responses limited and also unresponsive at times. I wouldn't be upgrading to a $100/$200 packages unless the reliability improved on the $20 offering first
As per https://www.anthropic.com/pricing, the reliability of the $20 offering will be further deteriating to prioritise $100+ package traffic "Priority access during high traffic periods"
I had not had almost any issues with reliability until recently and suddenly I'm getting transient UI and server issues on a daily basis. Not happy with it.
Even worse is I bought a yearly subscription from a deal they offered. However, now that reliability will be going down, I'm feeling a bit scammed!
My experience with Claude 3.7 with thinking has been incredible for coding tasks. I did not find the same level of success with Gemini even though the context window is nice.
Before they rolled this out, I rarely hit usage limits. Now it seems the usage limits have been lowered for Pro to add more value to Max. That is a less than ideal experience for users.
I agree with what most comments here are saying, that there should be more than just usage limits and I hope this changes (as it likely will because the state of competition is still high)
Aside from the more ambiguous access to newer features first, is there any benefit to this over just leveraging the API?
Going via the API with your own interface seems like it's objectively the better way to handle things like this at high usage, since you'll always have priority, wont have usage limits, and you'll pay as you go.
That explains why ~24h ago I reached my first rate limit on Claude (3.7 seems to misunderstand stuff a lot and you have to retry constantly which makes you hit those limits faster). I loved 3.5, possibly my favourite model. Might need to shop around soon for something better.
I’m surprised they didn’t just price it as $200/month but include high daily use of Claude Code. That tech is very cool and some sort of upper limit / bulk discount on costs would be quite compelling.
Bold to launch this before the roll out their own reasoning models / deep research. Seems like table stakes if you want to capture power users but maybe that's just my workflow.
Anthropic have recently said that they don't like the "reasoning" label and don't intend to have separate base and reasoning models, but rather one model that does it all. The current Claude 3.7 already seems to be doing some reasoning, displaying "pondering" and "analyzing" messages between different stages of output generation.
Regardless of naming, they don't have a model competitive with o1 Pro for coding (or with Gemini 2.5, for that matter). As someone who pays $200/month for GPT Pro I definitely wouldn't pay the same for Claude (and am considering cancelling GPT Pro if they don't deliver something better than Gemini 2.5 soon).
Gemini 2.5 is awesome, but when it screws the pooch, it really screws the pooch (e.g., https://gemini.google.com/share/374ac006497d ). It has delivered some of the best responses I've seen lately but also some of the worst.
I have been tempted several times to kill my GPT Pro account, but it is still valuable for cases where Gemini and Claude don't get the job done for whatever reason.
For Golang and Haskell I found o1 Pro and Gemini 2.5 are much better at generating code that works first try than Claude. Gemini 2.5 in particular can generate thousands and thousands of lines of code that correctly use types and functions that were generated earlier in the context, with minimal errors.
I've been using Gemini pro 2.5 over Claude 3.5 in cursor all week - some people have Gemini do a prd and tasks and Claude do the actual coding. I switch between them but have been pretty impressed with Gemini.
Gemini sometimes fucks up diffs or doesn't actually apply the edits - Claude is rock solid at that. They're both very good though - but 3.7 really likes refactoring unneeded shit and removing code sometimes.
Their reasoning is called "extending thinking". It was released alongside Claude Sonnet 3.7.
They have web search, but it's true, no "deep research". It honestly is not very good and it's WAY too trigger-happy with it. As a result, if you accidentally leave it on, you get terrible answers to simple questions that non-search mode would have answered well.
(And for context Claude Sonnet 3.7 is my model of choice)
You can just go on AWS bedrock and use the thinking claude 3.7. You can tune the output size. I doubt you would spend 200 bucks a month in AWS on bedrock even with daily use of claude.
Yeah if you're doing a big coding session up near the limits of context even with prompt caching each reply can be ~80¢ or something, so you can definitely blow through $200 on the API if you are using it heavily.
I already had to go through so many hoops to sign up for a teams account for 5 separate accounts for myself, I wonder if this will be any better or not. At least if one account starts getting dumb or somehow runs out of context, I can just switch, but if something goes wrong and your $200 account exponentially loses context, then you are stuck waiting. Anyone have any idea of the actual differences?
Everyday it is looking better and better to self host. I really don’t feel like ChatGPT $200/mo is 10x better than $20/mo and after trying QwQ 32B myself I just can’t justify paying these AI subscriptions. Gemini Flash is also dirt cheap as an api and Groq is dirt cheap and fast for QwQ and other OSS models.
How does this compare to o1 pro for coding? I can't figure out what exactly the max plan offers besides usage limits. Claude also has some interesting novel features but i can't try them out as a European. That's one thing OpenAI does better.
If they had something better than OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode and it came with unlimited access I'd consider it. If Advanced Voice Mode was just 15% better than it is now, I'd find $200 a month to give to OpenAI for unlimited access.
I love Advanced Voice Mode except it's so unreliable in my experience. I can't have more than a 5 minutes of conversation without it getting stuck and me having to restart it.
I believe it's partly due to it doing Whisper processing remotely (correct me if I'm wrong), which introduces lag and slows things down.
Gemini does voice processing locally through text-to-speech and voice conversations with Gemini are soo much smoother.
The downside is Gemini does much more poorly than ChatGPT at uncommon words and when I code switch between languages. ChatGPT is just excellent at understanding uncommon words and in different languages.
Advanced voice mode does not do text to speech, one of 4o’s modes is speech, it’s multi-modal. This is how it can understand the emotional content of your speech.
Find a way to send them that feedback. I've been doing that more lately and I'm noticing features/bugs I request/report get added pretty quickly. Obviously YMMV but from my experience it seems like they listen to feedback like this.
A little off topic, but how does o1 and o1-pro compare to 3.7/3.5 claude for coding and system design/architecture? I currently have the $20 chatgpt plus and claude pro plans but want to upgrade for a month to do some heavy coding. Thanks!
I've actually done a lot of comparisons in this regard. 3.7 with the thinking tokens maxed out is about equal to o1-pro, occasionally o1-pro will be more elegant (in coding) but it's not a huge difference, for tasks like long context understanding with text summarization/aggregation I actually slightly prefer 3.7. That said, gemini-2.5-pro is waaay better than 3.7 at code and long context so its safe to assume it's better than o1-pro.
If you want to do heavy coding right now go with Gemini.
Seems inferior to OpenAIs offering given is same price and capabilities, but OpenAI always have better models first other than code. But code is only useful when using Antvripic API.
Their comparison is not clear at all what you’re getting out of a rather large subscription price, IMO.
> Substantially more usage to work with Claude
Compared to pro or free what does this mean? More requests / time? More tokens / time? Something else?
> Scale usage based on specific needs
Are there limits with pro that this is removing or increasing? What kinds of specific needs?
> Higher output limits for better and richer responses and Artifacts
So Claude will do more thinking before responding compared to pro? Is that due to a new variant of 3.7 model?
> Be among the first to try the most advanced Claude capabilities
Okay so you’ll get access before people who pay less but not before well known tech people who get early access for testing, I’m assuming?
> Priority access during high traffic periods
If you’re paying for pro and they throttle you wtf are you paying them for? This seems like an admission they suck at capacity planning based on their current and predicted user base?
At last. I honestly think the product engineering org at Anthropic has serious issues. They are slow to ship, and quality of the webapp has been decidedly mixed in the past 6 months. Some of the UX decisions they've made are bone-headed.
I actually like Claude over ChatGPT specifically because of how their web UI distinguishes.
Its clear that neither company prioritizes their flagship chat UI, over their other offerings. So if it will be in stasis, I definitely like it
There are other web AI offerings now (deepseek web, perplexity, to name a few). This is what I like between these two:
The speed of responses.
The reliability. ChatGPT web UI often times out or has server errors for random things.
Different censorship. Overall better for my use cases, and how errors are handled.
Initially search of old chats was a first class citizen in Claude. ChatGPT didnt have it, needed third party plugins, it has since updated, but is still lackluster in this regard.
The diagrams, charting and coding interface is great and better. Easier for seeing how something compiles and runs, easier to copy and paste.
Having used Claude daily for last year or so, I don't feel great about being pushed into quite expensive tiers of 5-20x cost. I already feel like I'm hitting the Pro limit 2x/day more often than recently, although no data to support this - but the feeling is there.
Mostly I'm disappointed that the higher tiers are just usage tiers rather than features.
They are a bit of ripoff, especially cli thing. It will hallucinate tons of things, add things that break code and then you pay again (quite a lot) to fix it.
I have a bridge to sell to all those who are paying these companies $100 / $200 a month. Obviously they aren't hackers, I get that, but even normies should have a better sixth sense?
lol no. Claude Pro gave me like, 20-40 questions every 12 hours before it would throttle, and half of those were mistakes we already corrected that it was trying to re-integrate. Plus Claude is always trying to censor itself. I got suckered in by the "claude is better at code" shit, but wow was that BS.
Compared to ChatGPT, where 20 bucks gets you hundreds of prompts, and if you ask it hard questions it actually answers instead of lecturing about morals, and why you shouldn't be asking these questions in the first place.
Other than using Free Claude to generate resumes to apply to job postings at anthrowhatever, it is by far and away the most useless of the LLMs.
Turned out to be four months, not one
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42333969This is just pricing the same model to higher limits at a volume discount (which makes the pricing per usage lower, not higher). To actually "release a $200 model" they'd have to make something expensive to run like a ChatGPT 4.5 and then have the only plan which can use it worth a damn be that price. Given how bad 4.5 flopped in terms of performance I doubt many will go that route though, it'd have to be different kinds of services not in the current plan instead.
o1-pro (and high limit Deep Research) is technically the $200/mon offering. 4.5 is kind of a dud IMO, even in creative uses. That said gemini-2.5-pro is nearly as good if not better than o1-pro and now that Gemini has a Deep Research equivalent I'm finding it hard to justify the $200/mon sub.
I want different capabilities at $200.
I paid for that to get access to Deep Research from OpenAI and I feel I got more than $200 of value back out.
These companies have a hard time communicating value. Capabilities make that easier for me to understand. Rate-limiting and outages don't.
My current dream is a model that's good at coding with a ~10m token content window. I understand Llama 4 has a window approximately that size, but I'm hearing mixed results on its coding capacity.
If it had deep research and this, with a large number of API requests, I'd consider $200/month.
Has anyone found the output at these large context windows usable at all?
IME the quality of all models goes down considerably after just a few thousand tokens. The chances of hallucinating, mixing up prompts, forgetting previous prompts, etc., are much more likely as context size increases. I couldn't imagine a context of 1M tokens, let alone 10M, being usable at all. Not to mention that any query is going to come to a crawl just to move that amount of data around (which still annoyingly happens on every query...).
So usually at around 10K tokens I ask it to summarize what was discussed, or I manually trim down the current state, and start a new fresh chat from there. I've found this to work much better than wasting my time fighting bad output. This is also cheaper if you're on a metered plan (OpenRouter, etc.).
The results are not mixed, Llama 4 is terrible at coding. I agree on longer context window being the dream.
I mean you get a 2 Million token context window and by far my favorite coding model with Gemini 2.5 Pro.
I just subscribed to the free trial yesterday, and I've been hooked tbh. I haven't subscribed to any of the other LLM companies so far. I hope something else comes out within a month because I really don't want to spend 22 Euro per month for it.
The 1M context window (2M?) really sets it apart.
I believe you can still use Gemini 2.5 Pro for free via https://aistudio.google.com and their gemini-2.5-pro-exp-03-25 model ID through their API.
The free tier is "used to improve our products", the paid tier is not.
22 euro per month is less than 1 per day. Less than one espresso.
I get the subscription fatigue, but there are splurges and there are truly valuable things.
Has someone tried the 2m context window for a code base and can report how it compares over claude or o1?
Made a video comparing Gemini 2.5 Pro to Claude Sonnet 3.7 recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVdVJ_hD_vo
I mean I've tried it with Gemini 2.5 Pro + Roo and then tried Claude 3.7 + Roo on the same task and Gemini blew Claude away. Haven't spent anymore OpenRouter credits, because Gemini was so much better.
Does Gemini have a web interface similar to claude.ai? I am lazy[1], but I am also poor. I would not be able to afford 100 USD per month.
[1] But if it is cheap enough, has large context window, then I might consider setting up something akin to claude.ai with Gemini's API.
Yeah AI Studio is free with decent rate limits, though obviously more developer focused: https://aistudio.google.com/
The official Gemini app works well for me too and there's a nice free tier and it's free if you have a newer Pixel phone. Otherwise $20/month for the Advanced tier. There's no $200/month option.
https://gemini.google.com/app
There's also Google's https://idx.dev - which is a webide/vscode dealio and you can use gemini in agentic mode (mix of 2.0/2.5 but if you use your own gemini key you can guarantee 2.5 Pro i think)
edit, well it now appears to be https://firebase.studio/ - that is a recent change I haven't used it since it changed its name..
I mostly use LLMs on PC, as I use LLMs mainly for coding.
Does AI Studio allow you to have projects with project files and whatnot?
How about its context window length, more or less than Claude's?
I am also interested in open-source alternatives to the web interface that claude.ai has, I know there are some but I have forgotten their names, would be cool to have a list here.
The best open source UI I know of is https://openwebui.com/ - you can point it at any OpenAI API compatible endpoint and both Gemini and Anthropic offer those now.
You can use the Gemini API for free with quite generous allowances, including for 2.5 Pro.
Thanks Simon, will take a look.
Extremely off-topic: are you still around DS?
DS?
DarkScience's IRC server.
Wow that takes me back! I've not been active on IRC in about a decade I'm afraid.
So we have talked a decade ago?! Damn! I remember you from DS. :D
AI studio is only developer focused if you’re not working on AI, which is a prohibited use case according to the Gemini API / AI Studio “Additional Terms”
I waited until Deep Research came to the normal paid plans, but it's been very useful the times I have thought to use it.
I have been a heavy user of Claude but cancelled my Pro subscription yesterday. The usage limits have been quietly tightened up like crazy recently and 3.7 is certainly feeling dumber lately.
But the main reason I quit is the constant downtime. Their status page[0] is like a Christmas tree but even that only tells half the story - the number of times I have input a query only to have Claude sit, think for a while then stop and return nothing as if I had never submitted at all is getting ridiculous. I refuse to pay for this kind of reliability.
[0] https://status.anthropic.com/
Also cancelled Claude Pro due to a combination of unreasonable amounts of downtime and Gemini 2.5 just doing a better job for me.
I'd estimate there's probably like another 6 months to a year where I'll jump around to whatever 'cloud' LLM is currently winning on quality of the model (in terms of usefulness as a coding assistant) and just basic UI/availability and then I'll build a locally hosted system and just use that.
I certainly don't have anything like brand loyalty to any of them, so I'm down for a race to the bottom.
Can confirm. As an API user, "overloaded" errors have been happening pretty often lately.
At 99.38+ uptime - seems like the reds in the xmas tree are OR'd into the bars rather averaged in, making them look worse than they actually are, which is refreshingly honest to see in an uptime monitor.
I cancelled my OpenAI plan. Gemini 2.5 Pro is extremely good compared to OpenAI and Anthropic models. Unless things change, I don't see why I need to pay those subscription fees?
Yeah, I'm not really sure what the long play is here. $200 is what I spend on groceries for an entire month.
I'm impressed.
A pound of chicken breast, a pound of apples, a third loaf of bread cost at least $7. And that's only 1500 kcal.
A ten pound bag of russet potatoes costs $2-3 here (high CoL SoCal), and that's >3,000 kcal. A four pound bag of pinto beans is $4, that's >5,000 kcal. That's four days of 2,000 kcal per day for $7. Likewise 32,000 kCal of rice at Costco is $24 so it gets even cheaper when you buy those 20-40 pound bags. That goes for quinoa, lentils, and all kinds of other staples. Base caloric requirements are really cheap to cover with the basics, and should cost $50-60/mo. The rest can be spent on fresh meat, veggies, and fruit.
Under $200/mo is relatively easy to achieve as long as you know how to cook or can tolerate a repetitive diet. Stretching it to $250-300/mo takes it up a notch and makes it a very balanced and varied diet with whatever fruit and vegetables you want. I only run it up to $300/mo when I buy higher quality meats at Costco and eat an avocado a day.
Lol I'm not saying it's impossible.
Yes, beans/potatoes/rice can get you a long ways.
Definitely highly location dependent. In Hungary we spend ~3 times that for 2 people. And I definitely don't buy the cheapest. So to me, $200 looks realistic.
COL isn't the same everywhere. That $8 of chicken in downtown San Francisco whole foods that closed is $4 elsewhere and those differences add up.
I was assuming $3.50/lb.
Probably spends another $600 on takeout.
and $1,000 on APIs :D
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Interesting, I’ve been using o1-pro and Gemini 2.5 Pro with identical profiles and prompts and o1-pro has won every single time without exception.
Where win means the problem I set out to solve was solved and passed tests. Where both are aware of the tests.
How is Gemini 2.5 Pro v Deep Research? I've found that function on OpenAI quite impressive.
They upgraded Gemini Deep Research to use the 2.5 model a few days ago and the stylist shot up - I've seen a bunch of people comparing the new version favorably to OpenAI's, I agree that it's as good and maybe even better now.
I really like Claude and have the money to spend on something like this if I wanted to but it's not compelling at all.
No new models, no new capabilities, just higher limits. Which I know some people are asking/begging for but that's not been an issue for me. If I needed more I'd probably use the API.
I only continue to pay because some of the features in Claude Web are better than what I've seen elsewhere but their latest web redesign is making me seriously reconsider that stance. It's /bad/, breaks scrolling while it's generating a response, break copy/paste/selection, etc. It's incredibly hostile and I have to assume anyone seriously using Claude internally is using a different client.
> If I needed more I'd probably use the API.
The API gets overloaded and you get blocked out as well; yesterday I had to go look up a bunch of bash runes on stackoverflow because Claude's API was busy in the one day a year* I happened to be writing bash scripts. (Maybe I should have tried out Gemini for a change.)
Part of the promise here isn't just usage, but priority: you pay your $200/mo, and (I presume) you never have to worry about being locked out.
* This is an exaggeration but not much of one
you can use sonnet3.7 on aws or gcloud and you shouldn't hit any reasonable limits
I use the free model and API, when I look at the pricing page I see (for the extant $20 Pro plan)
What does "more usage" mean? It doesn't say anywhere what the free tier usage limits are. What are "more" models? It also doesn't make clear what models are available with each tier (except for "extended thinking" which is a separate bullet point)The only thing I can reason is that they want to keep this vague so that they don't have to update their marketing copy each time they update their offerings, but that's absurd.
> It doesn't say anywhere what the free tier usage limits are.
Ah, I see they've been to the Cloudflare school of free tier bait-and-switching.
can you elaborate you mean CF workers or the pro plans?
I mean how CF has advertises "unlimited bandwidth" and "unmetered DDOS protection" on their free and flat-rate paid plans, which abruptly turns into not-unlimited pay-per-gigabyte if they decide you're using them too much, but you're not allowed to know where that line is so you can plan around it. It's a fun surprise where they suddenly ask you to pay 10x more out of nowhere.
Just a tiny nit, 10x more of 0 is still 0. Your point still makes sense though
Can you point to a single example of CF doing this to a legitimate entity that wasn't obviously abusing their plan? Every time this comes up it's always some shady website that's getting the limited treatment.
And it's not "unlimited bandwidth", it's "unlimited bandwidth with restrictions". That's an important and critical distinction. I'm not sure I understand the position that somehow CF needs to subsidize every customer.
Nobody said CF needs to subsidize every customer. The rules need to be clear though, not secret. Same with anthropic's usage limits, since they're not public they can degrade the service you're paying for at any point in time with no notice.
I'd much rather have "unlimited" bandwidth with restrictions and the current ambiguous enforcement than clearly defined limits and strict enforcement which penalizes all customers. The current model benefits considerably more people than the alternative.
The oxymoronic style of marketing bullshit: unlimited with restrictions, free but only if you pay, lifetime membership for three years, etc.
Not sure if it still holds, but it was 5x at launch: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-pro
FAQ agrees: https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8324991-about-clau...
5x what though? Even if we assume this is the true figure, everyone who uses Claude regularly knows that usage limits fluctuate over the course of days and weeks.
not just limits, but response times. I swear there's a Cron job or something that kicks in a 2300 pacific because Claude backs up right around then.
Surge pricing? I'm not sure if my remark is sarcasm or a prediction on the future.
In the near future, everyone will have an intelligence meter in their hall and pay IQCoin to the National Intelligence Utility based on how much intelligence they use each month.
"more" usage likely means that they have a limited number of GPUs, and what models you get access to depends on how much you've used them recently, but also on how busy the GPUs are at this moment.
This is also how batching works for API users. If you don't need the results immediately, you can give them a batch with an attached 24-hour deadline, and they'll slot you in whenever they expect low usage, in exchange for better prices.
F
I can't believe we're going to high pricing based subscription. This makes me think we need than ever open source models like qwen and deepseek.
On the other hand, the free options are better than ever. I've only used the free versions of ChatGPT, Claude, and ImageFX and have been impressed by how much you get without spending a dime. The only real limitation I regularly feel is not being able to upload something like a 1GB CSV file for analysis, but I guess that's a fair restriction for a free web tool.
I am impressed by the free version of ChatGPT, not so much with Claude's (claude.ai). I love Claude Pro, more so than the paid version of GPT, but damn, the free version of Claude is awful, you reach the limit extremely quickly. The free version of ChatGPT works quite well.
It’s because these companies are burning billions of dollars.
The problem is that comparable-quality open models will still require lots of hardware to run at reasonable speeds, so even then it's not cheap.
A bit off-topic, but I wonder when Cursor is going to see a massive price increase. I've tried Aider (granted, this was when GPT4 prices were still much higher) and spent $10 in one hour easily. Now I use cursor a LOT (100h focussed programming time per month) and mostly stay within my $20 monthly fee. I think they must be losing money on customers like me.
Are they an LLM wrapper or do they have own models? I feel Sonnet 3.7 should cost $30 per month for regular coding, and Refact.ai pricing (10$, 20$, 30$ - most popular, 40$, 50$ and above for higher prepaid limits) reflects that.
it is already super expensive if you want to get an actual work done using their max model. On a midsize project, it cost ca. €200 for my vibe coding tests to get something reasonable done (each call, each tool costs 0.05c). Their normal claude window is super short, and almost unusable for serious work. Stack was python and Nuxt.
> to get an actual work done using their max model
I get plenty of work done without the max model.
The key is breaking out a planning step before implementation.
Have you tried Roo Code or Cline instead? I never felt the need to use Cursor after trying them and they're just extensions, so it's easy to install and use your own API key.
How bad is the bill?
With Gemini 2.5 the bill is zero for now.
I currently pay for Claude and I still find it best for coding but it's definitely bit unreliable at times and I find it rate limited or responses limited and also unresponsive at times. I wouldn't be upgrading to a $100/$200 packages unless the reliability improved on the $20 offering first
As per https://www.anthropic.com/pricing, the reliability of the $20 offering will be further deteriating to prioritise $100+ package traffic "Priority access during high traffic periods"
I had not had almost any issues with reliability until recently and suddenly I'm getting transient UI and server issues on a daily basis. Not happy with it.
Even worse is I bought a yearly subscription from a deal they offered. However, now that reliability will be going down, I'm feeling a bit scammed!
I would rather pay for o1-pro and also have access to the fantastic 4o image generation. o1-pro feels, to me, far ahead for complex coding tasks.
I do really prefer Claude’s unified model interface. Hopefully OpenAI improves that soon. Their product UX is a mess.
I'd rather just be able to paste an API key into the desktop client and PAYG it.
I basically do this using self-hosted LibreChat. Can even use MCP with it.
My experience with Claude 3.7 with thinking has been incredible for coding tasks. I did not find the same level of success with Gemini even though the context window is nice.
Before they rolled this out, I rarely hit usage limits. Now it seems the usage limits have been lowered for Pro to add more value to Max. That is a less than ideal experience for users.
I agree with what most comments here are saying, that there should be more than just usage limits and I hope this changes (as it likely will because the state of competition is still high)
Aside from the more ambiguous access to newer features first, is there any benefit to this over just leveraging the API?
Going via the API with your own interface seems like it's objectively the better way to handle things like this at high usage, since you'll always have priority, wont have usage limits, and you'll pay as you go.
That explains why ~24h ago I reached my first rate limit on Claude (3.7 seems to misunderstand stuff a lot and you have to retry constantly which makes you hit those limits faster). I loved 3.5, possibly my favourite model. Might need to shop around soon for something better.
I’m surprised they didn’t just price it as $200/month but include high daily use of Claude Code. That tech is very cool and some sort of upper limit / bulk discount on costs would be quite compelling.
Bold to launch this before the roll out their own reasoning models / deep research. Seems like table stakes if you want to capture power users but maybe that's just my workflow.
Anthropic have recently said that they don't like the "reasoning" label and don't intend to have separate base and reasoning models, but rather one model that does it all. The current Claude 3.7 already seems to be doing some reasoning, displaying "pondering" and "analyzing" messages between different stages of output generation.
Regardless of naming, they don't have a model competitive with o1 Pro for coding (or with Gemini 2.5, for that matter). As someone who pays $200/month for GPT Pro I definitely wouldn't pay the same for Claude (and am considering cancelling GPT Pro if they don't deliver something better than Gemini 2.5 soon).
Gemini 2.5 is awesome, but when it screws the pooch, it really screws the pooch (e.g., https://gemini.google.com/share/374ac006497d ). It has delivered some of the best responses I've seen lately but also some of the worst.
I have been tempted several times to kill my GPT Pro account, but it is still valuable for cases where Gemini and Claude don't get the job done for whatever reason.
I tried gemini 2.5 just once for coding and it immediately spit out hilariously invalid python, not even clearing the lowest of bars.
What (language/topic) are you coding in that gemini (or even chatgpt) is better than claude? Very surprised to hear this.
For Golang and Haskell I found o1 Pro and Gemini 2.5 are much better at generating code that works first try than Claude. Gemini 2.5 in particular can generate thousands and thousands of lines of code that correctly use types and functions that were generated earlier in the context, with minimal errors.
I've been using Gemini pro 2.5 over Claude 3.5 in cursor all week - some people have Gemini do a prd and tasks and Claude do the actual coding. I switch between them but have been pretty impressed with Gemini.
Gemini sometimes fucks up diffs or doesn't actually apply the edits - Claude is rock solid at that. They're both very good though - but 3.7 really likes refactoring unneeded shit and removing code sometimes.
Their reasoning is called "extending thinking". It was released alongside Claude Sonnet 3.7.
They have web search, but it's true, no "deep research". It honestly is not very good and it's WAY too trigger-happy with it. As a result, if you accidentally leave it on, you get terrible answers to simple questions that non-search mode would have answered well.
(And for context Claude Sonnet 3.7 is my model of choice)
They already have a reasoning model out. I don't think deep research is on the agenda atm.
You can just go on AWS bedrock and use the thinking claude 3.7. You can tune the output size. I doubt you would spend 200 bucks a month in AWS on bedrock even with daily use of claude.
Amazon Bedrock has even worse uptime than Anthropic (see "Uptime" column).
https://openrouter.ai/anthropic/claude-3.7-sonnet:thinking/p...
But I agree with the general point that using the API (with different providers) will have better uptime and that it will almost certainly be cheaper.
If its not cheaper, just subscribe, but subscribing outright doesnt make sense
> I doubt you would spend 200 bucks a month in AWS on bedrock even with daily use of claude.
I can _easily_ burn $20/hour of credits in Cline/RooCode. Before switching to Cursor, full-time software dev could easily burn $100+/week.
With intensive coding with claude 3.7, you could easily be at $5/hr - $10/hr. Per token pricing rans the meter very fast.
Yeah if you're doing a big coding session up near the limits of context even with prompt caching each reply can be ~80¢ or something, so you can definitely blow through $200 on the API if you are using it heavily.
I already had to go through so many hoops to sign up for a teams account for 5 separate accounts for myself, I wonder if this will be any better or not. At least if one account starts getting dumb or somehow runs out of context, I can just switch, but if something goes wrong and your $200 account exponentially loses context, then you are stuck waiting. Anyone have any idea of the actual differences?
Everyday it is looking better and better to self host. I really don’t feel like ChatGPT $200/mo is 10x better than $20/mo and after trying QwQ 32B myself I just can’t justify paying these AI subscriptions. Gemini Flash is also dirt cheap as an api and Groq is dirt cheap and fast for QwQ and other OSS models.
api + lobechat has been stellar for me
I was using LobeChat religiously until LibreChat added MCP support. Game changer.
How does this compare to o1 pro for coding? I can't figure out what exactly the max plan offers besides usage limits. Claude also has some interesting novel features but i can't try them out as a European. That's one thing OpenAI does better.
Claude is better at design but isn't as strong a reasoner. I'd expect the Max plan to add a Deep Research like feature too soon.
If they had something better than OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode and it came with unlimited access I'd consider it. If Advanced Voice Mode was just 15% better than it is now, I'd find $200 a month to give to OpenAI for unlimited access.
I love Advanced Voice Mode except it's so unreliable in my experience. I can't have more than a 5 minutes of conversation without it getting stuck and me having to restart it.
I believe it's partly due to it doing Whisper processing remotely (correct me if I'm wrong), which introduces lag and slows things down.
Gemini does voice processing locally through text-to-speech and voice conversations with Gemini are soo much smoother.
The downside is Gemini does much more poorly than ChatGPT at uncommon words and when I code switch between languages. ChatGPT is just excellent at understanding uncommon words and in different languages.
Advanced voice mode does not do text to speech, one of 4o’s modes is speech, it’s multi-modal. This is how it can understand the emotional content of your speech.
Find a way to send them that feedback. I've been doing that more lately and I'm noticing features/bugs I request/report get added pretty quickly. Obviously YMMV but from my experience it seems like they listen to feedback like this.
as far as i know anthropic has zero voice stuff?
There is a rumor that they're preparing a voice version of Claude. I assume it's a voice modality rather than simply tts.
A little off topic, but how does o1 and o1-pro compare to 3.7/3.5 claude for coding and system design/architecture? I currently have the $20 chatgpt plus and claude pro plans but want to upgrade for a month to do some heavy coding. Thanks!
I've actually done a lot of comparisons in this regard. 3.7 with the thinking tokens maxed out is about equal to o1-pro, occasionally o1-pro will be more elegant (in coding) but it's not a huge difference, for tasks like long context understanding with text summarization/aggregation I actually slightly prefer 3.7. That said, gemini-2.5-pro is waaay better than 3.7 at code and long context so its safe to assume it's better than o1-pro.
If you want to do heavy coding right now go with Gemini.
Seems inferior to OpenAIs offering given is same price and capabilities, but OpenAI always have better models first other than code. But code is only useful when using Antvripic API.
These models are all stupid af. Ask one to make a simple react native page and it will keep getting it wrong. Even O3 mini high is better than 3.7
Their comparison is not clear at all what you’re getting out of a rather large subscription price, IMO.
> Substantially more usage to work with Claude
Compared to pro or free what does this mean? More requests / time? More tokens / time? Something else?
> Scale usage based on specific needs
Are there limits with pro that this is removing or increasing? What kinds of specific needs?
> Higher output limits for better and richer responses and Artifacts
So Claude will do more thinking before responding compared to pro? Is that due to a new variant of 3.7 model?
> Be among the first to try the most advanced Claude capabilities
Okay so you’ll get access before people who pay less but not before well known tech people who get early access for testing, I’m assuming?
> Priority access during high traffic periods
If you’re paying for pro and they throttle you wtf are you paying them for? This seems like an admission they suck at capacity planning based on their current and predicted user base?
Can you even do an agentic approach with a Claude backend as a daily driver these days without something like this $200 plan?
Depends how you define "agentic approach"? With something like smol agents + stagehand you can do pretty much anything while being provider agnostic.
https://github.com/browserbase/stagehand
The email subject line was "We heard you: Introducing the new Max plan for more Claude usage".
What the hell?
Can you elaborate which parts are frustrating to you? It wasn't clear who the email came from just from the subject?
Sorry. The "we heard you" and then offered a ridiculous price tier.
People were complaining about rate limits on the $20 plan.
How is $200/month ridiculous for groundbreaking technology?
At last. I honestly think the product engineering org at Anthropic has serious issues. They are slow to ship, and quality of the webapp has been decidedly mixed in the past 6 months. Some of the UX decisions they've made are bone-headed.
(OpenAI launched their pro plan 4 months ago!)
I actually like Claude over ChatGPT specifically because of how their web UI distinguishes.
Its clear that neither company prioritizes their flagship chat UI, over their other offerings. So if it will be in stasis, I definitely like it
There are other web AI offerings now (deepseek web, perplexity, to name a few). This is what I like between these two:
The speed of responses.
The reliability. ChatGPT web UI often times out or has server errors for random things.
Different censorship. Overall better for my use cases, and how errors are handled.
Initially search of old chats was a first class citizen in Claude. ChatGPT didnt have it, needed third party plugins, it has since updated, but is still lackluster in this regard.
The diagrams, charting and coding interface is great and better. Easier for seeing how something compiles and runs, easier to copy and paste.
I just assumed most people at this point are using a client.
It is hardly better though. Aside from MCP support (with rather poor UX, just compare it with anything else out there) it really has nothing to offer.
I've been satisfied with msty and code/cursor.
The text for claude.ai/upgrade directs to claude.ai, did AI write this post?
Having used Claude daily for last year or so, I don't feel great about being pushed into quite expensive tiers of 5-20x cost. I already feel like I'm hitting the Pro limit 2x/day more often than recently, although no data to support this - but the feeling is there.
Mostly I'm disappointed that the higher tiers are just usage tiers rather than features.
Lol. The best they can propose for 200 is "not throttling"
They are a bit of ripoff, especially cli thing. It will hallucinate tons of things, add things that break code and then you pay again (quite a lot) to fix it.
Sounds like a great business model
Yep. Being inconsistent makes it even more addictive than being perfect every time.
Their pricing page says $100/month
- Expanded Usage: 5x more usage than Pro => $100 per month
- Maximum Flexibility: 20x more usage than Pro => $200 per month
I have a bridge to sell to all those who are paying these companies $100 / $200 a month. Obviously they aren't hackers, I get that, but even normies should have a better sixth sense?
lol no. Claude Pro gave me like, 20-40 questions every 12 hours before it would throttle, and half of those were mistakes we already corrected that it was trying to re-integrate. Plus Claude is always trying to censor itself. I got suckered in by the "claude is better at code" shit, but wow was that BS.
Compared to ChatGPT, where 20 bucks gets you hundreds of prompts, and if you ask it hard questions it actually answers instead of lecturing about morals, and why you shouldn't be asking these questions in the first place.
Other than using Free Claude to generate resumes to apply to job postings at anthrowhatever, it is by far and away the most useless of the LLMs.