Anthropic is the same. Unless it has changed within the last few months, you can subscribe to Claude but if you want to use Claude Code it'll come out of your "API usage" bucket which is billed separately than the subscription.
Some jerk has learned that we prefer CLI things and has come to the conclusion that we should therefore pay extra for them.
Workaround is to use their GUI with some MCPs but I dislike it because window navigation is just clunky compared to terminal multiplexer navigation.
This is down voted I guess because the circumstances have changed - but boy is it still confusing. All these platforms have chat subscriptions, api pay-as-you-go, CLI subscriptions like "claude code" ... built-in offers via Github enterprise or Google Workspace enterprise ...
It's a frigg'n mess. Everyone at our little startup has spent time trying to understand what the actual offerings are; what the current set of entitlements are for different products; and what API keys might be tied to what entitlements.
I'm with __MatrixMan__ -- it's super confusing and needs some serious improvements in clarity.
I think it is pretty clear that these $20/subs are loss leaders, and really only meant to get regular people to really start leaning on LLMs. Once they are hooked, we will see what the actual price of using so much compute is. I would imagine right now they are pricing their APIs either at cost or slightly below.
I'm sure that there are power users who are using much more than $20 worth of compute, but there will also be many users who pay but barely use the service.
I would've thought "most" people would be firmly on the free tier, are there any stats to check how common it is? Personally I've had Gmail for 20 years, Android phones for 13 years, Home/chromecast devices but never thought about paying for Google One or any other services.
Sam Altman said they use about same amount of power as an oven. So at $0.2/kWh thats about 100kWh/4kW=25 hours of compute or a little over an hour every workday.
When using a single terminal Pro is good enough (even with a medium-large code base). When I started working with two terminals at two different issues at the same time, i’m reaching the credit limit.
less expensive than what? You can use CC on the $20 plan. If you're using the maximum of your $20 subscription usage every 4 hours every day, the equivalent API cost would be at least hundreds per month
Isn't that a bit like saying that gasoline should be sold as a fixed price subscription rather than a usage based scheme where long distance truckers pay more than someone driving < 100 miles per week?
A ChatBot is more like a fixed-price buffet where usage is ultimately human limited (even if the modest eaters are still subsidizing the hogs). An agentic system is going to consume resources in much more variable manner, depending on how it is being used.
> Some jerk has learned that we prefer CLI things and has come to the conclusion that we should therefore pay extra for them
Obviously these companies want you to increase the amount of their product you consume, but it seems odd to call that a jerk move! FWIW, Anthropic's stated motivation for Claude Code (which Gemini is now copying) was be agnostic to your choice of development tools since CLI access is pretty much ubiquitous, even inside IDEs. Whether it's the CLI-based design, the underlying model, or the specifics of what Claude Code is capable of, they seem to have got something right, and apparently usage internal to Anthropic skyrocketed just based on word of mouth.
Claude desktop editing files and running commands via the desktop commander MCP is pretty much equivalent functionality wise to Claude Code. I can set both of them to go, make tea, and come back to see that they're still cranking after modifying several files and running several commands.
These companies are all for-profit, regardless of what altruistic intent they are trying to spin. Free tier usage and fixed price buffets are obviously not where the profit is, so it's hard to blame them for usage-based pricing for their premium products targeting mass adoption.
In addition to others mentioning subscriptions being better in Claude Code, i wanted to compare the two so i tried to find a Claude Max equivalent license... i have no clue how. In their blog post they mention `Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise license` but they don't even link to it.. lol.
Some jerk has learned that we prefer CLI things and has come to the conclusion that we should therefore pay extra for them.
Workaround is to use their GUI with some MCPs but I dislike it because window navigation is just clunky compared to terminal multiplexer navigation.