Man, that was my instinct too, but I’m not sure.

I don’t think everyone here is using Claude/GPT/… to create indie games?

If you’re using it for work then waiting another week/day/hour is a business expense, effectively.

Maybe it's like this guy I know who purchased a new-ish Bugatti but all the service is done by a local mechanic, during his time off, in a barn.

I think you're underestimating the "more expensive". It's not a 30% discount or similar. API is at least 10 times more expensive (own experience), ~40x as expensive if [1] is accurate.

At that price difference, lots of things that are viable to do in whatever harness the subscription allows are simply impractical via API, you'd be spending a whole developer's salary just for the benefit of using a different harness.

I tried for example Deepseek V4 Pro for a bit (via API pricing), but it's _more expensive_ than Sol via subscription, even though $1.7/Mtok is a lot less than 20$/Mtok.

[1]: https://tibotattle.com/

> API is at least 10 times more expensive (own experience),

More. On CC I'm currently burning ~$5k a day (according to claudes own metrics) and I use up the weekly quota in about 3-4 days. Meaning I'm eating $20k worth of tokens for a $200 sub.

Current session I have running in the background, spinning up tests mostly

Total cost: $660.33

  Total duration (API):  22h 36m 33s


  Total duration (wall): 8h 33m 58s


  Total code changes:    7662 lines added, 177 lines removed


  Usage by model:
      claude-haiku-4-5:  6.0k input, 38 output, 0 cache read, 0 cache write ($0.0062)


         claude-opus-5:  322.9k input, 5.1m output, 702.9m cache read, 19.3m cache write ($606.64)


       claude-opus-4-8:  742 input, 883.5k output, 38.6m cache read, 2.0m cache write ($53.68)

What are you doing with this, if I may ask?

Thank you.

> At that price difference, lots of things that are viable to do in whatever harness the subscription allows are simply impractical via API, you'd be spending a whole developer's salary just for the benefit of using a different harness.

Could you elaborate on that?

Off topic: You did the ISBN visualization thing! Awesome!

API costs are simply too high. If you go wild you can easily burn $3-5k a day. If you really hammer it (ie going full parallel agentic) you can exceed $10-20k. And this isn't even going crazy. Those costs are simply too high to make any sense.