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points by simon83 19 hours ago | 0 comments
Oh wow! I showed Opus the gist and asked it to analyze my own transcripts, and since those summary calls don't show up there, it calculated an estimate based on the 30 second timer.

I'm on the 20x Max plan and my quota is at 98% (resets today), so I had a quite heavy week of usage, including a bunch of orchestrated subagent runs (no workflows).

API equivalent spending for this week: $1,970

Hidden status-label calls: ~$380

Share of the true total: 16%

That's incredible...

[–] Izmaki 18 hours ago
You probably know this already but keep in mind that the "20x" only applies to the 5-hour window, not your weekly maximum. The weekly maximum is increased but not as significantly as the sales pitch wants you (us*) to believe.
[–] simon83 14 hours ago
Yes, I keep hearing that, but I never saw any concrete numbers. That's why I tasked Opus to write a script to keep track of this.

Here's the gist how it works:

The transcripts log the token count, so you can figure out what those tokens would cost in API prices. Each response returns the current 5h and weekly quota percentages, this is what is shown in the statusline. The returned quotas are not stored anywhere by default. So Opus wrote a small script that sits in the status line and records the percentages while I work. Dividing dollars spent by the percent used give what 1% of quota is worth.

On the 20x plan, 1% of weekly limit is worth about $20 in API prices. A full week is then about $2,000, or $8,000 a month. 1% of the 5h window is worth about $5.20.

All of this only works correctly if you use your sub on a single machine, within CC, as chat usage and other machines can not be tracked this way.

I'm on the 20x right now because I got offered 50% off as a returning customer (I cancelled a few months ago). So next billing period I'll switch to the 5x plan and measure its weekly and 5h limits the same way again.

[–] UberMouse 1 hour ago
>On the 20x plan, 1% of weekly limit is worth about $20 in API prices. A full week is then about $2,000

Considering I use on average close to $3k a week at API prices on my 20x plan I don't think this quite accurate. Some weeks I've used >$3.5k

[–] hedora 14 hours ago
I estimated the weekly quota was roughly linear in dollars spent a while back. I’m sure someone has more carefully measured and that it changes fairly regularly.
[–] ddorian43 14 hours ago
It's about ~2x from weekly of $100.
[–] criley2 17 hours ago
The way I think of it is that "20x" means "You get up to 20 tokens for each 1 if you run your limits down".

For example last week I put $1400 thru my Anthropic enterprise $200 plan. That's $5600 per month, or 28X the $200 my company pays (according to `npx ccusage`)

[–] brookst 16 hours ago
The 20x plan should get you far far more than $2k/week at API rates. Last I checked I was around $4k-$5k/week. What harness? And maybe check cache hit rate?
[–] simon83 15 hours ago
Yes that's what I remember as well. I haven't used Claude Code in a few months and only started to use it again around 2 weeks ago, but it seems they reduced the the subscription value quite a bit. See my other comment above how I measure the API dollars to weekly rate.

Also the Claude subreddits are complaining since last week about nerfed usage. But since it is reddit, nobody bothers to actually measure the true value.