You don't need a max subscription to use Claude Code. By default it uses your API credits, and I guess I'm not a heavy AI user yet (for my hobby projects), but I haven't spent more than $5/month on Claude Code the past few months.

I burned $30 in Claude Code in just under an hour. I was equally frustrated and impressed. So much so I ended up a $200 MAX subscriber.

The money starts adding up fast as your context fills up since it's resending the whole accumulated context back through the api every time.

They're good about telling you how full your context is, and you can use /compact to shrink it down to the essentials.

But for those of us who aren't Mr. MoneyBags like you all, keeping an eye on context size is key to keeping costs low.

I’ve been wanting to try Claude Code. What makes it such a difference maker compared to existing AI tools?

Can I assume you are still running into rate limits?

The problem with it is that it uses a 30k~ token system prompt (albeit "cached"), and very quickly the usage goes up to a few million. I can easily spend over $10 a day.

I spent $5 in 10 minutes when I tried it.

For me, it was $10 in 2 hours. That’s super cheap if it saves me significant time. Jury’s out on that, though.

AI Agent should be treated like a human developer. If you bring a new human developer to your codebase and give them a task it will take a lot of time to read and understand the codebase before making proper solution. If you want to use AI agent regularly it makes sense to have some sort of memory of the codebase.

And it seems like community realizes it and invents different solutions. RooCode has task orchestration built in already, there is a claude task-manager that allows splitting and remembering tasks so AI agent can pick it up quicker, there are different solutions with files like memory bank. Windsurf cursor upgraded their .widsurf/rules functionality to allow more solutions like that for instructing AI agents about the codebase/tasks. Some people even write their own scripts that feed every file to LLM and store the summary description in the separate file that AI agent tool can use instead of searching codebase.

I'm eager to see how some of these solutions will become embedded into every AI agent solution. It's one of the missing stones to make AI agents order of magnitude more efficient and productive.

> but I'd need easy, cheap access to try it.

You can try it for cheap with the normal pay-as-you-go way.