Stop Over-thinking AI Subscriptions | Peter Steinberger

I’ve been working heavily with AI for the past few months, and many times when I post something on Twitter, the replies are predictable: “Oh my god, how much did you pay for that?”

The thing is, people don’t understand that you don’t actually have to pay that much to get incredible AI productivity. After using the best AI subscription deals 2025 has to offer, here’s the real math (all prices in USD).

The Current Best Deal: Claude Max at $200/month

Claude Max gives you almost unlimited use of Claude Code, which is hands-down the best terminal-based AI tool available (next to Cursor). For $200/month, you get 20× the usage of Claude Pro.

Claude Max works on a rolling 5-hour block system with roughly 900 messages per 5-hour window. The moment you send your first prompt, the timer starts. When 5 hours are up, everything refreshes with a new block and full quota. The Claude Max subscription uses Opus as the default model and switches to Sonnet when you reach 50% of the 5-hour limit (this is configurable). If you really burn through your whole allowance for that window, you can switch to API-based billing.

If you’re tight on money and you really need this extremely high use case, look at the development partner program where they offer 30% off standard API pricing (this discount applies only to API usage, not the Max sub).

Cursor: The Math That Makes Sense

Cursor Pro costs $20/month and gives you 500 “fast” requests plus unlimited “slow” ones. Beyond that, it’s $0.04 per fast request (per Cursor docs).

Cursor offers two pricing modes: Normal mode charges a fixed number of requests per message regardless of context size, while Max mode uses token-based pricing (API cost + 20% margin) for complex reasoning tasks. Most everyday coding works perfectly fine in Normal mode where each message to Gemini 2.5 Pro (my favorite model) costs exactly 1 request.

That workshop I did? Probably 200+ AI requests across 3 hours. Let’s do the math: 200 requests × $0.04 = $8.

For an afternoon of intensive coding with AI assistance, you’re looking at pocket change. Even if you burn through 1,000 requests in a month, that’s $40 on top of your $20 subscription. When you run out of fast requests, Cursor automatically switches to free requests (processed at lower priority) so you never truly hit a wall.

What Actually Gets Expensive: OpenAI’s o3

Here’s where I’ll be honest: about half my monthly AI bill goes to o3.

OpenAI’s o3 model costs $10 per 1M input tokens and $40 per 1M output tokens. Cached input drops to $2.50/1M. When you’re debugging complex code and you want the absolute best reasoning, o3 delivers, but it adds up fast.

o3 is my dark knight—silent, pricey, but rescues impossible bugs.

I spent around $400 on o3 last month because I was banging my head against a wall with some really tricky code. When I hit truly difficult problems, throwing o3 at them for a few hours beats getting stuck in debugging rabbit holes for days.

Smart Alternative: Repo Prompt for o3 Access

If you’re tight on money but still want o3’s reasoning power, I highly recommend Repo Prompt (macOS-only). It lets you use o3 through your ChatGPT subscription instead of paying API rates.

While it’s more manual than integrated tools, it’s incredibly effective at taking code changes and applying them to your project. The workflow is straightforward: export your repo context, get o3’s analysis and suggestions, then apply the changes back to your codebase.

It’s an amazing tool that bridges the gap between premium AI access and budget constraints. Definitely worth experimenting with.

The Contractor Math

Let’s be conservative and say $800/day (though I’d assume many of you charge more). The AI subscription math is a no-brainer.

One afternoon saved per month = $200 in billable time. Claude Max pays for itself in 5 saved hours. Cursor pays for itself in 45 minutes.

The productivity multiplier is so absurd that arguing about the cost is like complaining about the price of coffee while billing $200/hour.

Now you know—don’t be a Mario:

Hi, my name is Mario, and I spent about $1000 in Anthropic pay-as-you-go before switching to Max and finding out that I stay well within the rate limit…

Don’t be a Mario.

— Mario Zechner (@badlogicgames) November 30, 2024

TL;DR

Time is the only non-refillable resource. Claude Max at $200 is currently the cheapest way I know to mint extra hours—and those hours compound faster than any SaaS line item ever will.

What’s your monthly AI spend? Ping me on Twitter @steipete with your breakdown and what you’re buying with the saved time.

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