AI Subscription vs API Costs
The cluster focuses on comparisons between fixed-price AI subscriptions (e.g., ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro) and pay-per-use API pricing from OpenAI, Anthropic, and others, debating affordability, value for coding/heavy usage, and personal spending experiences.
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$37/mo seems extremely expensive considering you could use ChatGPT or the OpenAI APIs to accomplish the same thing for much less. Best of luck!
Pay as you go using the anthropic API and an open source UI frontend like librechat would be a lot cheaper I suspect.
Is this cheaper or more expensive than using OpenAI?
As basically just a wrapper for the OpenAI API, why would I pay for this? I could do the sane thing in the OpenAI Playground.
Stop using ChatGPT or pay $20/month (for now). Alternatively use the APIs instead
How do you handle the OpenAI API costs? Doesn't it reach beyond the free limits and increase your costs when usage increases?
Too bad Claude Code doesn't have a fixed cost plan for teams. The API is super expensive (I can easily spend $6-10 in a single sitting in tokens)
using openai or anthropic to my hearts content, configured via api to my editor, i didn't go over $10/mo -- vs $20/mo for their regular product that hit me with rate limits
Sign up for the API and use the playground. You don't get the plugins, but you pay per usage. GPT-3.5 is super cheap, and even GPT-4 isn't that expensive. My first month, when I had only access to GPT-3.5, I didn't even break $1.00; and now that I've gotten access to GPT-4, I'm at about $3. I've only once had it tell me that it was too busy for the request; I tried again 30 seconds later and it worked.
I spent $600 because I did something like 5200 uses.You can start off for much less. I recommend trying claude-4-opus max/thinking. There might be cheaper options but that’s the one that has given me the best results so far.