I wrote about this on my blog: https://www.asad.pw/llm-subscriptions-vs-apis-value-for-mone...

But basically you get ~300Mn input tokens and ~100Mn output tokens per month with Sonnet on the $100 plan. These are split across 50 sessions you are allowed, each session is 5 hrs starting from the first time you send a message until 5 hrs after the first message. During this time, you get ~6Mn input and ~2Mn output tokens for Sonnet. Claude Code seems to use a mix of Sonnet and Haiku, and Haiku has 2x the limits of Sonnet.

So if you absolutely maxed out your 50 sessions every month, that's $2400 worth of usage if you instead had used the API. So it's a great deal. It's not $100 worth of API credits you're buying, so they don't run out like that. You can exhaust limits for a given session, which is at most a 5 hr wait for your next one, or you can run out of 50 sessions, I don't know how strongly they enforce that limit and I think that limit is BS, but all in all the value for money is great, way better than using the API.

Thanks for the link and explainer. My first experience with Claude Code left mixed feelings because of the pricing. I have Pro subscription, but for Claude Code can only use API mode. So I added 5$ just to check it, and exhausted 4.5$ in the first 8m session. It left me wondering if switching to Max plan will exhaust it at the same rate or not.

Right into the announcement, later down, they even explain how to handle the limits:

How Rate Limits Work: With the Max plan, your usage limits are shared across both Claude and Claude Code:

Shared rate limits: All activity in both Claude and Claude Code counts against the same usage limits.

Message variations: The number of messages you can send on Claude varies based on message length, conversation length, and file attachments.

Coding usage variations: Expected usage for Claude Code will vary based on project complexity, codebase size, and auto-accept settings.

On the Max plan (5x Pro/$100), average users:

- Send approximately 225 messages with Claude every 5 hours, OR

- Send approximately 50-200 prompts with Claude Code every 5 hours

On the Max plan (20x Pro/$200), average users:

- Send approximately 900 messages with Claude every 5 hours, OR

- Send approximately 200-800 prompts with Claude Code every 5 hours

How many prompts does Claude code send per user prompt? Is it 1:1?

Nope, it can be even a dozen (because agentic). Claude usage limits are actually based on token usage, and Claude Code uses a mix of Haiku and Sonnet. So your limits are split among those two models. I gave an estimation of how much usage you can expect in another comment on this thread, but you will find it hard to max out the $100 plan unless you are using it very, very extensively.

I didn’t realize they were tuning cost optimization by switching models contextually. That’s very clever. I bet the whole industry of consumer LLM apps moves that way.

I am using cline, it plans with Haiku and execute with Sonnet. It works well.