This is going to depend on what you're doing with it. I use Claude code for some stuff multiple times a day, and it is an unusual for a session to cost me $0.05. Even the most expensive thing I did ended up costing like $6, and that was a big and intensive workflow.
The size of the code base you are working in also matters. On an old, large code base, the cost does go up, though still not real high. On a new or relatively small code base, it is not unusual for my requests to cost a tenth of a cent. For what I am doing, paying with an API key is much cheaper than a subscription would be
