Since we’re sharing anecdata: I also have the $20 month plan for codex, and I hit the five hour limit after about an hour of work every single time I open it. I use it for personal side projects primarily in the evening after kids are in bed, so my strategy is to launch it about 4pm and send a simple prompt to prime the 5 hour window to end at 9pm, start working about 8pm, and then I can use up the existing 5 hour window and the next one by about 10pm.

I'm on the 100 USD plan with Anthropic, I hit the 5 hour limits about 75% of the time during working hours, but almost never the weekly ones - by the time they're reset I've usually used up between 50% - 75% of the quota. There are periods of more intense usage ofc, but this is the approx. situation I'm in (also it doesn't work on tasks while I'm asleep, because I occasionally like having a look at WIP stuff and intervene if needed).

The Anthropic 20 USD plan would more or less be a non-starter for agentic development, at least for the projects that I work on, even while only working on a single codebase or task at a time (I usually do 1-3 at a time).

I would be absolutely bankrupt if I had to pay per-token. That said, I do mostly just throw Opus at everything (though it sometimes picks Sonnet/Haiku for sub-agents for specific tasks, which is okay), so probably not a 100% optional approach, but I've wasted too much time and effort in the past on sub-optimal (non-SOTA) models anyways. I wonder which is closer to the actual cost and how much subsidizing there is going on.

Wow the 20 dollar Claude plan sounds awful. I use Claude at work which has metered billing and have to carefully not to hit my four figure max cap.

For me $20 a month is more than I want to spend I just use the free tiers. If I use AI in an app or site I use older models mostly chatgpt3.5. The challenge is more fun and it means I can do more like, make more api calls - 100x more.