alt Hacker NewsDo people actually get value out of the monthly plans? I've been using API access to both Claude and OAI and end up paying less, while I keep hearing about people being rate limited with lower usage. Am I missing something here? The only one that made sense to me was Cursor, but that comes with extra features and model switching.
Replies
CuriouslyC • last Wednesday at 2:20 PM
I use APIs for coding with Aider (gemini 2.5 pro is my preferred model), but still subscribe to ChatGPT plus because being able to use better models like O3 and 4.1 in chat, plus unlimited image generation, Realtime voice/video, Deep Research and Codex (as a backup agent while I'm manually driving Aider) ends up being worth the price.
Claude Code is only useable from a subscription.
Other than that, API + custom UI seems better since you're paying for the usage instead of competing with other flat-fee users for what seem to be overprovisioned resources (claude.ai was always throwing https 500 or 'sorry we're too busy' errors for me until I switched to API).
Not sure if it's cheaper though - I never checked.
It's insane how bad the first party chat apps are though. That's reason enough to use the API.