I have no problem believing that a Claude Max plan can consume equivalent to $5000 worth of retail Opus use, but one interesting thing you'll see if you e.g. have Claude write agents for you, is that it's pretty aggressive about setting agents to use Sonnet or even Haiku, so not only will most people not exhaust their plans, but a lot of people who do will do so in part using the cheaper models. When you then factor in Anthropics reported margins, and their ability to prioritise traffic (e.g. I'd assume that if their capacity is maxed out they'd throttle subscribers in favour of paid by the token? Maybe not, but it's what I'd do), I'd expect the real cost to them of a maximised plan to be much lower.

Also, while Opus certainly is a lot better than even the best Chinese models, when I max out my Claude plan, I make do with Kimi 2.5. When factoring in the re-run of changes because of the lower quality, I'd spend maybe 2x as much per unit of work I were to pay token prices for all my monthly use w/Kimi.

I'd still prefer Claude if the price comes down to 1x, as it's less hassle w/the harder changes, but their lead is effectively less than a year.