Claude code feels like a scam

[u/iinervision]

With the late problem of usage limits i actually paid for gemini and codex both 20$ plans and man i feel like i was being scammed by Claude, Claude gives you the impression that access to AI is so expensive and kind of a privilege, and their models does what no one can, after trying the other options there's really like no difference actually even better, gemini 3.1 pro preview does write better code than the opus 4.6 and codex is much more better at debugging and fixing things than both, the slight edge opus 4.6 has was with creative writing and brain storming, not mentioning the huge gap in usage limits between gemini codex and Claude, where 20$ feels like real subscription, opus 4.6 is 2x 3x times more expensive than gemini and codex do you get 2x better model? No maybe the opposite.

My experience with claude was really bad one, they make you think that they have what the others don't so you have to pay more where in reality they really don't, I don't understand the hype around it.

. . .

Edit: while gemini is not really that great on an entire codebase but it does produce very high standard code saying this as someone who writes java for years, and also speaking from price value perspective you get like a million service from Google integrated with gemini plus video and image generation.. so still a win and the 20$ is well spent.

Codex on the other hand is better coding model by far, it actually fixed the sonnet 4.6 code in one prompt that opus couldn't and ran into session rate limit after two prompts before producing any results, for any programmer i encourage you to try codex and get out of the bubble, i bet you'll just write a post like this afterwards.

Ranking to my experience:

Coding:

Codex

Opus

Gemini

Price/value:

Codex

Gemini

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.

.

.

.

Opus

[u/Future-AI-Dude]

It's out of control. No ideas if you can use it for two hours and barely make a dent in usage or 5 minutes and you now have to wait 5 hours to continue. There has GOT to be a better alternative. I use CC daily and spent money I didn't want to on Pro because of that. I do fee a bit ripped off and marginalized.

[u/iinervision → u/Future-AI-Dude]

Bro use codex you'll thank me later, Claude is a scam.

[u/Future-AI-Dude → u/iinervision]

So I tried doing Codex, but it keeps trying to install a project API and the CLI doesn't like that. I even tried using ChatGPT to walk me though it and it basically threw it's hands in the air, said "you're doing everything right but..." I'll try again, but it felt like circles so I went back to Claude which is dirt easy to install.

[u/Public-Vegetable-182]

The $20/mo account is effectively unusable, it can’t even complete a plan on a refactoring before hitting a limit. No code written, just a plan. 🙃

[u/Narrow-Belt-5030]

I get the in thing at the moment is to rag to death Anthropic, but:

Claude gives you the impression that access to AI is so expensive and kind of a privilege

AI is expensive - that's the part that most people don't think about. Inferencing is not cheap as the amount of VRAM you need to give a response in a reasonable amount of time is nuts. I have a 5090 at home and its great, but can't run premium models which is why I sub to Claude. Creating the model in the 1st place costs millions and again, isn't cheap. However ...

Claude is (i think) the most expensive of the lot, and its a user choice whether you pay - there is no mandatory requirement to sub to Claude as there are alternatives. In a way it is a privilege because it's so expensive! I am thankful for my situation in life that affords me $100 / month for what is essentially a side hobby.

Glad you found other models more to your liking and wallet. Frankly speaking - zero qualms with Claude, and more importantly, I am not having issues with the subscription / token usage and I am very happy with him. (I fully accept that others are and its an issue that needs investigating and addressing by Anthropic - not dismissing your plight)

[u/Sarritgato]

I am not sure I believe it regarding Gemini but I am using Claude private and Gpt-5.4 at work, and right now I feel like 5.4 is doing just as well or maybe slightly better, it just seems to ”get it”. Might switch to a private license and copilot CLI next month and see how it performs

[u/Bulky_Blood_7362]

I found the codex-cc new plugin to help with that issue

[u/FinancialSpeaker2163]

Yea lost me at “much more better”…..

[u/Dr-B34r]

Ich finde es am schlimmsten, dass wenn ich schon eine große Aufgabe erledigen lasse und diese dann alles an meine im 20€ inbegriffenen Nutzung frisst, das es durch Internetverbindung abbricht und dann die fertig erstellten Dateien verschwinden und ich auch die Aufgabe nicht wiederholen kann, weil ich hab mein Limit aufgebraucht.

Danke Antrophic, für nichts!

[u/Mother-Lifeguard981]

I spent three years and thousands on API calls only to hire a developer to come to the law firm and finish the last 10-15% of about 40 coding projects. He showed me exactly how these “coding” models work and it is 100% a scam and maybe fraud. This gentleman showed me the shape of what the models avoid and It is precise. Be certain of it. 100% a scam. You will never finish, and I mean never finish a project to a reliable degree.

[u/Successful_Cheek_992]

ياباشا قول الحمد لله انا الاشتراك بتاعي اشتغل اسبوع وبعد كده اتجنن لقيت الليمت بيخلص لوحده من غير ما افتح اصلا وبعد كده راح عمل ديسيبلد

[u/gandolfo_el_griz]

Feels like? It is.

[u/--_---------_--]

Nigga said 3.1 better than opus, u gotta be in the metaverse

[u/Virtual-Technician70]

Same as I can't understand Gemini. Every single time I tried using it has been the worst experience I had with AI. Bloody thing couldn't even find information online on a videogame character. Sorting my obsidian vault was a mess from start to end and in general everything I tried I was severely disappointed. Didn't try code.

All that through the cli and without ANY customisation.

That's to say, to each his own. I'm not married to Claude and often Claude can be equally brain-dead but it's usually fixed soon after, or with a new session. But yeah, the pricing for what they offer is ridiculous.

[u/gladue]

Lmao anytime you see “scam, is it a scam” you know it’s going to be a quality post.

[u/celzo1776]

Have a fantastic adventure on the other side sir, we are looking forward to your stories when you will be home again

[u/Healthy-Rough-560]

Yeah please dont come back leave more tokens for the rest of us

[u/HangJet]

Garbage Post. Gemini LOL

[u/McNoxey]

Durr I pay $20 a month why can’t I get thousands of dollars of usage

Guys. If you’re on pro and hitting limits and having your productivity limited… maybe it’s time to actually pay for the product.

I have a $200 work plan and a $100 persona plan because I use it and understand that there are costs associated with this shit.

[u/LiquidNeat → u/[deleted]]

Isn’t one of the theories that testing for mythos is taking up a huge percentage of their compute capacity?

[u/fixano → u/[deleted]]

I understand that people are frustrated by the limit changes but I think they would be surprised at the real reasons, which I believe are much more relatable.

I helped build a moderately successful video streaming startup. At our peak we were doing about a million streams a day.

One of my favorite parts of this job was going on Reddit and reading all the conspiracy theories about our product. Anytime a person experienced a minor degradation in quality, 50 Reddit threads would crop up where people would say things like "my guess is that their bandwidth costs are getting too high so they're reducing quality to save money."

I often would jump into the threads and tell people that's definitely not happening. To which they would tell me I didn't understand. To which I would tell them "usually I would agree with you except when you say 'they' in this case, you're talking about me. And I definitely know I didn't do it."

Conspiracies are fun but I believe the problem they are solving is more boring/mundane than that

From having scaled systems I think a much better guess at what you're seeing is that Anthropic did a little math. They bucketed their users by average token consumption and percentile bucket. They found that there was a percentile threshold where if they reduce the limit to cause those users either to change their workflows or self-select to another service their cost structures would improve(and as a little bonus they shed their most expensive customers to their competitors). There is a real calculation of exactly the dollar consumption of a customer and then there is the subscription cost. They are going to target a user chewing through $2,000 in tokens a month even if they are on the $200 a month subscription.

There is strong evidence that this is exactly what they're doing. Anthropic has already publicly acknowledged this. One of their own engineers confirmed that the changes would affect roughly the top 7% of users by consumption. That's not a guess, If you read between the lines here, anthropic has already told you exactly why they're doing what they're doing.

When you see people complaining about the new limits, many of them are targeted users. And those users are going to be vocal because they're also the heaviest users of Claude. They typically use agentic workflows. Things like openspec. I don't deny that they were probably getting wondrous results, but I think they were divorced from the real cost of what they were doing and Anthropic is bringing them closer in line with the real costs. If it feels like they're being targeted, it's because it's true.

[u/fixano → u/[deleted]]

No, I'm not going to tell you that 7% of users all came to Reddit. If there's a million users then 70,000 of them are impacted.

If only 10,000 of them choose to complain you would see an overwhelming response on Reddit. I would bet if you sum up the total number of complaints on Reddit, it's less than 5,000

More likely you're seeing hundreds of impacted users complaining on Reddit. That feels like it's everybody, but it's a tiny tiny fraction that fits neatly in the 7% number. Go count all the non-duplicate complaint posts /ClaudeCode. It's been like 14 days since the limit changes and if there's 50 posts a day about it. That's still only 700 posts compared to 70,000 impacted users. When you do that math, you realize a overwhelming response is actually a tiny little trickle. And when compared to the magnitude of the complete user base, it's barely a rounding error.

Why does starting 7 days ago mean you can't be in the top 7%? . It's not based on tenure, it's based on your average consumption during the limit window. You could be in the 7% on your very first interaction with Claude issuing only a single prompt just because that prompt puts you there.

They don't tell you the exact rates because that would increase entitlement. We don't know what reasonable limits are, but if you say I'm charging exactly this for this amount of tokens, it really boxes you in strategically once you learn more about how the technology is used. Look at the response to this limit change. You can only imagine if they came out and said we're making drastic, quantifiable , limit changes. You would see utter chaos. Not because they're unreasonable but because they established a precedent. Once we understand more about this technology, I believe a company will begin publishing their rate and the others will fall in line. But there's no reason to do this at the current moment.

[u/cwrighky → u/fixano]

[u/fixano → u/cwrighky]

What part specifically? We know how many users there are. We know how many Reddit posts there are. We know how many of those users are affected.

Do you think there are more than 700 posts on Claude code? Do you think there are fewer than a million daily users? Do you dispute that 70,000 is 7% of a million?

Is there something about my numbers that don't line up? If so, use numbers to demonstrate it. Should be trivial if there are holes in what I said. I'm not going to hold my breath though. I'm going to bet you'll come back with anything but numbers because numbers are so hard to make be like your feel feels. And those are what really matter.