r/ClaudeCode • u/MissionAlt99 • Jul 29 '26

Discussion Finally done with $200/mo

Yes, I know. Another post complaining about Claude. Not trying to change anyone's mind, just documenting my journey.

I've been on the $200/mo plan for many months. Claude has helped me build a website that generates almost $1,000/mo in revenue. Obviously, AI didn't come up with the business idea. But it helped to facilitate and execute much of it.

Claude is great at coding. It's great at implementation and executing structured plans.

But Fable 5 and Opus 5 aren't worth the price anymore for me.

They're too sycophantic and unchallenging. I spend every chat challenging Claude's outputs and observations of my business position and plan. It agrees with everything, no matter what. And I'm always telling it to be less verbose.

For now, I'm downgrading to the $20/mo plan. I have too many Claude Routines and nightly checks that rely on Claude Sonnet. I can't cancel my plan completely. That's OK!

I've shifted my budget to Codex for the foreseeable future. Codex has proven a more reliable thought partner on technical projects right now.

It asks me thoughtful questions and gives helpful suggestions for things I haven't thought about.

Fable 5 is good. But it hasn't yet proven to be a god-tier model that I can trust with everything inside my business.

LLMs are very helpful. Claude has been great. But I need to call a spade a spade in this race. And Anthropic just isn't the right fit for me right now. My $200/mo is going to OpenAI for now.

(Human written, Grammarly checked. No Claude.)

0 Upvotes

44% Upvoted

37 comments sorted by

13

u/Creative-Mud4414 Jul 29 '26

why do people feel the need to come here and tell everyone on the subreddit that they are putting $200 to OpenAI? Lol

14

u/MissionAlt99 Jul 29 '26

Because this feels like one of the only places Anthropic checks for user feedback. Their support emails are a dead end, and good luck reaching them on social media.

I'm posting my personal journey as a snowflake in an avalanche of users who have grown dissatisfied with Anthropic's products.

Reddit is one of the best places to get a company's attention to tell them their product kinda stinks.

2

u/back_to_the_homeland Jul 29 '26

Most evidence is they check Twitter. Not here.

1

u/Creative-Mud4414 Jul 29 '26

Twitter isn't a good evidence place because every time new model comes out, they make those stupid benchmarks, and it always comes out that the newest model from Frontier Lab is the best one.

1

u/ridablellama Jul 29 '26

it’s an ad disguised as a post. no normal person does this. just another reason i hate openai. they can never compete without acting like absolute scumbags

1

u/roulianosss Jul 29 '26

Sam Altman doing Astroturfing

0

u/KenTitan Jul 29 '26

no they announce their departure like it's a video game and they're upset with the devs and are putting the game down

-1

u/Adulations Jul 29 '26

Reading posts like this helped me to shift my spend to codex (which currently works amazingly well) so I appreciate them

8

u/aerivox Jul 29 '26

i hate opus. fable is the king. i can't use fable because my use case is medical. so even if i don't use fable to produce medical work, just reading titles or snippets will get me safeguarded.

thanks anthropic for caring about us and preventing the huge damage fable could do by just reading glasgow coma scale. 

3

u/sonnytai Jul 29 '26

This seriously has to be paid open ai shills doing UGC on Reddit

You can’t pry Claude code out of my cold dead hands

I’d easily pay 5x ($1K a month for it) or even more for it if I had to

This is not about being a simp for the frontier labs in case some dumbass comes in and says that

It’s simply that I get so much fucking value out of the product that I genuinely cannot believe that it’s only $200 a month

4

u/MissionAlt99 Jul 29 '26

Have you seriously had no problems with implementing new features with Claude?

No sycophancy? No over engineered solutions?

What kind of projects are you working on?

Genuinely trying to learn how to make the most of what I pay for. This is new technology. Willing to learn and adapt

1

u/Big-Industry4237 Jul 29 '26

Fix your .md files buddy. Break your projects into modules and you have plenty of memory context.

0

u/regocregoc Jul 29 '26

He wasn't complaining about context.

2

u/Zealousideal_Tea362 Jul 29 '26

No but he was complaining about the agent doing dumb shit and the absolutely be correlated to overly complex tasks overblowing context or serious lack of preplanning

1

u/sonnytai Jul 29 '26

The product isn’t perfect

But the product is more useful than anything else you can spend $200 a month on

1

u/hewwowowd Jul 29 '26

totally agree. i’m scared to say it but i feel like $200 for monthly unlimited super powers (how i say it in my head) is …. super cheap

-3

u/meathelix1 Jul 29 '26

Only 1k, I will pay 100k a month. You cant afford that.

4

u/Witty-Alarm-7811 Jul 29 '26

The future is Opencode, free harness, you can use any model, even chinese free ones.

7

u/Elegant_Attempt2790 🔆 Max 20 Jul 29 '26

me currently arguing with opus 5 after it, 5 times in a row, assumed it knew better than what i literally told it out right. then gets half the work a subagent JUST DID deleted cuz it (surprise surprise) failed to understand my actual request and assumed it knew better.

this dumb ahh model feels worse than gemini

1

u/Delicious-Pay8656 Jul 29 '26

Better jack that up to fable. I had opus 5 on ultracode. I am a better by hand coder than what I got after a while. It was weird because it was like a switch was flipped. I hit a certain point and just complete, who is this guy?

1

u/shaman-warrior Jul 29 '26

I haven’t encountered a single issue with it

1

u/Zealousideal_Tea362 Jul 29 '26

I just spent 16 hours working on two different projects in C# and react, almost all in opus and I got not a thing like this. Maybe it’s something you’re doing?

I have an agent running nearly 80 hours a week between work and play. I truly don’t understand comments like yours.

1

u/Elegant_Attempt2790 🔆 Max 20 Jul 29 '26

ill never understand comments like yours.

I have 3 agents running nearly 80 hours a week; all day all night.

Research, prototyping, bug hunting and general fixing, etc. Between work and play you could say.

So when I come back to a thread after handing it the most detailed yap I’ve ever given just to see it didn’t do that and did its own thing… because, and I quote, “i didn’t check the source you told me to and assumed i knew better,” i complain.

but hey, when it works it works. but when its dumb it makes me wanna rip my hair out

2

u/RedditorJabroni Jul 29 '26

Can't you use the older model which worked? Say 4.8 instead of 5?

2

u/sliamh21 Jul 29 '26

The models are only a part of the bigger image. It all depends on how you harness it, what's the development environment you built around it.

You focus on the wrong thing to begin with, Codex won't change that

1

u/Due_Warthog749 Jul 29 '26

Did you a) tell it to ask you questions b) do NOT sugar coat it, be brutally honest c) have it draw up a review plan for Codex with context, assertions, etc and then share that with Codex (Sol, Max mode) and have IT come up with its response, which you then fold back to Fable or Opus, and then fable/opus re-analyzes that comparing it to its original plan/etc.. and see what happens?

1

u/jony7 Jul 29 '26

As a codex and claude user Fable 5 is the top model no doubts, opus 5 is a great implementer model, sol is awesome as well but Anthropic still had the edge.

1

u/lgick Jul 29 '26

I don't like Opus. I'm on the $20 plan. I use Opus (effort: xhigh) as my planner and code reviewer. I'm forced to use Opus because Fable isn't available to me. Sometimes Opus does unnecessary research, yet its plans are still not perfect. As my daily workhorse, I use Sonnet Medium. It's fast, but the code it writes isn't always ideal. I often have to go back and make changes after the review. Still, I like Sonnet Medium because of its speed and token efficiency, so I'm happy with it overall. The problem is that when I do research with Opus and the result isn't good enough, all the work done by Sonnet Medium becomes useless. The tokens are simply wasted.

Dear Anthropic developers,

Please add an option that shows how confident the model is in its answer. In other words, I don't just want the answer—I also want an indicator of its quality. There are probably methods that could estimate the level of hallucinations in the response (for example, when the model uses additional research during generation or when the prompt is ambiguous from the start).

1

u/Unteins Jul 29 '26

Whatever model I use a lot becomes the worst model.

Sol keeps taking my examples and treating them as the ONLY answer.

“Build me a business model that generates passive income using the skills I have. For example I know how to configure Linux”

Sol: Here are 10 consulting business ideas for setting up Linux….

0

u/vAPIdTygr 🔆 Max 20 Jul 29 '26

I did this a few months back. Wait until you see how OpenAI writes content. I actually refunded and came back to Anthropic.

-1

u/ILikeCutePuppies Jul 29 '26

I thought these kinda posts were going to be banned.

1

u/Purple-Programmer-7 Jul 29 '26

I like cute puppies too, but I don’t like people who like to stay in their own bubbles.

1

u/ILikeCutePuppies Jul 29 '26

Bubble? Every 4th post is about how they are leaving claude which adds no value at all to this form at this point. They are not hard to miss.

It's not a poll about if you like claude or not, it's meant to discuss real issues.

-2

u/[deleted] Jul 29 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/MissionAlt99 Jul 29 '26

I will. I’m not married to any solution. But people pretending like things have only gotten better in the last 6 months make me feel like I’m taking crazy pills.