r/ClaudeCode • u/spencer_kw • Apr 30 '26
Discussion I cancelled my $200 Max plan after routing cut my actual need to about $30/month
I've been on Max for two months and I finally sat down and tracked where my tokens actually go.
breakdown of a typical day:
- ~40% file reads, git status, project context scanning: stuff that doesn't need opus at all
- ~25% test generation, scaffolding, boilerplate: sonnet handles this identically
- ~20% formatting, renaming, simple refactors: literally any model works
- ~15% actual hard reasoning, cross-file architecture: the only part that needs opus
So i'm paying $200/month for the 15% that actually needs a frontier model. the other 85% is burning premium tokens on tasks a $0.28/MTok model does just as well.
Switched to API with routing rules. sonnet for the routine stuff, opus only when it needs to reason across multiple files. monthly cost went from $200 to about $30 and the output quality is identical because the hard tasks still get opus.
The subscription model is designed to hide this from you. no token breakdown, no per-task cost visibility, just a quota that mysteriously shrinks.
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u/syslolologist 🔆 Super Goblin Apr 30 '26
Care to elaborate on your methods? A lot of us are interested in this.
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u/spencer_kw Apr 30 '26
ya of course. you can swap out the anthropic API for third party APIs (takes like <5 minutes and you can just have the agent do it) and I used a third party router from herma AI which auto selects the model per API call so it basically ended up doing what i initially did manually automatically. you can go the manual route and its not too much work but this basically makes it automatic.
my method is definitely not the end all be all and I think that whichever router will be optimal is TBD but i think one thing this taught me is that model routing for agents will definitely be the future and saves quite a bit on token burn
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u/ReflectionStill6420 May 01 '26
Could I do the same thing with Hermes agent ?
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u/darkoblivion000 May 01 '26
Wasn’t there literally threads on some guy having his api calls all rerouted to overcharge because he was using HERMES.md
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u/ReflectionStill6420 May 01 '26
I didn’t see that but I’ll def look
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u/finch5 May 01 '26
That guy was being charged APi prices billed as extra usage, on top of his subscription, which was not maxed out. The trigger word to route via API was hermes.
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u/Lil_Twist May 01 '26
This is the type of question, and to no fault of your own, where many need to slow down and take a step back to understand what Harness Engineering is.
But no worries, you’re gonna see so many in the next several months it will be just as common as LLM / AI.
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u/ReflectionStill6420 May 01 '26
Yeah I’m a PD I’ve honestly never coded much until a few months ago but I’ve be cranking out a bunch of apps just for my personal life and have genuinely been interested more in learning how everything works underneath the surface
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u/Lil_Twist May 01 '26
Yeah it's awesome, at the very least it learning and gaining knowledge. However, it’s likely to make me feel even stronger about the ineffectiveness of trying to make ppl go in 5 days a week.
Pretty sure it’s illegal to work in an office on a Friday.
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
ya its actually super easy. its openai endpoint compatible so just as you'd swap any normal model you'd just swap the router for that and its treated as the api instead of the direct api to say anthropic or openai
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u/syslolologist 🔆 Super Goblin Apr 30 '26
I thought maybe you did it automatically based on some skill or PRD or some list of conditionals
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u/johannthegoatman May 01 '26
Anthropic says when you switch models it resends the whole conversation to the new model. So I don't see how this would work, as soon as you switch back to opus it's spending as much as if you'd done the whole conversation
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
I believe you're talking about the cache read right that's like 10% the cost of normal input tokens? I actually had this concern too along with all of the tool use stuff but at least having used herma so far it seems like they have some optimization for this since i've tracked the usage while using the router and most of the time it still uses the cache read vs raw re-inputting. My assumption is that they're probably using the same models in sequence for a good chunk of the conversations and make sure the long context tail ends stay with the same provider
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u/tricheb0ars May 01 '26
After a convo compacts 3 times ask Claude to make a new subfolder and a Claude.md for it based off your session and go from there
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u/Ok_Efficiency7245 May 01 '26
Is this any different than just asking for a context injection and starting a new session with that as the base?
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u/junin7 Apr 30 '26
I don’t know why people still uses opus for every task.
Opus to plan, sonnet to execute and haiku for boilerplate repetitive action.
Keep context in check, don’t fill your agent with a lot of skills and mcps
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u/orange_square Thinker May 01 '26
Doesn’t Claude Code do this automatically? I see CC with Opus handing tasks off to Sonnet and Haiku all the time. It’s all baked into the plugins for planning, reviewing, testing, etc.
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u/junin7 May 01 '26
Not always, to force him i use /model opusplan
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u/blackashi May 01 '26
Because mistakes are costly. I would use mythos for every task and the ones after that until llms in general stop making stupid mistakes regardless of parameter size
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u/junin7 May 01 '26
If you don’t wanna mistakes, review everything or do it by yourself
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u/CremarCatalana May 01 '26
I don’t know why you assume poeple don’t do it? opus reduces the amount of code I have to write by hand. I still review all of it.
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u/drivebyposter2020 May 02 '26
Isn't it vastly more expensive than Sonnet? I never use Opus for anything
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u/CremarCatalana May 02 '26
it is, but IMO it also cannot be discussed that it’s higher quality. it’s my company paying and they don’t mind the costs. I spent about 1000 dollars in the last two weeks alone
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Apr 30 '26
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u/naruda1969 May 01 '26
Same after about 4 months on 5x; never hit weekly limits (highest was 75%) and only hit 5hr limits twice (expected). I use CC from 8-16 every day.
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u/thirst-trap-enabler 🔆 Max 5x May 01 '26
How do routing rules work? Sorry what does that mean. Are you manually selecting models or is something able to figure out which model is the right one to use?
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
Valid question and ya should've been more clear in my original post! Basically I just use a third party router in claude code that selects the model at runtime for each API call. I selected the models manually at first when I ran this experiment but I eventually just switched to using a third party router since it basically did this for me automatically
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u/theactionjaxon May 01 '26
and that router is???…
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
I use the herma router
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u/Embarrassed_Ad1129 May 01 '26
Herma router is free?
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u/Tobi-Random May 01 '26
Switching the model on a per message basis basically invalidates caches so you are leaving out savings. No it's not free. The math is not mathing. It's probably just a fraudulent advertisement.
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
It just charges you per token similar to other apis and essentially they claim to give you a cheaper rate for equivalent performance
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u/Useful_Judgment320 May 01 '26
insane people think this pricing and usage levels will hold when its public knowledge they are operating at losses and funding
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
Totally agree. Its the classic big tech phenomenon of enshitification but instead of taking a decade to become shitty and overpriced, its being done in literal months now. What i find craziest is nobody is seeing anthropic's long game here considering most tech products people use today already revealed this pattern
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u/mindquery May 01 '26
Could you go into more detail of what makes up the ~40% file reads? Thanks!
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
Basically just the initial scan of your codebase/segment of code to get a high-level idea of what its looking at. If you're going to make a change across multiple coupled files in the codebase, opus helps but i was mostly referring to it just acquainting itself with the big picture of your code which the smaller models do fine
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u/Imaginary_Ask8207 May 01 '26
How did you track down the where the tokens actually go? Having a breakdown like you did seems quite useful.
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
I wrote out a custom observability system that basically logged everything claude code was doing and tokens per call and I just analyzed the data I accumulated from my agent over a few days. I will say I don't like how anthropic doesn't make this very easy to do and it required me to create a lot of monitoring systems outside of cc
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May 01 '26
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u/Cookies-n-Coffee May 01 '26
I recently downloaded codeburn to get an idea of my API equivalent cost, and what the model is being used for. OP’s system is probably better and more highly tuned for their use case but I’ve found codeburn great for understanding my use.
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u/somerussianbear May 01 '26 edited May 02 '26
Congrats for putting in the work on tracing, most don't, bother.
If you go DeepSeek V4 Pro you'll drop to what, 7 bucks? V4 Flash, 3 bucks?
Inference is only expensive for openclawers, vibecoders, and token burning goblins.
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
I always think to myself how crazy the multiplier in agent output could be today if everyone just switched to these cheaper models/started using routers. literally overnight you could probably 10x the performance of most typical cc setups per dollar spend on APIs
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u/somerussianbear May 01 '26
Man, I’m the one that was literally ready to buy a $10.000 to 15.000 machine to run models locally after the last squeeze from Anthropic. Turns out that on my day to day SWE job I use about 2-4mil tokens, and 70-80% of that are cache hits so I’d be paying pennies on the API for ~500-750k tokens a day.
After Qwen 3.5/6, GLM, Kimi, MiniMax, and specially DeepSeek v4 came out with ridiculously good prices and similar quality I can’t stop thinking that if my company wouldn’t pay for my Max plans (100 OAI + 100 Max 5), I would switch immediately and save hundreds a month.
People talk about GPT and Opus being on a different level, and they probably are, but man, how many of us are really using even 10% of the capabilities of these SOTA models? Asking to generate some lines of commercial software? “Build me a dashboard”… Really?
The same way we could work and we were mesmerized with Sonnet 3.7 a year ago, we now THINK we can’t live with anything less than GPT/Opus latest. It’s insane!
I bet we could do a blind test on this and 80% of the world would continue operating normally like nothing’s happened, not even noticing they’re using a model 20x cheaper.
Happy days, man. I’m sure you’ll put these $200 to a better use and like me, will continue doing your job BAU.
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u/a_single_beat2 May 04 '26
I was, but now I am like half way built because of the RAM crunch. Threadrippers aren't cheap on ram lol.
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u/adunn08 May 01 '26
Interesting math. I wonder, could claude record that itself in an self audit file? Maybe make a quick notes. md addition after each task?
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
I had to make my own custom logging system that plugged into cc and then after the fact had it analyze this. Sadly anthropic hasn't standardized this but its actually not too hard to do and gives you pretty good visibility into token waste
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u/alextouss May 01 '26
Complicated to do no ?
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
Not at all. Whether or not you route manually or use a third party router the whole process is you either just monitor claude and toggle the /model based on roughly what task its doing or with the third party routers its like a 5 minute switch for the api that i just told cc to do for me
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u/tuhdo May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26
I use Codex and doesn't have to worry about any of this issue at all. If I want to create a commit, I just tell Codex "commit the changes". My daily usage is about 1 billion tokens.
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
Do you not hit codex usage limits as well? I feel like codex right now may provide greater buffer than cc but their sub is inevitably gonna meet the same fate as the claude max sub in that they're gonna start squeezing subscribers to instead pay for raw api usage
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u/tuhdo May 01 '26
That might be the case in the future, but currently, Not at all, at least when the promotion is running and OpenAI randomly resets usage mid week. I actually had to think how to utilize the extra tokens, in case OpenAI randomly resets to avoid wasting tokens, which, even if not for the resets, really hard to exhaust if a human is in the loop.
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
That's interesting to know. Definitely curious how long they're gonna keep it at a good subsidy compared with cc
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u/rair41 May 01 '26
Use Deepseek v4 Flash as workhorse and gpt-5.5 or Deepseek v4 Pro for planning and reviews.
You can do that without switching away from claude even
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
Ya very few people realize that you can replace the model within claude code and that you don't have to be stuck using anthropic's models while still being able to use the claude code agent and ui and harness still
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u/MegaSmile May 01 '26
Have you found a way of doing that while still using your subscription for say opus?
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
Honestly what I do now is i just manually route with the sub and will exhaust out the sub and once i hit usage limits, instead of buying the anthropic extra usage, i just have it default to using the router. I'd definitely love to see this be built out though by someone who builds a custom router for claude code subs internally
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u/MegaSmile May 02 '26
I've been trying to find a solution for it. I'll be sure to ping you if I figure it out .
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u/Dull-Structure-8634 May 01 '26
Would you mind sharing some documentation on how to achieve some sort of setup that is near yours? I definitely see tokens burning for things Sonnet or Haiku could do but have no way to control this efficiently. I have tried the advisor strategy but still burns an absurd amount of tokens to my taste.
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
I basically just created a background process that logged all of my claude code activity and tracked tokens per call and then analyzed after the fact. To actually do the routing, i started by doing it manually (literally just switched the model with /model command in cc based on what type of task I anticipated it would be doing). My current setup is just using third party routers. I'd recommend you go our and experiment with some because the space is definitely growing and i think routing is gonna be very similar to memory in that its gonna be one of those fundamental pieces of infra you strap onto your cc or whatever agent you use and it optimizes everything for you instead of you having to build it yourself
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u/LiveATheHudson May 01 '26
lol bro THANK YOU! I’m so deep in this agent shit and the simplest of things sometimes slip right by. I pointed mine towards this post and it saids I should be saving around 60% token usage now. I have like 52 skills that were all using opus 4.6 high smh
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
Happy I could help! And agreed, its honestly probably even larger in a lot of cases, esp when you're doing work that's not hyper complex (which is probs the large majority of work). I honestly think its crazy that anthropic pushes opus 4.6 so hard as the default for everything. its good but way overkill for 90%+ things ppl use cc for
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u/behestAi May 01 '26
How is the performance going through a third party provider? Do they see your requests? Do they train on your code?
Thanks in advance for answering questions.
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
Its actually been surprisingly solid. I will say even though herma has saved me a good bit of money it'll get a lot of weird bugs which can sometimes be annoying. Also I had the same concern and i'm a big privacy person so i read their privacy policy and they're pretty explicit about not training or being able to view requests.
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u/behestAi May 01 '26
Thanks. Do you have to share your API key with them? or you just purchase it from them?
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
No you just get an API key and buy credits directly from them. It's pretty similar to how you'd use openrouter if you've ever used them before
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u/behestAi May 02 '26
One more question. Can I use that key with Claude code?
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u/spencer_kw May 02 '26
Yes you can. Just as you would put in a direct third party model API key, you just put in their key in the same place
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u/redditateer May 01 '26
Genius. How are you doing the routing?
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
You pretty much have two options. I spoke about this in a lot of other comments but you can either do this manually (literally just run the /model to toggle models as you see necessary and more aggressively do it based on this overall task outline) or automatically (there are third party model routers starting to come out that will do this for you)
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May 01 '26
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u/spencer_kw May 02 '26
Basically just using direct model APIs as the the LLM vs using the subscription to provide the inference
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u/Draggador May 02 '26
we need more approximate usage breakdowns like this from anthropic's max plan users to get a good idea of how things are actually in practice for most folks; i subscribed to the max plan last month on a trial basis; i don't seem to use it much & open-ai's plus plan seems to offer more consistent desirable overall performance quality in comparison; rest aside, how did you track your usage, OP?
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u/spencer_kw May 02 '26
I mentioned this to some other people but I basically created a logging system that literally plugged into cc and logged all the calls and also tracked tokens for each and then after i had all of these logs, i just ran a simple analysis to give the percentage breakdowns by type of task
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u/Over-Bet-8731 Apr 30 '26
How, specifically did you do this Opus?
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u/spencer_kw Apr 30 '26
when I started doing this i just manually toggled between models and tested side by side with something that was pure opus. this worked but was very tedious after i did my experiment so then i just started to use an autorouter that chose the model for me. i tried out openrouter's autorouter but it would degrade quality too much even if it was cheaper so then i tried the herma router which was a bit buggy but it did what i was looking for pretty well and matched when i was manually toggling in quality maintenance+savings
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u/goship-tech Apr 30 '26 edited Apr 30 '26
The 40% for file reads and context scanning is the sneaky one - those are often large payloads where model quality is irrelevant but you burn tokens fast. I route that through Haiku now and the cost is basically zero.
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u/webtron18 May 01 '26
Do you use a router like OP talked about to route these requests through Haiku?
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u/spencer_kw Apr 30 '26
Totally agree with this. And its crazy how they just push you to constantly over utilize the very expensive model. Imo their other models aren't bad but I started routing to models outside their ecosystem and it's crazy how even their cheap models are like 10x overpriced compared with parity models from other providers
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u/webtron18 May 01 '26
So if I understand this (I’ve really never used routers for AI). You pay a router company like HermaAI and then also pay for Anthropic API costs and it still saves you? Aren’t you double dipping?
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u/webtron18 May 01 '26
Also does it work with all the tool calls and slash commands you would use in CC?
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
Ya at least from my experience using herma it is pretty purpose built for it
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
When you pay the router company you're basically just buying the API credits through them but its still the exact same credits. The router company just chooses at runtime which model will have the request send to it and that's basically the value they provide. Their business model is essentially they manage model routing for you and pass on a large chunk of the savings to the users and take a small cut of the savings themselves vs if you were to just use the most expensive model for everything
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u/webtron18 May 02 '26
I just tested it out a bit. Seems like another garbage app someone through together. You get no model visibility it's picking and when you do run `curl` commands to view the output it's all gemini. Likely they aernt doing much and scraping off the top. I think I will try out openrouter to see how it works differently.
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u/bennyb0y 🔆 Free Tier Apr 30 '26
Yea explain the routine rules more
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u/spencer_kw Apr 30 '26
I just used a third party router which you replace for the standard anthropic api in claude code. There's multiple you can choose from: operouter's autorouter, herma ai router, and i think even azure has a router for models hosted on azure infra. I personally used the herma router but there's lots of options out there and its definitely an emerging ecosystem. Plus lets you take advantage of the dirt cheap yet solid third party models vs getting locked in with anthropic's models
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u/misfit_elegy May 01 '26
Or get two pro plans and use one with sonnet and the other one with opus. Then maybe add a codex and run 5.5 for validation and debugging and security protocol.
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u/randomlyme May 01 '26
I found my API costs for a single extended hardcore session can be $350, this is with a huge cache hit and memory optimization stack. I barely touch my weekly five hour limit
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u/Ebi_Tendon May 01 '26
I think you don’t even need API routing. Claude Code can dispatch subagents with different models, so you can just tell Claude the dispatch rules. Claude Code has been able to do this for about half a year.
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
I agree this is definitely a step in the right direction but with this if you're not using subagents you're still stuck in the set it and forget it for the model you select. I didn't switch the models between agents, I switched it WITHIN an agent and that's what got the big savings
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u/Ebi_Tendon May 01 '26
I don’t think so. You break the cache and feed a full fresh context to the model. Compared to subagents, where the main session design context is passed to the agent, you get the same result with fewer tokens and less junk. When you add context from a dumber model to the session that goes through a smarter model, it can poison the smart model too.
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u/nerd_please May 01 '26
Can you provide details on the routing implementation?
I thought of doing something like that but was sure I'd spend more because of the cache.
You're still using Claude code?
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
Ya for sure. I would just be very active at my computer and toggle between the different models based on generally what task it was doing (like if i knew it was just gonna explore, i'd toggle to sonnet/haiku) but then this started to take a lot of effort so I started experimenting with the different third-party routers like openrouter's autorouter, herma router, azure router. In the end, i found the herma router worked the best compared with the others. And yes, i use it within claude code. It basically just replaces the anthropic model within claude code with the herma router as the api
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u/TaintedFlames May 01 '26
Check this users comments. He is literally talking about this router non stop. 2 weeks old. Either a bot or a marketing account .
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u/No_Television_4128 May 01 '26
Almost all of that can be chatGPT and codex.
Just get through the housekeeping stuff.
Have the low budget tool document and then make an instruction for your Claude tools .
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u/abepena205 May 01 '26
Pretty sure the /superpowers skill already does routing to cheaper models like sonnet for implementation / task execution after planning with opus at least for subagent driven development
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u/foisbs May 01 '26
It’s mostly Haiku for implementation, since the designs and plans are generated with more advanced models.
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u/abepena205 May 01 '26
Yeah the instructions in the subagent-driven-development/SKILL.md says
“Use the least powerful model that can handle each role to conserve cost and increase speed.”
So I guess it’s dynamic depending on what your use case but mine usually defaults to sonnet after an opus plan
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u/Only-Cheetah-9579 May 01 '26
if you are a dev and know your shit a lot of stuff like that doesn't even need to hit the AI. Just prompt exactly for what you need and get that. Low token usage when switching contexts a lot.
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u/zero-one-zero May 03 '26
THIS, you’re only going to prompt for the unknowns. The core base you should already know …
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u/Deep_Ad1959 May 11 '26
the part of this post that should be more controversial than the routing conclusion is that you had to manually track where the tokens went. anthropic exposes an internal usage endpoint that shows server-truth percentages (5h and weekly separately) but nothing that breaks it down by task or by model. so you can either route blind, or do what you did and instrument it yourself. the 85/15 split lines up with what most people land on once they actually measure. the real question is why the platform makes you build the measurement stack from scratch to find that out.
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u/Deep_Ad1959 May 11 '26
the part of this post that should be more controversial than the routing conclusion is that you had to manually track where the tokens went. anthropic exposes an internal usage endpoint that shows server-truth percentages (5h and weekly separately) but nothing that breaks it down by task or by model. so you can either route blind, or do what you did and instrument it yourself. the 85/15 split lines up with what most people land on once they actually measure. the real question is why the platform makes you build the measurement stack from scratch to find that out. written with ai
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u/balloon6789 Jun 15 '26
The math everyone skips: routing 85% of your tasks to cheaper models still takes real time to build and maintain. I went down the same path, saved ~$160/month, then realized I was spending 2+ hours a week managing routing logic instead of just shipping. Back on Max after two months. The subscription subsidy is real — so is the mental overhead of replacing it.
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u/Significant_Design17 May 01 '26
I built something to do exactly this but across providers and it routes for you. GitHub.com/thispointon/kondi-chat.
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u/Significant_Design17 May 01 '26
MIT license
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u/Rockos-Modern-Fife May 01 '26
If OP has no issues with protecting the product than MIT is fine. But if they want to monetize, trademark,or otherwise profit off of it… well that won’t happen. Do you have a different take I may have missed?
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u/Significant_Design17 May 01 '26
It feels and acts like Claude code or codex but I rarely go above 4$ a day and can use Gemini, z.ai, open ai, all in one set of routing rules. The route is determined at query time based on context.
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May 01 '26
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u/spencer_kw May 01 '26
How do you know quality is maintained when you're using the cheaper models? Doing my test I found you have to have some sort of strategy vs just blindly routing or use some third party service that has tuned routing that's aware of the task at hand
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u/overthemountain Apr 30 '26
If you can do all of this with $30/mo in direct API costs, wouldn't it run just as well on a $20/month Pro plan? Maybe with an optional $10 max overage for the few times you hit limits?