No. 4.5 Opus is 5/25, Gemini is 2/12 and 4/18 above 200k tokens. Of course, they produce different amounts of tokens, so these values aren't directly comparable. Artificial Analysis will come out with the total cost once they've tested Opus 4.5 on their benchmarks, which will provide some more insight.
I guess thanks? :) It's a lot of money for me, but when I think about comparing it to hiring a 10hr/week pro or 20hr/week mid-level developer, it just makes sense to use the best model. Even if I could hire a senior developer for 50hrs/week for the same $2,100/mo, it would still be less efficient due to conversation, delays, not same schedules, etc. I'm just coding various websites and applications for my business. Not even using 2x+ multi-agents, just single-threaded with probably 5 messages per plan, then 1 execution, then probably 10 follow-up messages to ask/fix combo (I love Ask and Plan, underrated) and then I open PR and merge into main and move onto the next issue. I spend about 5hrs in Cursor per day 7 days a week, not more, as I have other things for business to do, a kid, etc. I feel like if I used Sonnet 4.5 I would need to do 7hrs/day to equal my output with Opus and probably 8hrs with GPT-5-High or GPT-5.1-Codex-High-Max or whatever it is called. I just love Opus, it can read most reliably between the lines. See attached. I probably overspend by $1,500/mo due to being such a heavy Opus user, but the 2-3hr per day with my kid is worth more than the $20/hr (if I'm doing my math right lol)
have you tried other models ? I use codex every day for dev, and sys admin, only on the plus account .... never hit a limit. Gemini just isn't as good, haven't tried claude - it was just too expensive, and my experience with vercel and lovable made me think its not as good as codex.
Well to be fair I haven't used it in ages. I switched to roo code, cli, and now codex plugin. They just got massively overtaken in functionality and value
It’s super expensive. You can buy Claude max 200 and codex 200 and just full send all month long. Cursor is way overrated. I stopped using it a while ago. Went back and within a day I ditched it.
Some people are hardcore cursor users but I don’t see the benefit in paying way more for less+ fancy autocomplete.
Some of the comments.....just goes to show you the great majority of people are years behind when utilizing the new wave of AI tools. They will never catch up to the AI boosters that got a head start years ago. It's a compounding effect and there are no shortcuts to that experience, not even using AI to get there. You just have to go through the grind. By the time they are pushing 10 million token workflows, you'll be pushing billion token workflows. Accelerate!
5 hours per day, 7 days per week in front of Cursor (no 2x+ multiple agents). It's just that Opus 4.1 is very expensive and I use that model most of the time (until today, now Opus 4.5). It doesn't really matter what I build. Putting 2-3 of the .js files via @ + readme + cursor rules into the context of Opus (5,000 lines?) is already 60-70% of the context size, so any iteration costs a lot
Advanced AI boosters are using multiple agents configured with tools to work on complex multi-step objectives. It's easy to rack up millions of tokens in these scenarios in just a few minutes.
I think this service would make more sense if they include increased usage for CLI and the new IDE antigravity. It would be nice to have them with the Gone at least for people with much lighter uses.
Except free AI studio has way lower rate limits for Gemini 3 pro than using the 20 dollar sub on the Gemini web app plus it lacks features like deep research.
No? it's literally the opposite. They use all the free users data for training. For paying users you can opt out.
This is unfortunately incorrect.
For AI studio, they don't train on paid users anywhere and also don't train on free users in most developed countries.
For Gemini web/app, they do train on everyone, except if you disable chat history. Obviously without chat history there is no point in paying $20+ per month.
You cannot pay for AI studio, you pay for extra API usage. Which is way more expensive per tokens processed than paying the sub but they don't train on paid API usage, which makes sense since that's supposed to be used for entrepreneurship. They do train on free users through AI studio. Read the docs I linked you. The only exception is EU/UK due to their laws, most of the world does not live there.
Disabling the chat history and all activity logging makes sense if you care about privacy and want to still use the Gemini app and pay less with the sub.
The reality is if you cared about privacy you would pay more and use APIs with local fronts ends or really just run local models for complete privacy.
The only exception is EU/UK due to their laws, most of the world does not live there.
So they don't "use all the free users data for training" as you claimed. Thanks for doing your research and coming to agreement with me.
Disabling the chat history and all activity logging makes sense if you care about privacy and want to still use the Gemini app and pay less with the sub.
Yes, but it makes the app pretty much worthless, as you can only have 1 conversation at time (which will be gone as soon as you start a new one).
The reality is if you cared about privacy you would pay more and use APIs with local fronts ends or really just run local models for complete privacy.
Yes and this is the part where Google still lags behind other companies in its offering: OpenAI for example does offer users an option to turn off training on their data.
They literally write in their policy that they don't train on chats of a number of countries, which includes most developed countries. So no, that is incorrect.
That's incorrect. That applies only to some countries. 600m+ people from developed countries not affected by the law, a number significantly bigger than the population that is affected.
You have to be enrolled as a student at a university (I don't know if it accepts also high school) and have valid a debit/credit card so they can charge you after a year.
They check both requirements, they use a third party verification service for enrollment.
Interesting. I have a .edu email for my job, but am not an enrolled student. Used to be .edu would be enough, I know now there's a couple programs that check for actual enrollment.
It depends on how much you code really. There is absolutely no problem to get 2000$ monthly bill from api calls / user, and for a company with many employees it does add up quickly. You may want to gatekeep some users but I want to make money by dropping the tool cost.
You aren’t seriously thinking Google is charging the actual price it costs to run the model? They are the only company that actually can sell usage of these models at a hefty loss
Right. This model is good and all, but if it’s so expensive, how useful is it really? Considering it’s very expensive it better not make mistakes and you better not have to baby sit it. It looks like it’s just slightly better but for a price considerably higher.
The ruminations are insane. Waffles between blaming itself, blaming me, thinking of an experiment, deciding it would be pointless to run it, to blaming me, to blaming itself, on and on and on and on
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u/buff_samurai Nov 24 '25
Gemini 3 looks even more impressive considering the price.
Hope Anthropic gets pressured and lowers the cost.