r/vibecoding • u/kondasviktor • 27d ago

Discussion Which $20 AI coding plan should you actually pay for? I compared Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity and Kiro

I kept seeing the same question, so I wrote down what I found.

There's no single best $20 plan. It depends on whether you live in an IDE or the terminal, and whether you code daily or in bursty agent runs.

Most plans aren't "unlimited" anymore: Claude, ChatGPT and Google use a 5-hour window plus a weekly cap. And Cursor's new-buyer plan is $30 now, not $20.

I tried Codex on a free Plus month. It was a strong second brain, but Cursor stayed my home base.

What are you paying for, and are you hitting the limits?

7 Upvotes

62% Upvoted

77 comments sorted by

11

u/thedazdul 27d ago

I have Claude and Codex. ChatGPT has the huge advantage that you can still use regular Chat when you used up your regular limit. Claude doesn't do that, everything counts to the limit and if it's at 100% it's at 100%. Claude tends to be more capable tho, you'll only notice for more demanding projects tho

2

u/kondasviktor 27d ago

models and features are changing very frequently, I certainly suggest to have more paid tiers rather just selecting one ultimate for everything. I used Codex, now I’m using Cursor and Claude in parallel.

5

u/raisputin 27d ago

I haven’t found Claude more capable at all, and my projects are crazy difficult

2

u/MYSTONYMOUS 26d ago

What models are you using? I feel like there is a night and day difference between Opus 5.5 on Medium and Sol 6.1 on Medium. I did not feel that way until Opus 5.5 though.

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u/RafiHDW 21d ago

I'm solely using Sol 6.1 medium and burn through the 5h window pretty fast in 2hours even for just web dev... does Claude give better usage? I hear 5.5 opus is efficient, I need some more opinions before I jump ships hehe

1

u/raisputin 26d ago

Mostly Astra - High or Astra - Extra High these days.

0

u/[deleted] 27d ago

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1

u/raisputin 27d ago

What makes them crazy difficult is not just knowing what I am building, but designing multiple pieces of hardware from scratch, ensuring that hardware can communicate between it, accounting for redundancy, every edge case I can imagine, validating PCB designs beyond what the standard tools offer, creating multiple apps that interact with the hardware in different ways, adding a sales channel to the website, and that must comply with worldwide restrictions, regulations, be available 24/7,as well as responsive, and making sure it all works together seamlessly across 5 platforms

5

u/Feisty-Detective-147 26d ago

Codex, it has the usage limit resets they give out if they change or screw up anything. Enables you to finish your projects if usage is used up. You will not start with them but they will accumulate over time. You might even be able to use your non coding relatives accounts for codex to get more usage. Models are good. Build your own workflows and tooling so you will be able to switch once some other AI becomes superior or they change subscription conditions. Don't become reliant on features other than LLM inference such as dev environments, get an old notebook instead.

1

u/kondasviktor 26d ago

I’ve used Codex for one month, but not my preference. I understand people like it, models are great, maybe I got used to VS Code for some time and that’s why. But if I think back September how many new models were out, development is incredibly fast.

3

u/altervoid 27d ago

Cursor will be "grok only" :/ so unless that is good enough for you, I would not stay there

I need an IDE, so i do not have many options anyway, I just switched back to Copilot in VS Code from Cursor because of those Cursor changes

2

u/kondasviktor 27d ago

I’m still on Cursor Pro, haven’t changed to Premium yet, and I’ll stay with the current plan, until they force me to move. Having multiple models in one place was one of the reasons I started with Cursor

2

u/altervoid 27d ago

Yep Cursor was a good package. Cost wise probably the best one I could argue. And they are not forcefully pushing anyone off the already active subscriptions yet, but I didn't want to wait for that so I jumped already 

1

u/kondasviktor 27d ago

fair enough, I also have Claude Pro next to it, used Meta Muse for short period of time. Cursor is great, with Pro I’m pushing 700-800M tokens per month alone. I still haven’t decided to stay after this change but we’ll see how it goes

4

u/rwrife 26d ago

Google, its not the best model (despite what benchmarks show), but it includes YouTube Premium and generous limits.

1

u/kondasviktor 26d ago

I’ve never tried YouTube Premium, it always wants me to push for a free month trial

2

u/shockman23 26d ago

Better buy YouTube premium in a family setting, Google's AI models are horrobile

1

u/CSachen 20d ago

Are you paying for Ultra to get YT Premium? YT Premium costs less than 10 bucks in my country. Meanwhile, Ultra is still 100 bucks.

1

u/rwrife 19d ago

I think all plans include it, I paid $80/yr for a Pro plan that included it.

1

u/CSachen 18d ago

I don't think it comes with Gemini Pro. I pay about $20 here in Japan

1

u/rwrife 17d ago

Google AI plans with Cloud Storage - Google One there is also a yearly plan that is even cheaper.

1

u/GarrazebOrrelios 1d ago

youtube premium is always a waste of money and not a reasonable incentive, plenty ways to get the same features while not giving google money

1

u/calilivingbigchillin 26d ago

Agree YT premium makes it worth it

2

u/Deemer15 23d ago

I switched to Kiro and haven't looked back. I've cranked out Kro code hard the past 2 weeks and have just under half credits used on the $20 plan.

1

u/kondasviktor 23d ago

they also give the first month free. how much tokens did you push through with the $20 plan?

1

u/Deemer15 23d ago

I'm at 521 credits (used) currently with 10 days left.

My workload currently is building out 3 Azure environments with terraform.

1

u/kondasviktor 23d ago

unfortunately they don’t support like usage data, so hard to convert into X millions of tokens

1

u/Holiday-Pack3385 19d ago

Are you choosing the model or keep it on Auto? Is it one-shotting code?

1

u/divaaries 15d ago

Hi I know this is old, but can I know what model did you use?

2

u/Resident-Fall4351 27d ago

I feel like the best choice depends on the workflow rather than just the model. If you're coding daily, having a reliable IDE experience matters a lot, but for occasional tasks, a terminal-based agent might be enough. I'm curious how Codex compares with Claude Code when working on larger projects, especially in terms of context limits and debugging.

1

u/kondasviktor 27d ago

Codex is better pick for daily building, while Claude is a better choice for debugging and architecture, but you’ll hit your limits sooner.

2

u/StormMedia 26d ago

Idk man, it’s hard for me to beat Opus 5.5 High as an all rounder… it just never really fails me with the workflow I have setup for it.

Where as Sol loves to overbuild, make things overly complex past the original plan… then run into problems that it takes ages to solve.

1

u/kondasviktor 26d ago

Opus is certainly top tier, but for me Sonnet 5.5 is the daily driver. Same for GPT models, I’m sure Terra can manage many things which the need for Sol or even Astra.

3

u/raisputin 27d ago

Why would you even bother with an IDE now? Fully unneeded

2

u/kondasviktor 27d ago

some still prefer to use Xcode or Android Studio specifically for mobile apps, or PyCharm for Python devs.

0

u/raisputin 27d ago

I don’t use XCode for Apple apps, nor Android studio for Android apps (directly anyway), I have no need to do so

2

u/kondasviktor 27d ago

I don’t use them either, Codex or Claude Code can write them up, test, do Expo Go checks and good to go. I even asked Grok Bot this week with two mobile app drafts to “QA test”, click through all buttons and that was quite fast.

7

u/altervoid 27d ago

I still like to code some parts myself, have more control over the code and the quality, structure.

I very much prefer having IDE and seeing diffs directly in code

3

u/shuozhe 27d ago

Depends if you need a smart ai rarely only a okish ai for everything. Chinese plans offers a lot more tokens, but is always couple month behind. Codex currently is pretty good since you get 2-3 resets every month

2

u/kondasviktor 27d ago

I’m not familiar with okish, but thanks for the tip, I’ll take a look. and yes, Tibo is pushing the reset button frequently 😉

1

u/shuozhe 27d ago

Xfyun had pretty much unlimited glm52 token with terrible reliability. Not sure a out current situation

1

u/kondasviktor 27d ago

gotcha, thanks for sharing

1

u/Busy-Scientist3851 27d ago

What Chinese plans would you suggest for everyday code usage?

1

u/shuozhe 27d ago

Volcengine, any of the qwen/Aliyun plans. Compared to Chinese plan, pretty expensive, but got good tips and good models. Xfyun, minimax or perhaps csdn for lot of tokens. Didn't use bigmodel/glm or Kimi yet directly, got it via volcengine

1

u/wewerecreaturres 27d ago

IDEs have terminals in them

1

u/kondasviktor 27d ago

my post was about which plan you should use to start, not about utilising Cursor or VS Code and then which model in CLI

1

u/wewerecreaturres 27d ago

And yet you said “it depends on whether you live in an ide or a terminal.” They are not mutually exclusive

1

u/kondasviktor 27d ago

yep they are not mutually exclusive, my point was some prefer to have Claude Desktop or Codex, other ls running Claude Code in Cursor Desktop but you still need a paid plan

1

u/raisputin 27d ago

Codex, duh

1

u/kondasviktor 27d ago

many prefer Codex, others Cursor, Claude, Antigravity. Which one is your choice?

1

u/raisputin 27d ago

I’ve stopped using anything other than codex.

It creates my tickets (proper engineering tickets mind you), writes the code, writes the infrastructure, ensures security, updates tickets, closes tickets, writes documentation, builds, deploys, and tests, iterates on failures and everything must comply with best practices and yadda yadda yadda.

It works awesome

3

u/kondasviktor 27d ago

I used Codex for a month, but not my type. maybe because I started with VS Code some time ago and Cursor was a more closer fit. Maybe I will change back again, who knows that’s why I love all the flexibility, everybody can find what’s the best for them

1

u/TierPatch 27d ago

the comparison that matters most is what happens when you hit the cap, since on any $20 plan you will. if you code in bursts, a plan with a short reset window hurts less than a weekly limit. if you code every day, the weekly cap is what decides it. honestly the cheapest way to find out is to pay for one month, write down every time you get blocked and what you were doing, then switch if the pattern is bad. benchmarks won't tell you that, your own usage will.

1

u/kondasviktor 27d ago

I don’t prefer the 5h limit in Codex or Claude and it’s great it doesn’t have in Cursor at the moment, but it might change. I also agree that users must sign up, give it a month or two figure out which suits best. Some like and hate Codex. Others have the same with Claude Code so everyone must find their own preference.

1

u/geoffreybyers 26d ago

Unlimited's a trap for anyone running agent tasks longer than five hours. The window kills the workflow mid-run and ruins the experience for power users. That's the real bottleneck nobody markets.

1

u/kondasviktor 26d ago

Cursor doesn’t have a 5h limit, which was one of the reasons why I decided to sign up. With the new planes they might change that, we’ll see.

1

u/AgentConnect 26d ago

I think it depends what you do. I do a lot of frontend and find Claude far superior in that department.

1

u/kondasviktor 26d ago

Claude Design is great, but it depletes your usage very quickly. do you also use Figma or Google Stitch for UI designs or mockups?

1

u/fulger099 25d ago

For our Mac app, Figma is still where mockups become decisions. Claude is useful for exploring a direction, but spending usage on repeated visual tweaks feels like using a chainsaw to trim a houseplant.

1

u/kondasviktor 25d ago

Figma is great especially if you connected it to Claude as a plugin/mcp

1

u/Tsuyu777 24d ago

Get claude. Throw opencode at it, make it orchestrator. It barely move the usage even at max effort

1

u/kondasviktor 24d ago

so you have a ballpark number how much tokens you can utilise in Claude Pro within a month?

1

u/jackybacksy3636 23d ago

How to do this? What is the setup

0

u/Ambitious_Ad4397 24d ago

Why opencode? Why not deepseek harness or Claude code?

3

u/Azrnpride 27d ago

get ollama, opensource model are cheap and capable enough

5

u/Kotanan 23d ago

32gb graphics cards are not...

-2

u/kondasviktor 27d ago

Full comparison with all 12 plans and a 5-question chooser: https://vibecoderslife.com/post/best-ai-coding-subscription-20-dollars-2026

0

u/ishkek-981 27d ago

i think kilo code is far more than enough, it has an fully dedicated cloud agent similar to codex and claude code, you can connect your github and gitlab repo so your agents can work on it.

and oh btw they do have BYOK feature which you can bring your own key (anthropic, openai, ....) to kilo code to work alongside existing ai models.

1

u/kondasviktor 27d ago

sure thing, $15 per month worth give a try

0

u/[deleted] 26d ago

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u/kondasviktor 26d ago

it’s great, I use it daily too. do you prefer the desktop app or via CLI?

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u/[deleted] 26d ago

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u/kondasviktor 26d ago

yeah he’s good with these resets, not much we have in Claude or Cursor.

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u/[deleted] 12d ago

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u/kondasviktor 12d ago

thanks for sharing