Spending Too Much Money on a Coding Agent

I can see how pricing at 100 to 200$ per month per employee could make sense for companies, it’s a clear value proposition at that scale. But for personal projects and open source work, it feels out of reach. I’d really like to see more accessible pricing tiers for individuals and hobbyists. Pay per token models don’t work for me either; earlier this year, I racked up almost $1,000 in a month just experimenting with personal projects, and that experience has made me wary of using these tools since.

Sources

I’ve seen some people describe getting pretty good value out of the Claude $20 plan with Claude Code?

Pro is fine for medium sized projects, stick to 1 terminal.

> Pay per token models don’t work for me either; earlier this year, I racked up almost $1,000 in a month just experimenting with personal projects, and that experience has made me wary of using these tools since.

Can't have your cake and eat it too.

Behold the holy trifecta of: Number of Projects - Code Quality - Coding Agent Cost

> But for personal projects and open source work, it feels out of reach

Is it? Many hobbies cost much more money. A nice bike (motorbike or road bike, doesn't matter), a sailing boat, golf club/trips, a skiing season pass ... $100/month is significantly less than what you'd burn with those other things. Sure you can program in your free time without such a subscription, and if you enjoy that then by all means, but if it takes away the grunt work and you are having more fun, I don't see the issue.

Gym memberships are in that order of magnitude too, even though you could use some outdoor gym in a city park for free. Maybe those indoor perks of heating, lights, roof and maintained equipment are worth sth? Similar with coding agents for personal projects...

Github Copilot has unlimited GPT-4.1 for $10/month.

is GPT-4.1 decent for coding?

And you can use it as an API, so you can plug it as an OpenAI compatible LLM provider into any 3rd party tool that uses AI, for free.

That's the only reason I subscribed to GitHub Copilot. Currently using it for Aider.

Say more. Is the API access unlimited? What models are available?

It's unlimited for the models that have unlimited use in GitHub Copilot, gpt-4.1.

couple hours a day or?