AI subscriptions are more generous than their API equivalent

SemiAnalysis bought one subscription of every Anthropic and OpenAI plan and ran random, long-horizon coding tasks until they hit the weekly limit. The common wisdom: a $200/mo plan squeezes out roughly $2000/mo worth of tokens at API prices. In practice, subscriptions turned out to be far more generous — they hand out noticeably more tokens than the same money buys through the API.

Takeaway for anyone who codes heavily with LLMs: there's a real arbitrage between a flat subscription and per-token API billing. For heavy users a subscription almost always wins — providers subsidize it to keep you inside their ecosystem. For the exact per-model, per-plan breakdown, see the SemiAnalysis thread.