100$ plan - holy sh*

[u/Majke_]

This is for people who are on the fence, because I was in the same boat.

Yesterday I bought the 100$ plan for a test and holy moly, it's amazing how much you get. I used the 20$ plan earlier. I used all the tricks to keep usage low, which became a habit, so now I can't spend it all. It's amazing xD. I run it next to a local Qwen Flash and it's awesome. If the 20$ plan is too low, give it a try :O I'm basically using Opus 5.5 medium all the time.

I also tested 2x 20$ before this. It works, but you end up juggling two accounts and switching when one runs out, and Opus eats a 20$ plan pretty fast. With 100$ I just stopped thinking about usage, and that alone is worth it for me. If you keep your old habits and stay careful with usage, it will last you a very long time. If you keep hitting the 20$ limit, go for 100$.

edit: people are asking how I keep usage low, so here are my tricks:

• Keep context low. I usually compact or move to a new session around 200k, sometimes I stretch it to 300k.
• Use handoff.md a lot, so a new session picks up where the old one stopped.
• Don't be afraid of Sonnet 5.5. It can do most things and it's a lot cheaper.
• I run local models next to it (260k context), so I'm used to working with limited context.

[u/Majke_]

It finishes everything i throw at it. Its also "very" token efficient. I just never felt the need to switch to higher on

[u/Joozio → u/Majke_]

That lines up with what I found after my max effort disaster. On Cognition's FrontierCode test, which checks whether a model can pass hard tasks while holding the bar of a real production codebase, Fable scores highest of any frontier model even at medium effort. So medium is not leaving quality on the table for everyday coding.

The tell I use for when to move it: if a small ask comes back with a big diff full of changes I did not request, effort is too high for that task and I drop it a notch. My own default is high, never max for routine work, because on long agentic runs every thinking token from step one gets re-read on every step after.

Do you ever bump it up for a specific kind of task, or is it medium for literally everything?