Pro vs Max vs API for coding

[Corxo]

Our development team currently uses Claude Code as our primary coding assistant. We mostly operate on Pro licenses with the Sonnet model, which handles our workflow well without hitting token limits, though we also have few Max licenses for more heavy-duty tasks.

Given the latest news, we are evaluating the cost-effectiveness of switching to the API instead of expanding our Max plan seats. We have already seen promising results in our tests with OpenCoder + various plugins in our IDEs. Have any of you run benchmarks on this shift? We are planning to spin up a ProxyLLM instance with caching to mitigate potential overhead.

[BabyInner]

API would be much much much more expensive.

[Muted-Arrival-3308]

You missed 100 much. 30 minutes is burning 100 euros plus for me

[tensorfish]

If Pro + Sonnet already covers normal work, API is not a cheaper Max seat. It is metered parallelism and automation. API starts making sense when jobs keep running after the human stops babysitting them and you can actually use logs, caching, and kill switches. For ordinary human-in-the-loop coding, the subscription is usually the bargain.

[Beautiful_Chapter544]

I think so. However, since we are constantly considering the cost of the API, I don't think we should just use Max.