I think you're underestimating the "more expensive". It's not a 30% discount or similar. API is at least 10 times more expensive (own experience), ~40x as expensive if [1] is accurate.
At that price difference, lots of things that are viable to do in whatever harness the subscription allows are simply impractical via API, you'd be spending a whole developer's salary just for the benefit of using a different harness.
I tried for example Deepseek V4 Pro for a bit (via API pricing), but it's _more expensive_ than Sol via subscription, even though $1.7/Mtok is a lot less than 20$/Mtok.
> API is at least 10 times more expensive (own experience),
More. On CC I'm currently burning ~$5k a day (according to claudes own metrics) and I use up the weekly quota in about 3-4 days. Meaning I'm eating $20k worth of tokens for a $200 sub.
Current session I have running in the background, spinning up tests mostly
> At that price difference, lots of things that are viable to do in whatever harness the subscription allows are simply impractical via API, you'd be spending a whole developer's salary just for the benefit of using a different harness.
Could you elaborate on that?
Off topic:
You did the ISBN visualization thing! Awesome!
At that price difference, lots of things that are viable to do in whatever harness the subscription allows are simply impractical via API, you'd be spending a whole developer's salary just for the benefit of using a different harness.
I tried for example Deepseek V4 Pro for a bit (via API pricing), but it's _more expensive_ than Sol via subscription, even though $1.7/Mtok is a lot less than 20$/Mtok.
[1]: https://tibotattle.com/