I’ve been trying to understand why people buy Claude API credits for personal coding use when the Max plan seems dramatically cheaper. I did a rough measurement by tracking my token usage over a month and comparing it to Anthropic’s API pricing. Based on the token counts and model costs, my Max subscription usage would have cost somewhere around $500–600/month even more than that through the API. That made me wonder: Are people buying API credits mainly for automation and integrations? Is the API significantly less rate-limited than Max? Are there capabilities available through the API that justify the higher effective cost? Or am I underestimating how much usage heavy API users actually consume? For people who actively use both Claude Max and the API, where do you see the value in paying for API credits instead of just upgrading to Max? submitted by /u/intellinker
Originally posted by u/intellinker on r/ClaudeCode