I feel crazy. LMK if I’m crazy… My CC account is maxed out, so I spent time figuring out how much it would cost to get the same amount of usage from an Opus 5.5 ~equiv model. Shockingly, it’s likely cheaper to stick with my CC sub. Here are the receipts The setup 5 Max accounts at $200/mo each, so $1,000/mo (different clients accts) Compared against DeepSeek V4.1 Flash on OpenRouter, which is listed at $0.022 / $0.40 per 1M and looks like a steal Usage pulled from my actual CC transcripts ( ~/.claude/projects/**/*.jsonl ), not estimated. Every assistant message has a usage block. I counted each response once and included subagents My usage October: ~82B tokens November so far: ~25B in 4 days ~97% of it is cache reads Output is only ~176M/mo Cache reads are the bill. Output barely matters. What the same tokens would cost on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (at my Nov pace) Why the cheap price isn’t cheap That $0.022 / $0.40 is one provider (Morph). Default routing spreads you across ~35 providers, and most of them charge $0.30 / $1.20. Cache misses kill you. At 97% cache reads, every miss is billed at full input price. OpenRouter shows each provider’s real hit rate, and they range from ~70% to ~98%. The cheap provider is slow. Morph does ~38 tok/s vs 200+ for the fast ones. That’s roughly 17 seconds per turn instead of 3 at my average output. Painful in agent loops. Watch quantization. Some of the cheap providers run FP4. Max is flat. My usage doubled from October to November and my bill didn’t change. Bottom line The best case is pinning the slowest provider and hoping its cache works as well as Anthropic’s. That saves me ~$50/mo, and every turn takes ~5x longer. Every other setup costs more, some of them 3-4x more. Sticking with Max. Heads up if you want to run this on your own usage: CC deletes transcripts after 30 days by default ( cleanupPeriodDays ), so bump that if you want history. Happy to share the script if people want it. PS: This prob sounds like an Anthropic shill…it’s not. I was just surprised and wanted to share. I assume OpenAI, X.ai/Grok and other frontier labs are offering similar subsidized pricing. Best I can tell, they’re barely making money on top of the inference costs if you’re maxing out your sub submitted by /u/Dorkian2000
Originally posted by u/Dorkian2000 on r/ClaudeCode
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