Also, if you sign up for Anthropic’s feedback program you get a 30% reduction on API usage.
It is insanity to spend thousands of dollars a month when you could be spending hundreds for the exact same product.
It's an absolute no-brainer. And it's not even "either or". You can use both the plan and fallback to the API when you get rate-limited. A 30% discount on tokens cannot match the 90% discount on tokens you get using the plan. The math is so unbelievably in favour of the plan.
There are probably people who are not heavy users where the plan may not make sense. But for heavy users, you are burning piles of your own money by not using Anthropic's Max plan. You only need a week of moderate usage a month and already the plan will have paid for itself compared to paying for API credits directly.
Maybe that's the key piece of information you're missing where you mistakenly thought the rate-limits applied to the whole month, when in fact they apply to a 4-hour window.