Yeah. $100 for Claude just about gives me all the usage I want, as a more or less full-time hobbyist having it work in the background most of the day. I was trying to economize by having a local LLM, then Deepseek, then Cursor/Grok, and then I got a taste of Opus 5.5 and I simply cannot go back to having to carefully spec things out and double-check work. I just let it decide, Opus or Sonnet for the next task, and I get almost perfect results. Probably similar with OpenAI's models.

The token-equivalent monthly spend is > $5K+. If Deepseek's token cost is 20x cheaper, that's $250/mo, and I'd be spending a lot more of my brainpower babysitting it and getting worse results.

For business/team accounts that pay per-token, maybe I can see the "freaking out" being warranted on the part of the fronter labs. But as long as they're willing to subsidize their end-user subscriptions, I'm not going to move off of them until the alternatives are truly at their level.