FWIW I've only ever been on the API based plan at work and we never seem to run into the majority of the problems people seem to be very vocal about. Outages still affect us, and we do have the intermittent voodoo feeling of "Claude seems stupider today", but nothing persistent.

Of course it's a stupid amount of money sometimes, but I generally feel like we get what we're paying for.

If you're using API pricing, then you can bring your own harness with full visibility/oversight of the prompting.