I just have the Anthropic 100 USD Max plan and it's enough for daily work - I sometimes do hit the 5 hour limits by mid day, but weekly ones usually cap out at around 80% or thereabout, even with this approach. I usually use xhigh, sometimes max, both still result in situations where I need to intervene plenty, not even on that complex use cases (some LLM stuff, mostly web based CRUD, some light data processing, integrations with Jira and GitLab, processing PDFs and so on, sometimes ML training and geospatial work, like the Sentinel-2 satellite data, nothing crazy).

If I had to pay per token, I'd probably look at DeepSeek. In general it feels like it's a bit early for the technology - either our software methods are wasteful, or the hardware hasn't caught up. To me, it appears that we often need to throw more tokens at these problems, not less, since otherwise it's just one-shot slop.