177: Your AI Subscription Is About to Get a Lot More Expensive (And What To Do About It)

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Summary: Yesterday Anthropic quietly ran an AB test that removed Claude Code from the $20 Pro plan, apparently hoping nobody would notice. They noticed. What started as a pricing page edit turned into a useful window into where AI costs are actually heading, so I put together a presentation on what's going on: why inference is now the bottleneck, how Jevons Paradox means cheaper tokens still lead to higher bills, and why the all-you-can-eat subscription model is living on borrowed time.

The practical bit covers what you can actually do about it right now: Codex as a serious alternative (genuinely good, and embarrassingly generous with limits), local models via LM Studio if you're happy spending on hardware, and a set of prompting habits that will meaningfully reduce your token consumption without slowing your output. If you're building anything with agentic tools, this is the context you need before prices stop being theoretical.

—— Time Stamps ——

0:00 Intro: The AI Pricing Era Is Here 0:43 Anthropic Pulls Claude Code from Pro Plan 2:39 Codex Team Trolls Anthropic 4:14 What This Means for $20 Pro Users 5:41 The Broken Promise of Cheap AI 7:15 How Agents Changed the Economics 9:35 Inference: The New Bottleneck 11:45 China's Electricity Advantage 12:25 Solution 1: Switch to Codex 14:05 Solution 2: Run Local Models 15:25 Token Efficiency Tips 16:32 The Future: AI Employees, Not Subscriptions 18:53 Outro & Newsletter

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