Yeah, $200/month makes sense if you're a contractor passing the cost to your client, but if you're a hobbyist or employee it's a massive chunk of money.

You can try it with a regular dev account and it charges you per token. It's still costly, e.g. around $20 for an active hour of experimentation, but you can just run `/cost` at any point to see how much you've paid so far, and decide when to stop if it's not worth your money.

You can get pretty far with much less. See https://steipete.me/posts/2025/stop-overthinking-ai-subscrip...

You can actually use it with Claude Pro, which is 20/month

Zed.dev’s agent is comparable and includes 50 prompts per month free.

You can use openai's codex, or any of the claude code clone's available on github.

At the end of the day all do the same. a cli tool that can call tools and use them as needed.

https://github.com/openai/codex http://aider.ai/

the $100/mo plan is more than enough i never get fully limited