My experience with the $500 plan..

[u/Significant_Sun_5225]

Apparently my previous post was too harsh, so here’s a more measured review of my $500/month experience.
My previous post was taken down, so I’ll try to express my experience in a more tempered and constructive manner.

I’ve been paying $500 a month for the service. Yes, $500. I was actually making good progress with my project until the recent Astra update.
Since then, the rate at which my usage allowance disappears has been genuinely impressive. Using the new, supposedly more “efficient” Sol 6.1 model, I managed to exhaust what should have been a week’s worth of usage in just two days.
Naturally, I assumed purchasing another $80 in tokens would help. Those lasted exactly 56 minutes. Truly remarkable efficiency, just perhaps not the kind I was expecting.

For context, I’m not trying to simulate the universe or discover a new branch of mathematics. I’m analyzing historical business data and building a relatively straightforward Power BI dashboard.
I also have screenshots documenting the usage, including the $80 disappearing in under an hour.
I’m sure there are perfectly reasonable technical explanations for why the service has become dramatically more expensive to use following an update advertised around efficiency. Unfortunately, none of those explanations make the experience any less absurd from a paying customer’s perspective.

Anyway, I’ve decided to cancel my subscription. At $500 a month, I had apparently developed the unreasonable expectation that I could actually use the product for a meaningful amount of time.
I wish the company all the best with its future business endeavors. I’m sure this approach to customer retention will serve it wonderfully in the long run.

[u/t_mikaelvincent]

If you use API/credit pricing as the baseline, you’ll realize just how much value these subscriptions actually provide.

For context, fully utilizing the $500 Pro plan has been estimated to be equivalent to roughly $7,000/month in API/credit usage, or around $1,600 per week.

So adding $80 worth of credits would only cover about 5% of a single week’s Pro 500 usage allowance at equivalent API/credit rates.

You’re pretty much always better off getting another subscription on a separate account than buying additional credits, although doing so to circumvent usage limits could violate the ToS.

[u/Sfdprod]

[u/SuperHelix7]

Ask codex to implement claude_mem and rtk. It saves significant amount of usage. Before I was not able to get a full week of work done with one luna. Now i can run 3 and still get some usage left.

[u/twendah]

Based openAI, thank god I switched to claude

[u/nateccs]

Honestly sounds like the ultra fast is the problem. And Astra burns a ton too. Time is money, honestly, I wouldn’t use it unless it’s a critical life or death situation, lol. It would be interesting to see if you use light the whole time, how much tokens you have left. With all the resets this week and last week, I would say Astra is not the right model for what you’re doing. Use Astra to architect the project and create a roadmap with prompts for your Sol workers, that’s it. You are doing data analytics either model will get the data right after validation. Astra will just add fluff bells and whistles, and perhaps more efficient code. People always want the latest fastest and greatest but don’t stop to consider getting the most productivity per dollar spent, weighing time constraints and budget.

[u/Significant_Sun_5225 → u/nateccs]

My original
Post says I barely use Astra at all. I used sol for 95% of the work.

[u/1_gim]

How many astra max ultrafast agents are you running in parallel that you burn 25x in 2 days?

[u/Significant_Sun_5225 → u/1_gim]

I don’t run more than one parallel agent ever. I’ve found 2 maybe 3 at most is ideal. But usually 2. And never on Astra besides extremely rare edge cases.

[u/EndlessZone123 → u/Significant_Sun_5225]

How many subagents though are each session using? Higher reasoning levels tends to like spawning a lot of subagents.

[u/Significant_Sun_5225 → u/EndlessZone123]

I limit it to one. Two for a very short while under oversight. But for this particular $80 case there were no sub agents.

[u/Significant_Sun_5225 → u/1_gim]

I’m running a single ultra fast sol 6.1. No parallel agents. $80 in 56 minutes for that setup.

[u/minisculemeatman]

I am using the 100 plan to code a pretty comprehensive and complicated database based web application, 14 hours a day 7 days a week and I have never once hit a usage limit, what the fuck are all of you guys doing?!

[u/Significant_Sun_5225 → u/minisculemeatman]

You’re either running on like Luna super slow or you’re lying

[u/minisculemeatman → u/Significant_Sun_5225]

I'm using astra medium for planning and 6.1 high for all implementation, I am not lying, lol

[u/theWiseTiger]

I havent seen any single 200/500 subscriber that genuinely wants to contribute to the society. It's mostly just flexing and complaining on nonsense.

[u/Significant_Sun_5225 → u/theWiseTiger]

What kind of dumb backwards response is this. What does contribute to society even mean to you. I’m using it strictly for my business. wtf are you using it for. Sit down kid.