AI Coding Plan Calculator
Tell us how you actually code — CLI agents vs IDE, frontend vs backend, hours per day. We'll pick the cheapest Claude, Codex, or Cursor plan that won't lock you out.
How do you use AI for coding?
What do you build?
Backend & full-stack pull bigger files into context — burns tokens faster.
How much will you use it?
Which model do you mostly use?
Opus burns 5× the budget of Sonnet at the same number of turns. Pick what you actually run.
Prompt cache hit rate
Re-using the same system prompt or file context across turns is heavily discounted. Anthropic charges cached input at 10% of base, OpenAI at ~50%. Long agent loops are typically 50-80% cached.
Vendor preference
Optional — leave on No preference for the absolute cheapest fit across all vendors.
Inputs sync to the URL — share the link to share your scenario.
Your projected burn
Top picks for you
Smallest price that handles your typical session
Cursor Ultra
Cursor
Power user running parallel agents in Cursor. Competes directly with Claude Max 20×.
Best margin per dollar — for bursty heavy days
Cursor Ultra
Cursor
Power user running parallel agents in Cursor. Competes directly with Claude Max 20×.
No subscription plan fits this scenario. Consider the pay-as-you-go API instead.
Pay-per-token API: Claude Sonnet 4.6
At 50% cache hit rate, paying the raw API works out to $144/month on Claude Sonnet 4.6. That's cheaper than Cursor Ultra ($200) — consider the API.
All plans, ranked by price
$10/mo with unlimited inline completions + $10 of AI Credits for chat/agent.
- ·On heavy days you exceed the 5h window by 2700%.
$19/seat. SAML SSO, IP indemnity, no training on your code.
- ·On heavy days you exceed the 5h window by 1393%.
Sonnet + Haiku via web and Claude Code. Limits not numerically published.
- ·Limit numbers are community-measured; the vendor does not publish exact caps.
- ·On heavy days you exceed the 5h window by 6300%.
$20 of pass-through API credits since the June 2025 model change. No more 500-request quota.
- ·On heavy days you exceed the 5h window by 1020%.
$39 credits, unlimited completions, Opus 4.7 + GPT-5.5 + Spark.
- ·On heavy days you exceed the 5h window by 647%.
Per-seat. SSO, audit logs, pooled credits on Enterprise plans.
- ·On heavy days you exceed the 5h window by 460%.
$70 included credits × 3× usage multiplier on frontier models.
- ·On heavy days you exceed the 5h window by 273%.
Marketed as 5× Pro. Two weekly caps (Sonnet + all-models) since Aug 2025.
- ·Limit numbers are community-measured; the vendor does not publish exact caps.
- ·Weekly cap is the binding constraint here (18% of demand).
- ·On heavy days you exceed the 5h window by 3100%.
20× Pro. Full Opus access, still gated by a weekly Opus quota.
- ·Limit numbers are community-measured; the vendor does not publish exact caps.
- ·Weekly cap is the binding constraint here (73% of demand).
- ·On heavy days you exceed the 5h window by 1144%.
$400 credits × 20× multiplier + priority feature access.
View sources & methodology
Plan prices and per-model API rates come from each vendor's official pricing page (linked below). Rate-limit caps are tricky: Anthropic publishes only “5× / 20× Pro” multipliers, so the numeric token caps we display are triangulated from community reports (Reddit r/ClaudeAI, faros.ai engineering blog, The Register's coverage of Anthropic's March 2026 limit changes). Plans flagged Estimated caps are exactly those. OpenAI switched Codex to token-credit metering on April 2, 2026 — Plus/Pro “messages per 5h” figures are official ranges, but exact token allotments are not yet on the rate card. Cursor moved from request quotas to dollar-denominated API credits in June 2025; the 3× and 20× multipliers on Pro+ and Ultra are how their dollar allowances stretch in practice.
Burn rates come from a combination of vendor docs and community-measured per-hour token consumption. Prompt caching savings — 90% off on Anthropic, ~50% off on OpenAI — are documented in their respective API docs.
Data verified 2026-05-12. Anthropic does not publish numeric 5-hour caps — their figures are triangulated from r/ClaudeAI and engineering blog reports. OpenAI switched Codex to token-credit metering on April 2, 2026. Cursor's plans use dollar-denominated API credits since June 2025. To know your actual burn on any plan, install SessionWatcher.
How this calculator works
We multiply your daily message volume by realistic per-message token estimates (~4,800 tokens for a Claude Code turn, much higher for long agent runs), then compare against each plan's published 5-hour rolling window. The cheapest plan that gives you 25% headroom wins.
Why not just buy the biggest plan?
Because most developers pay for capacity they never use. SessionWatcher data shows the median Claude Code user burns under 40% of their plan's daily budget — that's $120/month wasted on Max 20× for someone who'd fit on Max 5×.
What the calculator can't tell you
Your actual usage. Self-reported message counts are notoriously off, and Claude Code agent runs consume 10–20× a normal message. The only way to know is to measure. That's what SessionWatcher does.
SessionWatcherStop guessing your plan. Track real usage in your menu bar.
Native macOS menu bar app. Track Claude and Codex usage, costs, and rate limits in real-time.
“Fast, simple, and does exactly what it should. Definitely worth it.”
@nicojerome on GitHub
macOS 14+. $7.99 one-time purchase.
