If you pay for ChatGPT or Claude and you genuinely lean on it by spending your day coding, running agents or even churning through long research sessions, then you're getting one of the best deals in tech right now. And yet, you're also the reason the deal won't last.
At least that's the uncomfortable takeaway from a new analysis by research firm SemiAnalysis, which bought every paid tier from OpenAI and Anthropic and deliberately ran them into the ground. The team pushed each plan with long, agent-style coding tasks until it hit the weekly usage cap, then worked out what all those tokens would have cost at standard pay-as-you-go API rates.
The gap between what you pay and what you get turned out to be enormous.
