I did some testing, as I have two accounts, one private, which is currently Pro, and another Team. I enabled 20$ of usage based pricing on my own one, nothing like that on Team one.
- When I do request with my own account (Pro), if I am within rate limits (which I mostly am) I simply see in the dashboard that I made a request, and it is included in Pro plan. The trick is in the last column (Cost/Requests) says just “-”.
- However, when I do reach usage based pricing, and I never know when it is gonna happen (I am not hitting “after every two requests I am limited” like some people do) it really go crazy - sometimes it shows 0, then it shows 0.11, and when I refresh the same tab, for the same request, it shows up to 2$ per that single request. However, in this case, I do see token usage, and I can potentially reason why something costs 0.11 and something is 1.92.
- Fun comes with my team account: it still says I have 500 requests per month, but at least it shows transparently that every request I make costs 2 requests - simply because I am using Claude 4 Sonnet. I kinda remember reading about this change (in the sea of other changes in last two months). Which is funny - for 100 requests I make I am actually charged 200, so considering I am doing software development and not just chatting with ChatGPT about the weather, other models for me are quite useless.
- I did try other models of course. But considering what I just wrote above, it results simply in more requests for the same result.
So talking about transparency:
- It is unclear for me how much a request really costs: is one request with zillion tokens free in whatever package simply because it is one request? In usage based pricing it is clear it is charged based on tokens.
- Is one request in Ultra/Pro Plus/Pro to Claude 4 actually always 2 requests? Meaning that whenever you send a single word to Sonnet you are two steps closer to being rate limited?
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t even have a problem with this. I just have a problem with having no idea what is happening and being rarely privileged one to be even able to test this myself and spend my own money vs being shown by a simple dashboard what is happening and what I can expect for which money. I don’t even mind paying 60 or 200$ per month for predictable and very transparent service but I am having less and less trust that whatever I pay for is gonna change on someone’s whim in a product standup at Cursor because why not.