$10 of API credits vs $10/month plan: benchmark shows heavy agent users get 3-5x more work per dollar

NoahPersaud · reddit · 2026-11-09

The author had Claude design and run an experiment measuring what $10 of pay-as-you-go API credit (DeepInfra) buys for agentic coding on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash versus CommandCode's $10/month GOAT plan (advertised $100 of usage). Method, tasks, and raw logs are open-sourced in the plan-bench repo.

TL;DR: worth it if you code with an agent daily; not for occasional use. Once your monthly API spend exceeds $10, the plan buys 3-5x more work per dollar at the same quality. On real codebases, agent sessions run 5-10x bigger than the benchmark's tasks, moving break-even down to roughly 12-25 tasks/day.

Key findings:

Same model, same quality: both routes passed 25/25 hard tasks with reasoning on; both slipped with it off (19 and 21/25). Reasoning made tasks cheaper too.
API: $0.0028 per passed task; $10 ≈ 3,500 tasks, not tied to a month.
Plan: $0.0083 of credit per passed task, 12,000 tasks for $10 if fully used; weekday peak hours (UTC 01-04, 06-10) cost double, covering over half this run.
Plan adds 1s latency; no rate limits or malformed tool calls across 2,863 requests.
Downsides: CommandCode outputs can't be used for training; multi-accounting is forbidden.

The author, who trains decision models for games and uses Claude Code's $200 plan, plans to keep both.

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$10 of API credits vs $10/month plan: benchmark shows heavy agent users get 3-5x more work per dollar

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