The loss-leader pricing is still really distorting perceptions.

I've been a $20/mo Claude subscriber for about a year. My work uses Cursor "auto" agent selection is by far the most efficient option in there, and I can burn $80 in a day on Cursor doing the same kind of stuff I'm doing on Claude for less than $1 per day.

Then there's the Google Pro Gemini access at $4.99 per month for 3 months, then $20 per month thereafter, and while the Gemini 3.8 isn't quite as sharp as Claude Opus 5, it feels like Google is showering far more token access than Claude does in this "basic" subscription tier.