Simon Willison thinks the AI labs have found product-market fit. Here’s his own monthly usage priced at API rates against the $200 he actually pays:
- $1,199.79 for Anthropic Claude Code
- $980.37 for OpenAI Codex
That’s $2,180.16 worth of tokens for $200—not bad at all! I’m a moderately heavy user of these tools, but I’m certainly not running agents every hour of the day and night.
That discount is gone: since April 2026 enterprises pay full API rates. Willison’s read:
Coding agents really did change everything. These are tools which burn vastly more tokens, but are also quickly becoming daily drivers for the work carried out by extremely well-compensated professionals. Right now that’s still mostly software engineers, but a coding agent is a tool that can automate anything you can do by typing commands into a computer… so they are clearly applicable to a much wider set of skilled knowledge workers.
Right now the bill falls on engineers. Designers may be next. Anthropic has already rolled out a separate usage meter for Claude Design. And Figma is charging for AI usage overages.
