I Calculated What My $200/Month AI Subscription Actually Produced. Here’s the Math.

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I pay $200/month for Claude Code Max. After 50 days, I wanted to know: is this rational?

Not “is AI useful” — I know it’s useful. The question is: what did $200 produce, and could I have bought that cheaper?

I built a calculator to answer this. Not just for my setup — for anyone’s AI subscription stack.

AI Cost Reality →

My 50-Day Numbers

What happened Number
Claude sessions 3,446
AI work hours 109
Git commits 458+
Tools shipped 8
Articles written 30+
Games shipped 5
Revenue generated $4.99

That last number is the uncomfortable one. $4.99 in revenue against $400 in AI costs over two months.

The calculator doesn’t hide this. It shows you the full picture.

How the Calculator Works

Select your active AI subscriptions: 

□ ChatGPT Plus   $20/mo
□ Claude Max     $200/mo  ✓
□ GitHub Copilot $19/mo
□ Cursor Pro     $20/mo
□ Midjourney     $30/mo
... (12 options + custom)

Then it shows:

  • Total monthly/annual spend
  • Cost per session (from your cc-session-stats data)
  • Cost per commit (if you paste your git log count)
  • Comparison: What the same amount buys in human hours
    • Junior developer: ~$35/hr (US average)
    • Senior developer: ~$85/hr (US average)
    • Freelancer: ~$50/hr (global average)

At $200/month and 109 hours of AI work: $1.83/hour. A junior developer runs $35/hour.

The math says yes. If the AI is genuinely doing the equivalent of human dev work.

What $200/Month Actually Looks Like

My tools output at cc-session-stats –json shows:

  • 109 hours with AI
  • Average 2.3h/day
  • Peak usage: Fridays (20.5h total across the study period)
  • 35-day consecutive streak

In human-equivalent terms at junior dev rates: that’s ~$3,815 of human time for $200.

But “equivalent” is doing heavy lifting here. The AI doesn’t context-switch. It doesn’t get tired. It also hallucinates API endpoints, introduces bugs while fixing other bugs, and occasionally tries to push to main.

The Honest Assessment

The calculator adds a “reality check” column based on your actual productivity data:

Input My value What it means
Monthly cost $200
AI hours/month ~65h (109h over 50 days)
Commits produced ~275 (458 over 50 days)
Cost per commit $0.73 Pretty good
vs. hiring 3-17x cheaper per hour If AI works as intended

“If AI works as intended” is where your mileage varies.

Try It

Select your subscriptions, add any custom tools, paste your session count if you have cc-session-stats running:

Calculate your AI cost →

What does your cost-per-commit look like? I’m curious whether the math holds for other setups.

Leave a Reply