Anthropic's Claude Max dashboard gives you a vague "weekly utilization" percentage. It's a frustratingly opaque metric when you're trying to figure out if the subscription is actually saving you money compared to just hitting the API.

Someone finally ran the numbers. A recent Reddit post and experiment tracked 80 autonomous coding tasks, simultaneously measuring the per-task API-equivalent cost and the change in that elusive weekly percentage. The resulting math gives us a concrete dollar value for a full weekly limit.

Here is what the limits are actually worth in API pricing:

• Max 5x ($100/mo): A full week is worth about $523. That's roughly 20x ...