What the maintainer actually pays for AI subscriptions vs what the same usage would cost at API list prices — real fees, showback valuation and counterfactuals, kept apart. Aggregates only: no workspaces, no sessions, no content.
History gap · Claude Code — no usage on record before 2026-09-24. Claude Code deletes session transcripts after 30 days, and this history was gone before tokencur kept a ledger. The 2026-07-21 snapshot, which still had it, recorded $750.56 of Claude Code usage value (2026-06-04 to 2026-07-21). Its subscription fee is not counted across the gap, so lost records don't read as months paid for nothing.
Correction · 2026-10-02 — Subscription fees were counted across the whole window, as if all three plans had been paid every day of it. Each plan now counts only while it was active: Codex CLI through April 2026, Kimi Code from June to September 2026, and Claude Code from 2026-09-24, upgraded from $20 to $100 a month on 2026-10-02. For 2026-02-07 to 2026-10-02 the page had published $240.49 of estimated outlay and 3.5× subscription leverage; counted plan by plan, the same window comes to $96.59 and 8.7×.
Correction · 2026-10-02 — Codex usage was counted about twice: Codex re-sends each usage report, and earlier snapshots counted every copy. Codex usage value went from $685.66 to $332.95; every Codex session now reconciles with Codex's own running total. Details in the changelog.
Subscription fees really paid, each counted only while its plan was active (Claude Code $20/mo from 2026-09-24 to 2026-10-01, then $100/mo from 2026-10-02; Codex CLI $20/mo until 2026-04-30; Kimi Code $10/mo from 2026-06-21 to 2026-09-30): actual money. Leverage = API-equivalent usage value ÷ estimated outlay over the same window (fees not counted across the history gap above).
Claude Code: Pro for about a week before the upgrade, counted from 2026-09-24, the first day on record.
Codex CLI: ChatGPT Plus, no longer paid. Its cancellation date was not recorded, so it counts through April 2026, the month Codex CLI was last used.
Kimi Code: No longer paid. Its dates were not recorded, so it counts from the first day Kimi Code was used through September 2026, the month it was last used.
Provider bills (RunPod Pods $2.69) are real money too, for compute rather than coding-agent usage, so they stay out of subscription leverage.
Subscriptions bill a flat fee, not per token. These figures value the usage at API list prices: what this work would have cost on pay-per-token billing.
Cost avoided by caching is a property of the provider's architecture, not an action taken. Under a flat subscription, right-sizing buys rate-limit headroom, not dollars — it would save real money only on API billing.
| day | Claude Code | Codex CLI | Kimi Code |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-02-07 | $0.00 | $2.00 | $0.00 |
| 2026-02-08 | $0.00 | $1.37 | $0.00 |
| 2026-02-09 | $0.00 | $2.48 | $0.00 |
| 2026-02-10 | $0.00 | $8.33 | $0.00 |
| 2026-02-11 | $0.00 | $5.29 | $0.00 |
| 2026-02-12 | $0.00 | $12.17 | $0.00 |
| 2026-02-13 | $0.00 | $2.52 | $0.00 |
| 2026-02-14 | $0.00 | $7.71 | $0.00 |
| 2026-02-15 | $0.00 | $13.94 | $0.00 |
| 2026-02-16 | $0.00 | $4.75 | $0.00 |
| 2026-02-17 | $0.00 | $0.79 | $0.00 |
| 2026-02-18 | $0.00 | $16.26 | $0.00 |
| 2026-02-19 | $0.00 | $1.47 | $0.00 |
| 2026-02-20 | $0.00 | $31.64 | $0.00 |
| 2026-02-21 | $0.00 | $10.31 | $0.00 |
| 2026-02-22 | $0.00 | $0.60 | $0.00 |
| 2026-02-23 | $0.00 | $1.36 | $0.00 |
| 2026-02-24 | $0.00 | $0.77 | $0.00 |
| 2026-02-25 | $0.00 | $0.52 | $0.00 |
| 2026-02-26 | $0.00 | $0.15 | $0.00 |
| 2026-02-27 | $0.00 | $5.79 | $0.00 |
| 2026-03-01 | $0.00 | $4.93 | $0.00 |
| 2026-03-02 | $0.00 | $1.63 | $0.00 |
| 2026-03-03 | $0.00 | $0.70 | $0.00 |
| 2026-03-04 | $0.00 | $0.80 | $0.00 |
| 2026-03-05 | $0.00 | $3.68 | $0.00 |
| 2026-03-06 | $0.00 | $28.97 | $0.00 |
| 2026-03-07 | $0.00 | $13.84 | $0.00 |
| 2026-03-08 | $0.00 | $36.81 | $0.00 |
| 2026-03-09 | $0.00 | $24.56 | $0.00 |
| 2026-03-10 | $0.00 | $79.31 | $0.00 |
| 2026-03-11 | $0.00 | $6.94 | $0.00 |
| 2026-03-16 | $0.00 | $0.19 | $0.00 |
| 2026-03-17 | $0.00 | $0.03 | $0.00 |
| 2026-04-25 | $0.00 | $0.34 | $0.00 |
| 2026-06-21 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.17 |
| 2026-06-23 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $1.20 |
| 2026-06-24 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.31 |
| 2026-06-28 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.42 |
| 2026-06-29 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.11 |
| 2026-08-06 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.11 |
| 2026-08-10 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.11 |
| 2026-09-04 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.01 |
| 2026-09-24 | $8.91 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| 2026-09-25 | $5.69 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| 2026-09-26 | $21.14 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| 2026-09-27 | $71.88 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| 2026-09-28 | $106.04 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| 2026-09-29 | $26.14 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| 2026-09-30 | $79.85 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| 2026-10-01 | $95.62 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| 2026-10-02 | $189.02 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| 2026-10-03 | $10.49 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| model | value USD | tokens |
|---|---|---|
| claude-opus-5-5 | $603.71 | 1,474,504,594 |
| gpt-5.4 | $189.95 | 341,017,638 |
| gpt-5.3-codex | $139.71 | 405,185,814 |
| claude-fable-5-1 | $7.36 | 1,982,985 |
| gpt-5.2-codex | $2.49 | 5,414,267 |
| claude-opus-5 | $2.46 | 264,415 |
| moonshot-ai/kimi-k2.7-code-highspeed | $2.44 | 9,925,718 |
| claude-opus-4-8 | $1.26 | 686,048 |
| gpt-5.1-codex-mini | $0.81 | 15,048,582 |
| kind | recommendation | USD (list prices) | % of baseline |
|---|---|---|---|
| achieved | Prompt caching on claude-opus-5-5 | $5,391.27 | 91.8% |
| achieved | Prompt caching on gpt-5.4 | $685.19 | 90.0% |
| achieved | Prompt caching on gpt-5.3-codex | $593.84 | 90.0% |
| potential | Right-size claude-opus-5-5 → claude-sonnet-5-5 | $157.43 | 26.1% |
| potential | Right-size gpt-5.4 → gpt-5.3-codex | $50.66 | 26.7% |
| achieved | Prompt caching on claude-fable-5-1 | $15.03 | 78.4% |
| achieved | Prompt caching on gpt-5.2-codex | $7.87 | 90.0% |
| achieved | Prompt caching on moonshot-ai/kimi-k2.7-code-highspeed | $7.26 | 83.2% |
| potential | Right-size claude-fable-5-1 → claude-opus-5-5 | $4.24 | 57.6% |
| achieved | Prompt caching on gpt-5.1-codex-mini | $2.98 | 90.0% |
| achieved | Prompt caching on claude-opus-4-8 | $2.41 | 71.5% |
| potential | Right-size claude-opus-5 → claude-sonnet-5 | $1.48 | 60.0% |
| achieved | Prompt caching on claude-opus-5 | $-1.12 | -85.1% |