$200 a month with Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 won't let you replace a $12.5k / month employee - but it's cheap enough that everyone, including you and even your employees, will want to see how much utility they can squeeze out of it.

This is a price to get people hooked up, yes, but also to get them to explore all kinds of weird tricks and wacky workflows, especially ones that are prohibitively costly when billed per token. In some sense, this is crowdsourcing R&D - and then when Opus 7 or whatever comes along to take advantage of best practices people worked out, and that turns out to be good enough to replace your $150k/yr / $12.5k/mo employee - then they'll jack up prices to $10k/month or whatever.

$200 a month gives your $12.5k / month employee a handy assistant who can take care of things you'd love to automate or would employ a junior dev for.

And makes your codebase completely unmaintainable, even for Claude. The more Claude runs one does, the more unmaintainable the codebase becomes, and more tokens Claude spends on each subsequent run. It's a perfect ecosystem!

> replace a $150k

Seems tangential? Price entirely depends on what consumers/businesses willing to pay and the degree of competition

> If I replace a $150k yr employee

Based on my experience with Claude Code (which is relatively good TBH), I'd say good luck with that.

You can spend $2000 a month if you want, they have an pay what you use option.