I’ve been using Claude Code, the Max 5x subscription, which is $100/month for about 5 months now. It is the main cost for my apps, at least for now, while marketing is just starting. I am happy with the quality. What I’m not sure of yet, is the price that I pay.

For the last 3 months I also ran in parallel MiniMax 2.7, as a backup model. Used mostly when I was hitting my Claude Code limits, and just as an experiment for less important features.

Three days ago, MiniMax 3 was released, with improved coding capabilities (benchmarks are placing it above ChatGPT 5.5) AND a 1 million token window. The main limitation of MiniMax 2.7 was the 200k context window, which made it unusable for large codebases (and all my 10 apps are large codebases). Now, with 1 million and a $20/month subscription for the token plan, there’s literally no reason NOT to try switching.

I will still keep Claude Code, with Opus 4.8 subscription for the entire month of June, but I will try not to use it all.

The Setup

Until now, my coding was 95% terminal, and 5% Visual Code extension. For all the apps I used just a plain bash terminal where I launched the Claude Code cli, and that was it. For my blog I used a combination of Visual Code and terminal inside Visual Code, in which I again ran the Claude Code cli.

The setup worked because I am very used to the using cli, I have years of interacting with the computer like this, back when I was using Linux as my main operating system. But if there are more than 5-6 terminals that I have to monitor at the same time, friction arises and I spend too much time just switching back and forth.

So, I searched for something more visual. Seems like Open Code is my sweet spot. It can run a variety of models, has very decent git integration, and, if the planets align, can also be my UI layer for local inference – which is basically my North Star now, that’s where I want to be in 6-9 months time.

Switching models inside it is also very easy, and the connectors – the types of APIs you can integrate with – covers a large chunk of the current providers. I already use it for 3 projects,

The Money

Claude Code Max 5x is $100/month. I have barely hit my limits with it, but I’m using large prompts, which trigger conversation compacting very often.

MiniMax Token plan is $20/month and gives me roughly 1.7 billion M3 tokens / month. Based on my usage patterns with Claude Code, I suspect this is maybe 2-3x of what I currently have. At 5x less money.

The only unknown is if MiniMax 3 can actually deliver the same level of quality like Claude Code.

I’ll keep you posted.