bunx ccusage Shows $18,450 in Credits Burned — Flat Plans Absorb the Cost
A Reddit user on r/ClaudeAI ran bunx ccusage monthly -s 20260501 --all and discovered they had burned $18,450.29 in credits during May — on a flat-rate subscription of €200/month for Claude Code plus €200/month for Codex (€400 total). The tool calculated 248M input tokens, 42M output tokens, and 21.7B total tokens when counting cache reads.
What bunx ccusage Shows
The command bunx ccusage@latest pulls actual usage data from Anthropic's API history. In this case, the user's side project — built in evenings, weekends, and early mornings — consumed far more than the subscription covers. They noted: "so on the actual usage side they're literally losing money on me I think."
Flat Plans vs. Pay-as-You-Go
The €200 Claude Code flat and €200 Codex flat plans are currently subsidized, as the user acknowledges: "subscriptions are paid with VC money at the moment." This level of consumption would cost $18,450 on pay-as-you-go pricing. If Anthropic adjusts pricing or removes flat options, heavy users like this could face steep increases.
How to Check Your Own Usage
Run this in your terminal:
bunx ccusage@latestOr for a specific month:
bunx ccusage monthly -s YYYYMMDD --allIf you're on a flat plan, it's worth checking — especially if you use Claude heavily outside of work hours.
Who Should Care
Developers on Claude flat-rate subscriptions who want to know their true consumption before pricing changes. Also useful for teams negotiating enterprise plans.
📖 Read the full source: r/ClaudeAI
👀 See Also
Claude Code at Scale: How Agentic Search Avoids RAG Failure Modes in Large Codebases
Claude Code uses agentic file-system traversal instead of embedding-based RAG, eliminating stale index issues. The article details five extension points (CLAUDE.md, hooks, skills, plugins, MCP) and the harness-as-model philosophy for multi-million-line repos.
Claude Dispatch Beta: Setup Tips and Initial Impressions
A developer shares their experience setting up Claude's Dispatch beta on a Mac Mini, highlighting the need for constant uptime, specific success criteria, and aggressive permissions with Computer Use enabled.
Recursive Self-Improvement Framework for AI Coding Agents Using Claude Code
An open-source framework enables AI coding agents to recursively improve themselves using Claude Code. The system analyzes agent traces, identifies failure patterns, and implements fixes, achieving a 25% performance increase in one test cycle.
WCY format reduces LLM token overhead by 50-71% and adds structural 'I don't know' markers
WCY (Watch-Compute-Yield) is a line-oriented format that reduces JSON token overhead by 50-71% and introduces structural '?' markers for LLMs to indicate uncertainty during reasoning. The format requires no fine-tuning—just three few-shot examples.