The question comes up constantly and the answer depends on how you work. Here are the options by the numbers and by scenario.
What each costs
Claude Code is available on the Pro plan at twenty dollars a month, on Max at one hundred or two hundred, or pay-per-token through the API. For teams there is Team Premium at one hundred twenty-five dollars a seat with a five-seat minimum.
A subscription gives you limits that refresh on a schedule. The API charges exactly what you consumed.
Where a subscription wins
Subscriptions win on steady daily load. If you sit in Claude Code for a few hours every working day and only occasionally hit limits, a fixed amount is predictable and usually cheaper.
There is a second benefit: you stop thinking about spend. That costs money and saves attention.
Where pay-per-token wins
Three scenarios where a subscription nearly always loses.
Spiky load. Two intense weeks, then a quiet month. A subscription bills in full whether you used it or not.
Automation and background jobs. An agent in CI, nightly runs, queue processing. There is no human at the keyboard, and subscription limits are designed around one.
Several projects or clients. Spend needs splitting and a subscription is not built for it. On tokens you simply issue a separate key and see spend per key.
The trap nobody mentions
A subscription is bounded by limits, and when they run out the work stops. They tend to run out exactly when a task turned hard, which is the worst possible moment.
Pay-per-token has no such cliff: the only bound is your balance, and you can see it coming.
Working it out for your case
Take a real week of yours and estimate the token volume. There is a calculator on our site with presets for typical scenarios: a Claude Code session, an agent running for a day, a team of five. The presets are editable, put your own numbers in.
Then compare against the fixed subscription amount. The line usually falls where you work fewer than four days a week, or conversely where you run automation around the clock.
A note on Russia
Paying for a subscription directly with a Russian card does not work: the payment is cut at BIN level. So for a Russian developer the choice is often not subscription versus API, but a foreign card with all its risks versus paying for tokens through a gateway that takes local payment.
Through Claudexia tokens are paid by SBP, card, MTS or crypto, no Anthropic account is needed, and the minimum top-up is one dollar.
In short
Steady daily work with a human at the keyboard means a subscription. Spiky load, automation and multiple projects mean tokens. If you are in Russia, add the cost and risk of maintaining a foreign card to the calculation.