I think Opus is just an expensive model on API, especially without context management. A single message with near full context (I think this was still on 250k as well) costs like 1$ or something like that iirc.

Imo this is the premium I pay right now to just not have to worry about this. The project where I burned 50$ in a day was using superpowers plugin (A set of skills that makes Claude meticulously plan out design and implementation, interview for details, use subagents for subtasks and review them independently, etc.) - it burns tokens like crazy, but it has super good results for me for custom software tools for myself.

I would probably change my approach if I a) was creating software for customers where I had to actually worry about the implementation details or b) if I was forced to switch to API and couldn't just throw Opus at a 28-task plan for an hour. But this works for me right now so meh. I feel like I'm in some rare Goldilocks zone where Anthropic is not super ripping me off (I use CC quite heavily and generate real value for myself) but I also don't go crazy if I go 2 days without building the next SaaS startup.