It's impossible to justify the jump in the expense unless you are directly working on something that makes you money. Messing around on a hobby project, doing some quick research, and getting personalized notifications was a no brainer for 200 a year.

The product keeps getting worse so I will definitely evaluate options and possibly switch if management keeps screwing up the product.

I found the perfect sweet spot for my hobby development. I pay 7 euros for Gemini plus and use it for creating the architecture and technical specs. Those are fed to Sonnet on Pro that just implements the instructions. This gives plenty of space to do long sessions several times a week.

True that.

Max 5, sonnet for 95% of things. I never run out of tokens in a week and I use it for ~5-6 hours a day.

I dare to call meself a senior dev, so I don't need a replacement, I need a tool.

I'm not a vibe coder or software manufacturer.

I juts need a convenient commandline tool to sometimes analyse the repo and answer a few questions about it.

Am I unworthy of using CC then? Until now I thought Pro entitles me to doing so.

LOL, the elitism is through the roof.

For some reason you are being downvoted but I wanted to echo your sentiment. As someone who tries to switch things up for every next task, the productivity of Claude Max is worth every penny.

And I actually read the output to fix what I don't like and ever since Opus 4.5, I've had to less and less. 4.6 had issues at the beginning but that's because you have to manually make sure you change the effort level.