Cheapest hire I've ever made

I had one Claude Max 20x sub for over a year. Every so often I’d hit the weekly limit. Nothing broke. I just got impatient.

Then I started doing a lot more with Opus 5.5, mostly coding on Cortex and other internal tools. Cortex is the operating system I’m building for Painter Marketing Pros. It runs our internal operations, helps the team do good work for our partners, reports on it, and gets them better results.

I bought a second sub and hit the limit again within days. So I bought a third.

Last week, I used 15.2B tokens across the three. At API prices, that week alone would have cost about $4,989. I pay around $1k a month for everything: three Claude Max 20x subs, Codex and Cursor. It still feels like I’m getting away with something.

There’s one dip in the chart, on Oct 11. That was the night I slept.

Theo posted a few days ago:

Despite having 6 accounts, it’s not looking good for my Claude limits right now.

That made me feel better about 3, which probably says something about me.

My days now are writing specs, reviewing what the agents ship, and testing it myself. That’s where things stall. The agents finish faster than I can check their work, so I’m the bottleneck now.

There’s a line in The Phoenix Project I highlighted ages ago:

Any improvements made anywhere besides the bottleneck are an illusion.

I didn’t expect to be the bottleneck.

If you’re on one sub and keep hitting the limit, buy the second one.

~ aq