Plans & limits

Every Claudin.io plan is unlimited usage with a spend-protection cap. You're not billed per token or per request — you pay a flat monthly price and use it freely. The cap exists only to stop a runaway agent (an infinite tool loop, for example) from draining your plan.

The plans

Plan	Price	Spend protection	Best for
Essential	$19 / mo or $189 / yr	$2.00 / hour	Quality for everyday use
Pro ★	$39 / mo or $389 / yr	$4.00 / hour	Heavy agentic workflows
Ultra	$99 / mo or $989 / yr	$10.00 / hour	Maximum power, teams & production

Most people never hit the cap

The hourly cap is generous for normal interactive work. You typically only brush against it if an agent goes into a tight loop — which is exactly when you want a brake.

Which model should you choose? Claudinio vs Claudius

We offer two main models for your coding agent:

Model	Backend	Use case	Recommended for
claudinio 🏆	Fast, balanced, cost-effective	Everyday coding, hobby projects, general code	All plans (Essential to Ultra)
claudius ★	Premium, deep reasoning	Complex tasks, deep reasoning, heavy agentic workflows	Pro and Ultra

claudius is included in Pro and Ultra

On Essential, a request that names claudius is not rejected — it is served by claudinio and billed at claudinio rates. Your agent keeps working and you are never charged the premium rate on a plan that does not include it.

On Pro and Ultra, remember the cap is measured in dollars, not requests: the same work on claudius uses roughly six times as much of it. On Pro ($4/hour) that is about 70 premium requests before the hour is gone; on Ultra ($10/hour), about 175. Keep claudinio as your agent's default and reach for claudius when you actually need the reasoning.

Straight talk

If you're on Essential ($19) — same answer, and you have twice the cap to spend on it. claudius is not part of this plan; if your agent asks for it, claudinio answers and you pay claudinio rates.

If you're on Pro ($39) or Ultra ($99) — claudius is yours, but treat it as a tool you reach for deliberately, not your default. The most effective setup we see is plan with claudius, implement with claudinio: the reasoning is where the premium model earns its cost, and the implementation loop is where the volume lives.

Here's the reality: claudinio delivers quality comparable to Claude Sonnet for everyday coding at a fraction of the internal cost. On the Essential plan, you can get hundreds of requests per hour with it — which is why it is the model every plan is built around.

Metric	claudinio	claudius
Impact on hourly budget	Low — stretches much further	High — up to 6x per request
Use case	Daily coding, personal projects	Heavy reasoning, complex agents

Golden rule: Configure your agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Continue, etc.) with claudinio as the default model. Only switch to claudius when you explicitly need more reasoning power. For hobby projects, claudinio is all you need and probably more than you expect.

If you go over your hourly cap and you hold credit, we don't block you — the request is served and the excess comes out of your credit balance. The dashboard meter says so while it is happening, and we email you the first time it happens in a day. Nothing is taken silently.

💡 Tip: Both models work with all major coding agents. Set model=claudinio in your agent config — or model=claudius if you are on Pro or Ultra. claudinio also automatically resolves aliases like claude-sonnet-4, gpt-4o, o3-mini and dozens more — no need to change your agent's configuration.

How spend protection works

Each plan defines a budget window — a rolling period and a maximum spend inside it:

• Essential, Pro, and Ultra use a 1-hour window.

Within the window, your usage accumulates a tiny internal cost. When that internal cost reaches the window's cap, requests pause until the window resets.

Only your model calls through the proxy. Each request adds to the current window's running total based on the tokens it used. When the window resets, the total resets with it.

If you hit the cap and get a budget error, you have two options:

1. Wait for the window to reset (shown in your dashboard).
2. Upgrade to a higher plan for a larger cap.

See Plans-related errors for what the budget error looks like.