OpenAI and Anthropic give you a lot of usage/$ through their plans. For the Anthropic Max plans, this can be like a ~90% discount. Copilot does not benefit from this (their pricing model is also different though, it is request-based rather than token usage based, so it is hard to compare).
That's not to mention that the models generally work better in their own harnesses, which is perhaps unsurprising because the models have been trained with the specific harness in mind (and vice versa). That said, I think some 3rd-party harnesses do a lot of work to make different models work well in their harness.
You cannot just directly compare prices like this. It is like comparing share prices, it doesn't really mean much unless you also know how many tokens the models use.
For example, GPT-5.2 is even cheaper than Gemini, but in real-world usage it ends up costing similar amounts to Opus 4.6 because it uses a lot more tokens.
Claude Code and Cowork are incredible products, and can do much more than just search. Lots of people are paying hundreds of dollars a month for them.
If you’re just using AI for search then I can see why you’d not see the value. But many people really are getting a huge amount of value out of agents, and are already paying for it.
That said, agentic search connected to your companies information sources is very valuable on its own. We have just connected up our internal zendesk, Jira, confluence, and github in Claude Code and it’s incredible how useful it is to find information spread across different services in 1 minute instead of it personally taking me 15 minutes of manual search.
I think this originated from old arguments that say that the total _cumulative_ time spent reading code will be higher than the time spent writing it. But then people just warped it in their heads that it takes more time to read and understand code than it takes to write it in general, which is obviously false.
I think people want to believe this because it is a lot of effort to read and truly understand some pieces of code. They would just rather write the code themselves, so this is convenient to believe.
That's not to mention that the models generally work better in their own harnesses, which is perhaps unsurprising because the models have been trained with the specific harness in mind (and vice versa). That said, I think some 3rd-party harnesses do a lot of work to make different models work well in their harness.
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