Cut the cord: what $200 actually buys you as an AI agent runner

Your $200 ChatGPT Pro subscription runs one chat window. Claude Max at the $200 tier runs one chat window (plus Claude Code, which is Anthropic's chat window pretending to be an agent). If your work involves an AI agent running in the background, in a terminal, from a script, on a cron, or overnight while you sleep, none of this is the product you're paying for. You're paying for a chat window for humans that also happens to expose a rate-limited agent mode.

Here's what the same $200 does if you run your agents through Reality Router instead.

What we measured

Over the past two weeks I ran eighteen real agent workloads on my home lab through Reality Router: email triage, receipt extraction, PDF form filling, PR review, vision, long-context document analysis, blog cross-posting, and a class-action settlement claim. Every one of them was a task an actual person would do. Every one produced a real artifact you can inspect.

Cost across all eighteen: about fifty cents. Average per task: $0.028.

Meaning, $200 of RR spend at that rate gets you 7,140 completed agent tasks in a month.

Now compare that to what $200 buys through the other options in the same month:

The chart

Enlarge

What the caps actually feel like

The subscription bars aren't small because subscriptions are bad. They're small because subscriptions were designed for a human at a keyboard, and a human at a keyboard doesn't send 500 requests a day.

OpenCode Go is a genuinely good deal for what it does. Ten dollars a month gets you up to sixty dollars of consumption. But at $60 you stop. There is no "spend more this month," no top-up, no burst allowance. If you're running agents that actually work, you'll hit $60 in a busy week and then you sit and wait for the reset. The other $190 of your $200 budget doesn't buy you a single extra task that month.

Claude Max at the 20x tier is the most capable subscription for agent-adjacent work, and it will still push back on you. The reset window is five hours. Push through your Claude Code work in the morning, hit the ceiling by lunch, and Claude tells you to come back later. That's fine for a human in an editor. It's disastrous for an overnight batch.

ChatGPT Pro at $200 markets itself as "effectively unlimited." Read the fair-use clause. Thinking-mode is hard-capped at 3,000 messages per week. Agent-mode has its own throttle. "Unlimited" means "we won't tell you the number, but we reserve the right to slow you down when your usage looks abusive."

Where the direct API bars sit

The three flagship-model bars (Sonnet 5, Opus 5, Fable 5) sit shorter than the RR bar for one reason: RR picks the model per call. Most agent turns don't need Fable 5 or Opus 5. They need a decent Sonnet or a fast DeepSeek. When RR routes a routine planning turn to a $0.14/M-input model instead of a $10/M-input one, that's a 70x cost reduction on that call. Do this across the fourteen or twenty agent calls a task takes, and the compounding gets ridiculous.

If you pointed OpenRouter (or any router-shaped SaaS) at "always Opus 5" you'd pay Opus 5 rates for every call. That's the same as going direct. The router only saves you money if it actually routes.

Reality Router works with what you already use

One thing to be clear about: RR isn't a new agent framework or IDE. It's a router. It speaks the OpenAI protocol, which means anything that already speaks that protocol can point at RR without you rewriting anything.

That includes:

• OpenCode (the CLI you're likely already using for agent work) — change one URL in the config and every OpenCode call routes through RR
• Aider, Cursor, Continue, Cline, Zed, any other OpenAI-compatible client — same story
• OpenRouter as a downstream provider under RR — RR treats OpenRouter as an OpenAI-compatible endpoint. One OpenRouter key replaces the per-vendor keys (OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google, and the rest) you'd otherwise juggle. RR still makes the model-per-call decision, then hands the request off through OpenRouter's catalog

So the choice isn't "OpenCode Go OR Reality Router" and it isn't "OpenRouter OR Reality Router." It's "keep the parts of your existing stack that are working, and put RR in front so it can route and calibrate." OpenCode Go stays useful for what fits under its $60/mo ceiling; RR handles anything that scales past. OpenRouter stays useful as a single-key gateway to a broad model catalog; RR sits above it and decides which model to actually use per call.

The chart above compares them because the marketing pitch is comparable, but architecturally RR is additive to the rest of the stack.

Why any other router will lose on routing quality too

Beyond the pricing model, there's a technical point that matters: RR routes on RealitySignal.

Every other router in production today either doesn't route at all (OpenRouter, Cursor's passthrough) or uses a static heuristic (Diamond, Sapiom, the vendor-specific ones). RR is different. Every routing decision is made against real-time calibrated probability scores of each candidate model's likelihood of succeeding on the specific task in front of it. Those probabilities come from RealitySignal, which continuously calibrates against actual outcomes. The router gets better the more you use it. No hard-coded heuristic can beat a system that's calibrating itself against real workloads in real time.

Combine that with the pricing: RR routes cheaper and routes smarter. Any other router you might choose can match one, not both.

And underneath all of it, RR is the only truly open-source router in this category. Every closed-SaaS competitor could deprecate a model, change pricing, or shut down tomorrow. RR is a container you run yourself. Your API keys stay yours. The routing policy is code you can read. The model catalog is a config file you edit.

Where subscriptions actually earn their price

I don't want to pretend subscriptions are bad. If your workflow is a human sitting in a chat window most of the day, uploading files, asking follow-ups, using web search and the code interpreter, Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus is the right product. Subscriptions bundle a lot beyond the model call: a real UI, memory, artifacts, uploads, integrations. RR bundles none of that. RR is a router. You bring your own agent.

The cord to cut isn't the subscription. The cord to cut is paying subscription prices to do agent work the subscription was never built for.

Try it yourself

Reality Router is open source. Point OpenCode, Aider, Cursor, or your own agent code at it. Add your API keys. Route through it. See what your bill looks like when the router is actually routing, and calibrating against real outcomes.

→ realityrouter.dev

Chart data sourced from: published subscription caps (Claude Max, ChatGPT Pro), OpenCode Go pricing docs, OpenRouter pricing, and eighteen agent workloads measured on Reality Router during August 2026. Methodology: Claude Max estimate derived from Anthropic's advertised 40 hours/week of Claude Code use on the 20x tier (~160 hrs/month × ~4 completed tasks/hour = ~640 baseline), doubled to reflect that Max bundles Sonnet and Haiku alongside Opus, offset by Anthropic's models producing notably longer per-turn responses than competitors. ChatGPT Pro estimate derived from OpenAI's 3,000 GPT-5-Thinking-messages-per-week hard cap divided by typical turns per agent task. OpenCode Go estimate is the midpoint of a defensible range: their $60/month consumption cap gets you ~2,000 tasks if you route to their cheapest models (DeepSeek Flash tier) and ~120 tasks if you route to their most expensive (Kimi K3 tier, Sonnet-equivalent pricing); the midpoint ~1,000 reflects a realistic mixed-model workload. A follow-up post will publish empirical measurements from pushing real ChatGPT Pro and Claude Max accounts until they break.