accounts and costs

two accounts, two paths

The two agent tools belong to two separate providers:

• Claude Code → needs an Anthropic account. In practice Claude Pro (about $20/month) is the entry level; the larger Max plans give you a bigger token (the unit of model usage – roughly: how much text the model reads and writes) allowance.
• Codex → needs an OpenAI account; ChatGPT Plus (also about $20/month) includes the starting allowance.

To begin, one of them is enough. The curriculum teaches both, because in real work they complement each other well – but in the first weeks you can complete every lesson with a single subscription. If you have to choose: start with Claude Code – most of the session replays in these lessons run on it.

subscription or API key?

Both tools can connect to the model in two ways:

1. With a subscription (Pro/Plus): fixed monthly fee, allowance included. Predictable – this is what we recommend for beginners.
2. With an API key: usage-based billing per token. More flexible, but you have to watch it: a runaway session costs money.

Every recipe on this site publishes its real cost – you can see that building a complete site typically lands in the tens of dollars, not the hundreds. But that is only true with disciplined work – hence this lesson.

how do you keep the cost under control?

Four habits, from day one:

1. Small tasks. One prompt = one well-bounded goal. A "build the whole app" type of request burns a lot of tokens and gives a bad result.
2. Watch the feedback. Both tools show the session's consumption – build an intuition for what things cost.
3. Set a limit. With API-key usage, set a monthly spending cap in the provider's dashboard before you send the first request.
4. Don't leave it alone. As a beginner, approve the agent's work step by step (this is the default setting in both tools) – you learn from it, and it can't run off pointlessly.

creating the accounts

1. Anthropic: claude.ai → register with email → Pro subscription in the settings.
2. OpenAI: chatgpt.com → register → Plus subscription.

Both need a credit card; the fee is charged in dollars. For company use, both providers have team plans – that comes up later, in the going-live module.

The machine is ready, the account is live – in the next two lessons we install the agents themselves.