What a $20 Claude Code or Codex subscription actually buys, per ApertureJoin us in San Francisco for TailscaleUp!Grab your ticket ->

Blog|insightsJuly 17, 2026<br>What a $20 coding subscription actually buys

31 cents seems like a lot to pay just to send “Good evening” to Claude Code, even if there are reasons for it. But $3.29 for a personalized B-minus copy of Rampart, running in a browser? I can see that.<br>Those are the current token costs you might pay Anthropic for its coding assistance. If you pay $20 per month for a Claude Pro or ChatGPT subscription—or your company pays even more per-seat for team subscriptions—you don’t see the costs, unless you go looking for them. I know these numbers because I started using Claude Code through Aperture, Tailscale’s gateway for managing LLM use—which now works with subscription logins, not just API keys.<br>Why track your coding costs through Aperture? Right now, a flat monthly fee buys a mostly unknown amount of computing, subsidized by lighter users and a great deal of venture capital. You’re never quite sure how good a deal you’re getting. Anthropic provides a usage-limit progress bar and per-session tools, while OpenAI offers next to nothing.<br>The economics of this arrangement seem increasingly temporary. When the inevitable repricing happens—like it already has for organizations above Anthropic's 150-seat Team limit—people who know their token math can make an informed decision, based on their real usage and needs. Everyone else does a gym-membership-style guessing game, whether for themselves or dozens of employees.<br>Tracking your own coding receipts takes less than 15 minutes. Once you’re set up, you’ll almost certainly find other tools in Aperture useful, too, whether for subscriptions or other AI usage.<br>Connect your subscription to Aperture<br>Let’s set up Aperture to handle access to an Anthropic Pro subscription to use Claude Code. If you use ChatGPT/Codex, the process is much the same. We have documentation on setting up both Anthropic/Claude and ChatGPT/Codex.<br>First, add Aperture on your tailnet. Provide your email address on Aperture’s signup form (company name is optional), then follow the prompts. You’ll end up with a web address you can reach on your tailnet URL, with ai as the default. So if your tailnet was assigned silly-pangolin.ts.net, your Aperture instance would live at https://ai.silly-pangolin.ts.net (presuming you have HTTPS enabled for your tailnet; otherwise it starts with http). Open your Aperture URL in a browser while signed into Tailscale.<br>If you're setting up a new Aperture instance, Anthropic and OpenAI subscriptions are automatically configured for you. If you created your Aperture instance earlier this year and have not set up subscription providers yet, go to the Administration section of your My Aperture configuration section, head into Providers , and choose OpenAI (Subscription) or Anthropic (Subscription) , and the fields are filled out for you.<br>Aperture should provide the most commonly used models in the Models section, using exact names like claude-sonnet-4-6; add anything else you want specifically in there. Select Save and you’re most of the way there.<br>Connecting a coding agent<br>We’re now going to set up Claude Code to send its requests and authorization through Aperture, rather than its default flow that goes straight to Anthropic.<br>First, log in. If you haven’t set up Claude Code before, install it, launch a terminal window, start Claude Code with claude, answer the prompts about directories and safety, and you’ll land at a Claude Code prompt. Enter /login, and log into your Anthropic account through the browser tab that pops up (or copy and paste the URL and resulting code).<br>Once you’ve logged in, you need to edit one file, to add your Aperture hostname. Using silly-pangolin.ts.net as an example, we’ll edit ~/.claude/settings.json to provide our Aperture gateway (~/.codex/config.toml for ChatGPT). Note that base URL is specifically http, to avoid unexpected TLS issues; the traffic remains encrypted.

"env": {<br>"ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL": "http://ai.silly-pangolin.ts.net"<br>You can do this a few ways:<br>With your file browser, by revealing the hidden `.claude` folder in your user folder and opening it with Notepad, TextEdit, or another text editor<br>With a code editor like Visual Studio Code<br>Inside the terminal itself: nano ~/.claude/settings.json, edit the file, then Control+O to “WriteOut” (save), and Control+X to exit.<br>If you have other variables set in your settings.json, you can leave them be. If there is an API key, remove that line, making sure there is a comma after every line, except the last.<br>Now test your connection. Run claude from a directory you want to work in (or just your home directory). Give it a test prompt. If it responds, it’s likely working, but let’s double-check. Head into your Aperture dashboard, down to Logs, and look for your test prompt. In my case, using Claude Code and sending a single-line chat, it’s broken...