BYOK Economics: Claude Pro vs Max for Clearly, Honestly

Clearly costs $20/month flat ($0 on Free for 1 canvas). What Claude itself costs is a separate question — you bring your own Anthropic subscription. Here's the honest breakdown so you can pick the right plan.

The two layers

Clearly — the visual canvas + the Mac daemon that drives Claude. $20/month (Pro) for unlimited canvases. $0 forever for 1 canvas.
Anthropic — the actual AI doing the work. Pro is $20/month; Max is $100 or $200/month.

The Anthropic plan is the cost lever. Clearly itself is the same $20 whether you're on Pro or Max.

What Pro buys you

Anthropic's Pro plan ($20/month) gives you ~45 Claude messages in any rolling 5-hour window. A "message" is one turn — your input + Claude's response. Tool calls (reading files, editing, deploying) inside a single turn don't count as separate messages.

That works out to roughly 9 turns per hour, sustained, every 5 hours. Most non-dev users we see hit that ceiling exactly twice a week — usually during a focused build session of 2-3 hours.

Pro is right if:

You ship 1-3 projects a week, not 1-3 per day
Your sessions are 30 minutes to 2 hours of active back-and-forth
You don't mind waiting ~30 minutes for the window to reset when you hit it
You're new to Clearly and want to see what you actually use before upgrading

Pro will frustrate you if:

You batch-generate ten landing pages in a single afternoon
You're iterating on a sticker sheet 50 times in a session
You have Claude Desktop / claude.ai also open eating into the same window
You're a marketer running a launch sprint

What Max buys you

Anthropic's Max plan comes in two tiers:

Max 5× — $100/month. Roughly 225 messages per 5-hour window.
Max 20× — $200/month. Roughly 900 messages per 5-hour window.

Same model quality (Claude Opus 4 / Sonnet 4). Same speed. Just a much higher ceiling.

Max 5× is right if:

You ship daily; multi-hour focused sessions are normal
You also use Claude Desktop / claude.ai alongside Clearly
You're a freelancer / solopreneur for whom the $80/month delta is dwarfed by the value of not hitting limits mid-project
You run a TikTok / YouTube channel building in public and shipping demos weekly

Max 20× is right if:

You're treating Clearly + Claude as a full-time dev replacement
You're shipping multiple production projects per week
You're running it through a business (the deductibility makes the math simpler)
You hit Max 5× limits regularly

The math: cost per shipped artifact

Let's price out three real personas with the same task: ship 10 landing pages in a month.

Marketer on Pro ($20 Clearly + $20 Pro = $40/month):

10 landing pages × ~4 turns each (brief → first draft → revision → deploy) = 40 turns
Spread across the month, this fits comfortably in Pro's 45-per-5-hours ceiling
Cost per landing page: $4
Verdict: Pro is fine.

Solopreneur on Max 5× ($20 Clearly + $100 Max = $120/month):

Same 10 landing pages BUT also a logo, a sticker sheet, a Notion clone, daily inbox triage
~250 turns/month total
Pro would hit the 45/5h ceiling 3-4 times → ~3 hours of waiting per week
Max 5× gives the headroom; cost per artifact drops as volume rises
Cost per landing page (10/month, but with ~15 other things shipped): ~$4.80 if you amortize evenly
Verdict: Max 5× pays for itself the moment your time is worth >$80/month.

Studio on Max 20× ($20 Clearly + $200 Max = $220/month):

Multiple clients, daily output, no patience for ceilings
600+ turns/month
Pro and Max 5× both bottleneck; Max 20× doesn't
Verdict: only if you're running a business through it.

What you're NOT paying for

The clearest thing about BYOK pricing is what's NOT in the bill:

No per-token markup. Clearly doesn't take a cut of your Anthropic usage. The relationship is between you and Anthropic.
No per-generation fee. Lovable, Bolt, Replit Agent all meter generations. Clearly doesn't.
No floor-bumping price ladder. You don't get pushed from $20 → $50 → $200 as your usage grows. The next price step is whenever YOU decide to upgrade Anthropic.

The trade-off: you have to be on a Mac running the Hive desktop app. The Mac runs the daemon that talks to Claude on your local Pro/Max session.

How to decide

A 30-second decision tree:

Are you new to Clearly? Start on Free (1 canvas, no Anthropic needed for the canvas itself — only when you Send to Claude). Upgrade to Pro ($20) once you want more canvases.
Have you been using Pro and hit limits more than twice a week? Move to Max 5×.
Are you hitting Max 5× limits regularly? Move to Max 20× OR add an Anthropic API key for overflow.
Are you a developer doing serious daily work? Max 20× is the right starting point — don't bother trying to make Pro work.

The API-key escape hatch

If you don't want a subscription at all, you can plug an Anthropic API key into Clearly instead. That's pure per-token billing — usually ~$3-15 per million input tokens, $15-75 per million output (depending on model). A heavy day might run $5-20 in raw API cost. Good for people who want to control spend granularly or for org-billing arrangements.

You pick this in Clearly Settings → Claude → API key. Pro/Max plan vs API key is mutually exclusive — pick one per machine.

TL;DR

Plan	$/month	Best for
Clearly Free + Pro	$20	1 canvas, light usage, trying it out
Clearly Pro + Pro	$40	Marketers, side projects, 1-3 ships/week
Clearly Pro + Max 5×	$120	Solopreneurs, daily users, freelancers
Clearly Pro + Max 20×	$220	Studios, dev replacement, business use
Clearly Pro + API key	$20 + usage	Granular control, overflow, org billing

The honest summary: most users start at $40, upgrade Anthropic to Max 5× within 2 months, and stop there.

Start free with Clearly → — pick your Anthropic plan when you're ready to Send to Claude.