I'd like to limit the Scope to Indie development of products and services.

1. Cost: I use humanlayer which uses the claude code go binary with the max/pro plan. My costs are capped. Is this popular with medium(ish) use(I find the max plan sufficient for my use). But I fear API use might be too expensive. Does someone have some way to compare cost vs. benefit of these two cases based on usage and comparison?

2. The other main thing I am value is visibility e.g. display thought tokens, sub agent input and output in the WUI. Humanlayer and Pi provide this. Which one do you use and what do you like about it? I find that humanlayer using the claude code sdk binary is quite good at this, though SDK based harnesses might be easier to be coded and customized.