14 ms·

> divorced from any kind of fundamentals Anthropic ARR went $1B -> $4B in the first half of this year. They're getting my $200 a month and it's easily the best

by nikcub 1y ago

> divorced from any kind of fundamentals Anthropic ARR went $1B -> $4B in the first half of this year. They're getting my $200 a month and it's easily the best money I spend. There's definitely something there.

benjaminwootton 1y ago
I’ve always dwelled over $5 a month subscriptions for iPhone apps due to subscription fatigue. I find myself signing up for $200 AI subscriptions without a moments hesitation.
- smith7018 1y ago
  I hope both of you know that you're in the extreme minority, right?
  - jarredkenny 1y ago
    A very productive minority.
    - Forgeties79 1y ago
      Have we seen any examples of any of these companies turning a profit yet even at $200+/mo? My understanding is that most, if not all, are still deeply in the red. Please feel free to correct me (not sarcastic - being genuine). If that is the case at some point the music is going to stop and they will either perish or they will have to crank up their subscription costs.
      - jarredkenny 1y ago
        I am absolutely benefitting from them subsidizing my usage to give me Claude Code at $200/month. However, even if they 10x the price its still going to be worth it for me personally.
        Forgeties79 1y ago
        I totally get that but that’s not really what I asked/am driving at. Though I certainly question how many people are willing to spend $2k/mo on this. I think it’s pretty hard for most folks to justify basically a mortgage for an AI tool.
        jarredkenny 1y ago
        My napkin math is that I can now accomplish 10x more in a day than I could even one year ago, which means I don't need to hire nearly as many engineers, and I still come out ahead. I use claude code exclusively for the initial version of all new features, then I review and iterate. With the Max plan I can have many of these loops going concurrently in git worktrees. I even built a little script to make the workflow better: http://github.com/jarredkenny/cf http://github.com/jarredkenny/cf
        Forgeties79 1y ago
        Again I understand and I don’t doubt you’re getting insane value out of it but if they believed people would spend $2000 a month for it they would be charging $2000 a month, not 1/10th of that, which is undoubtedly not generating a profit. As I said above, I don’t think a single AI company is remotely in the black yet. They are driven by speculation and investment and they need to figure out real quick how they’re going to survive when that money dries up. People are not going to fork out 24k a year for these tools. I don’t think they’ll spend even $10k. People scoff at paying $70+ for internet, a thing we all use basically all the time. I have found it rather odd that they have targeted individual consumers for the most part. These all seem like enterprise solutions that need to charge large sums and target large companies tbh. My guess is a lot of them think it will get cheaper and easier to provide the same level of service and that they won’t have to make such dramatic increases in their pricing. Time will tell, but I’m skeptical
        nl 1y ago
        > As I said above, I don’t think a single AI company is remotely in the black yet. As I note above, Anthropic probably is in the black. $4B ARR, and spending less than $100M on training models.
      - nl 1y ago
        It's possible Anthropic is cash-flow positive now. Claude 3.7 Sonnet supposedly cost "a few tens of millions of dollars"[1], and they recently hit $4B ARR[2]. Those numbers seem to give a fair bit of room for salaries, and it would be surprising if there wasn't a sustainable business in there. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/25/anthropics-latest-flagship-ai-might-not-have-been-incredibly-costly-to-train/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/25/anthropics-latest-flagship... [2] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-revenue-hits-4-billion-annual-pace-competition-cursor-intensifies https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-revenue-hi...
        joks 1y ago
        Cost to train and cost to operate are two very different things
    - acmj 1y ago
      Are there studies to show those paying $200/month to openai/claude are more productive?
      - radley 1y ago
        It's subjective, but the high monthly fee would suggest so. At the very least, they're getting an experience that those without are not.
      - jfim 1y ago
        Anecdotally, I can take on and complete the side projects I've always wanted to do but didn't due to the large amounts of yak shaving or unfamiliarity with parts of the stack. It's the difference between "hey wouldn't it be cool to have a Monte Carlo simulator for retirement planning with multidimensional search for the safe withdrawal rate depending on savings rate, age of retirement, and other assumptions" and doing it in an afternoon with some prompts.
        OccamsMirror 1y ago
        For curiosity, how complex are these side projects? My experience is that Claude Code can absolutely nail simple apps. But as the complexity increases it seems to lose its ability to work through things without having to burn tokens on constantly reminding it of the patterns it needs to follow. At the very least it diminishes the enjoyment of it.
        ido 1y ago
        Simple apps are the majority of use-cases though - to me this feels like what programming/using a computer should have been all along: if I want to do something I’m curious about I just try with Claude whereas in the past I’d mostly be too lazy/tired to program after hours in my free time (even though my programming ability exceed Claude’s).
        OccamsMirror 1y ago
        Well that's why I'm curious. I've been reading a lot of people talking about how the Max plan has 100x their productivity and they're getting a ton of value out of Claude Code. I too have had moments where Claude Code did amazing things for me. But I find myself in a bit of a valley of despair at the moment as I'm trying to force it to do things I'm finding out that it's not good at. I'm just worried that I'm doing it wrong.
  - christina97 1y ago
    The point is that if a minority is prepared to pay $200 per month, then what is the majority prepared to pay? I also don’t think this is such an extreme priority, I also know multiple people in real life with these kinds of selections.
    - jrflowers 1y ago
      >if a minority is prepared to pay $200 per month, then what is the majority prepared to pay? Nothing. Most people will not pay for a chat bot unless forced to by cramming it into software that they already have to use
      - bicx 1y ago
        It's a generic chat LLM product, but ChatGPT now has over 20 million paid subscribers. https://www.theverge.com/openai/640894/chatgpt-has-hit-20-million-paid-subscribers https://www.theverge.com/openai/640894/chatgpt-has-hit-20-mi...
        sgt 1y ago
        So $415m revenue per month, annualized $5 billion / yr. Let's say we use a revenue multiple of 4x, that means OpenAI should be valued at $20 billion USD just based on this. Then one obviously has several other factors, given the nature of OpenAI and future potential. Maybe 10x more. Which puts the current valuations I've heard pretty much in the right ballpark. Crazy, but it could make sense.
      - swat535 1y ago
        Forget chat bots, most people will not pay for Software, period. This is _especially_ true for developers in general, which is very ironic considering how our livelihood is dependent on Software.
        oytis 1y ago
        Yeah, cause we want to be in control of software, understandably. It's hard to charge for software users have full control of - except for donations. That's #1 reason for me to not use any gen AI at the moment - I'm keeping an eye on when (if) open-weight models become useful on consumer hardware though.
  - wrsh07 1y ago
    Yes, but that doesn't mean they aren't finding real value The challenge with the bubble/not bubble framing is the question of long term value. If the labs stopped spending money today, they would recoup their costs. Quickly. There are possible risks (could prices go to zero because of a loss leader?), but I think anthropic and OpenAI are both sufficiently differentiated that they would be profitable/extremely successful companies by all accounts if they stopped spending today. So the question is: at what point does any of this stop being true?
    - Graphon1 1y ago
      > I think anthropic and OpenAI are both sufficiently differentiated that they would be profitable/extremely successful companies by all accounts if they stopped spending today. Maybe. But that would probably be temporary. The market is sufficiently dynamic that any advantages they have right now, probably isn't stable defensible longer term. Hence the need to keep spending. But what do I know? I'm not a VC.
  - bicx 1y ago
    Are there available numbers to support this? Software engineering in the U.S. is well-compensated. $200/mo is a small amount to pay if it makes a big difference in productivity.
    - joks 1y ago
      Perceived productivity or actual productivity?
    - benburleson 1y ago
      Which raises the question: If the productivity gains are realized by the employer, is the employer not paying this subscription?
      - unshavedyak 1y ago
        My day job in talks to do that. I'm partly responsible for that decision, and i'm using my personal $200/m plan to test the idea. My assessment so far is that it is well worth it, but only if you're invested in using the tool correctly. It can cause as much harm as it can increase productivity and i'm quite fearful of how we'll handle this at day-job. I also think it's worth saying that imo, this is a very different fear than what drives "butts in seats" arguments. Ie i'm not worried that $Company will not get their value out of the Engineer and instead the bot will do the work for them. I'm concerned that Engineer will use the tool poorly and cause more work for reviewers having to deal with high LOC. Reviews are difficult and "AI" provides a quick path to slop. I've found my $200 well worth it, but the #1 difficulty i've had is not getting features to work, but in getting the output to be scalable and maintainable code. Sidenote, one of the things i've found most productive is deterministic tooling wrapping the LLM. Eg robust linters like Rust Clippy set to automatically run after Claude Code (via hooks) helps bend the LLM away from many bad patterns. It's far from perfect of course, but it's the thing i think we need most atm. Determinism around the spaghetti-chaos-monkeys.
- bakugo 1y ago
  A fool and his money are soon parted.
- OtherShrezzing 1y ago
  What do you do with $200/mo subscription to Anthropic? I’d consider myself a power user and I’ve never come close to a rate limit on the $20 subscription.
  - Implicated 1y ago
    If you're using Claude Code with any regularity then the $200/m plan is better than a Costco membership in value.
  - lumost 1y ago
    Anecdotally, usage rises precipitously when you are building a system from scratch with unlimited ai access.
  - crazylogger 1y ago
    Depends a lot on the way people use them. If you discusses a plan with CC well upfront, covering all integration points where things might go off rail, perhaps checkpoint the plan in a file then start a fresh CC session for coding, then CC is usually going to one shot a 2k-LoC feature uninterrupted, which is very token efficient. If the plan is not crystal clear, people end up arguing with CC over this and that. Token usage will be bad.
- vonnik 1y ago
  I personally find gemini 2.5 pro and o4.1 mini to handle complexity better than claude code. i was a power user of claude code for a couple months but its bias to action repeatedly led me down the wrong path. what am i missing?
  - OccamsMirror 1y ago
    I'm finding myself agreeing with you... After also being a Max plan power user. Now I just find myself exasperated at its choices and constant forgetfulness.
  - rtcoms 1y ago
    how do you integrate that with a code editor ?
ironmagma 1y ago
Or so you think.. [1] https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... [2] https://futurism.com/companies-fixing-ai-replacement-mistakes https://futurism.com/companies-fixing-ai-replacement-mistake...
- d3m0t3p 1y ago
  Your first link is (in my opinion) highly biased in the samples they choose, they hired maintainers from open-source repos (people with multi years of experience, on their specific repo). So indeed, IF you are in that case: Many years on the same project with multiple years experience then it is not usefull, otherwise it might be. This means it might be usefull for junior and for experienced devs who are switching projects. It is a tool like any other, indeed if you have a workflow that you optimized through years of usage it won't help.
  - fsndz 1y ago
    Exactly. I think the study is a good reminder that we really have to be careful about the productivity gains attributed to AI. Main takeaway imo, despite limitations from the study, is AI is not a panacea, it can increase productivity, but only if used 'well' and with the good workflows in place, and in the right context.
  - bakugo 1y ago
    > This means it might be usefull for junior and for experienced devs who are switching projects. In other words: it might be useful for people who don't understand the generated code well enough to know that it's incorrect or unmaintainable.
- fsndz 1y ago
  I mean, hacker news is still the same aren't they using AI to completely make this website more of whatever it was before ????
- teruakohatu 1y ago
  > Or so you think.. > [1] https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... You are welcomed to your point of view, but for me while one agent is finding an obscure bug, I have another agent optimising or refactoring, while I am working on something else. Its hard to believe I am deluded in thinking I am spending more time on a task. I think the research does highlight that training is important. I don't throws devs agents and expect them to be productive.
hugs 1y ago
I'm easily getting $10K/month of value from my Anthropic subscription. (Rough estimate of how much I would have paid someone else to create the things I've (co)created with Claude Code so far.) If this is a bubble, I just hope I can finish all the projects I want to finish before it pops (or before they raise their prices to $9K/month because they read this comment.)
- fsndz 1y ago
  and people are still saying vibe coding is overrated? nonsense: https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-vibe-coding-is-overrated https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-vibe-coding-is-overrated
- bakugo 1y ago
  > I'm easily getting $10K/month of value from my Anthropic subscription. Are those things created by Claude actually making you that much in real money every month? Because the amount of money it would cost to pay someone to create something, and the value that something brings to you once it's made are largely unrelated.
  - hugs 1y ago
    They are tools I want/need for my business (like creating software libraries for various things). My $10K number is how much I would have paid a contractor in the past to code it for me.
    - lelanthran 1y ago
      > I'm easily getting $10K/month of value from my Anthropic subscription. (Rough estimate of how much I would have paid someone else to create the things I've (co)created with Claude Code so far.) I know it's hard to place a value on how much a utility saves a business, but honestly this math is like the piracy math and we didn't buy it back then either. Some teenager downloading 20k songs does not mean that they saved $20k[1], nor does it mean that the record labels lost $20k. In your case, the relevant question is "how much did your revenue increase by after you started 10x your utility code?" [1] Assuming the songs are sold on the market for $1 each.
alecco 1y ago
Agree. But I think Anthropic is the outlier. Maybe ElevenLabs, too.
cootsnuck 1y ago
They're still gonna be an estimated $3 billion in the hole though. Jury still out of there is really "something there".
logsr 1y ago
growing ARR is easy when you are selling dollars for cents. people hyping ARR as an meaningful investment indicator are a dead giveaway that we are in fact in a bubble.
Keyframe 1y ago
For sure, but then again - Nvidia $4T?! I can't shake the feeling though that with Nvidia we're looking at another Sun type of situation from _the bubble_. Remember the dot in dot com?
- mark_l_watson 1y ago
  NVidia is being propped up by the US government. Huawei’s new chips are lower tech but would probably hit a good ‘practical sweet spot’ for AI data centers in many countries around the world but our current administration is threatening economic violence against any countries who choose to use more cost effective Huawei AI chips. I don’t want to descend into talking politics, but I want to say that geopolitics, the rising geopolitical ‘south’, etc., is fascinating stuff - much more interesting and entertaining than anything fictional on Netflicks or HBO!
  - SJC_Hacker 1y ago
    Then why didn't DeepSeek use the Huawei chips, and as opposed to the H800s ?
hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
"Sooner or later the bubble's gonna burst" and "There's definitely something there" aren't mutually exclusive - in fact they often go together. It makes me perhaps a little sad to say that "I'm showing my age" by bringing up the .com boom/bust, but this feels exactly the same. The late 90s/early 00s were the dawn of the consumer Internet, and all of that tech vastly changed global society and brought you companies like Google and Amazon. It also brought you Pets.com, Webvan, and the bajillion other companies chronicled in "Fucked Company". You mention Anthropic, which I think is in a good a position as any to be one of the winners. I'm much less convinced about tons of the others. Look at Cursor - they were a first moving leader, but I know tons of people (myself included) who have cancelled their subscription because there are now better options.
- pqtyw 1y ago
  Not really much a of stuck bubble this time, though. Besides Nvidia and a handful of other HW companies, at least. Almost all of the very high valuations are for private companies and usually the amount of actual money involved in is relatively low.
- ttrmw 1y ago
  what're you finding better than cursor now?
  - rock_hard 1y ago
    Devin is light years ahead of Cursor. It’s not even the same category! I stopped writing code by hand almost entirely and my output (measured in landed PRs) has been 10x And when I write code myself then it’s gnarly stuff and I want AI to get out of my way…so I just use Webstorm
  - andrewmutz 1y ago
    Cline is absolutely fantastic when you combine it with Sonnet 4. Always use plan mode first and always have it write tests first (have it do TDD). It changed me from a skeptic to a believer and now I use it full time.
dom96 1y ago
I pay $0 and that's already enough for me. Genuinely, what are you getting for your $200? I cannot fathom paying that much for what seems like I get basically for free anyway.
tekawade 1y ago
Genuinely curious for the value add with Claude code here. Some perspective and/or data is appreciated.
zaphirplane 1y ago
Why are you paying for that? Are you employed as a dev and paying out of your pocket or are you a hobbyist or ?
babyshake 1y ago
The big question is to what extent they hit a plateau and are commoditized. What happens when there is a fully open stack that gets Claude Code level results but at a fraction of the cost? Not saying that will happen, but that seems to be the scenario for a bubble bursting.
v5v3 1y ago
Unless they are paying annually, the next big thing could see those $200 a month premium users gone.
westoque 1y ago
> They're getting my $200 a month and it's easily the best money I spend Can you explain? I don't see how $200 makes that much difference than what I get from paying $20/month with OpenAI? What's the use case?
999900000999 1y ago
Microsoft is obviously the elephant in the room. I decide to try out the agent built into VS Code. It basically matches most of these fly by night "agent" ides which are mostly just VS Code forks anyway. But it's weird. Because Microsoft can use Anthropic's API, funnel them revenue and take a loss on Copilot. We're all getting this stuff heavily subsidized by either VC money or big corp money. Microsoft can eat billions in losses on this if they become *the* provider of choice. This stuff isn't perfect, but this is the worst it'll ever be. In 2 years it'll be able to replace many of us.
csomar 1y ago
1. If you're maxing out your subscription, they're burning money on you. 2. They don't have a moat. DeepSeek and Kimi are already good enough to destroy any high margins they're hoping to generate from compute. Just because something is highly useful doesn't mean it's highly profitable. Water is essential to life, but it's dirt cheap in most of the world. Same goes for food.
- mark_l_watson 1y ago
  I agree. I was experimenting with tool use with Kimi K2 APIs yesterday - very effective, and so incredibly inexpensive. I am retired, now doing independent research, so my requirements are very different than most people here who are still in the job market or growing their own business. I find a combination of local Ollama models, with very inexpensive APis like Moonshot’s Kimi with occasional Gemini 2.5 Pro use, and occasionally using gemini-cli provides extraordinary value. Am I missing out by not using one or more $200-$300 a month subscriptions? Probably but I don’t care.
deleted 1y ago
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rsynnott 1y ago
Economic bubbles _usually_ aren't based on things which are entirely worthless; there's generally _something_ there (just not enough something to sustain the valuations). There are exceptions (NFTs, arguably cryptocurrency as a whole, and of course tulips), but those _are_ the exceptions.
Lalabadie 1y ago
The bubble isn't the value available to buyers, it's the x00% multiplier created by speculation.
freejazz 1y ago
Yeah, the difference between the "something there" and the $4b valuation is the bubble.
__loam 1y ago
It's so funny to see people in this industry get super excited about revenue while never mentioning costs.
beefnugs 1y ago
So how much is it worth? what if it balloons to 5x the amount? what if "they" just decide this is too powerful so only corporate accounts worth $xx,000 a month, and plebs get limited per month for $x,000?

by nikcub 1y ago

benjaminwootton 1y ago

I’ve always dwelled over $5 a month subscriptions for iPhone apps due to subscription fatigue. I find myself signing up for $200 AI subscriptions without a moments hesitation.

smith7018 1y ago
I hope both of you know that you're in the extreme minority, right?
- jarredkenny 1y ago
  A very productive minority.
  - Forgeties79 1y ago
    Have we seen any examples of any of these companies turning a profit yet even at $200+/mo? My understanding is that most, if not all, are still deeply in the red. Please feel free to correct me (not sarcastic - being genuine). If that is the case at some point the music is going to stop and they will either perish or they will have to crank up their subscription costs.
    - jarredkenny 1y ago
      I am absolutely benefitting from them subsidizing my usage to give me Claude Code at $200/month. However, even if they 10x the price its still going to be worth it for me personally.
      - Forgeties79 1y ago
        I totally get that but that’s not really what I asked/am driving at. Though I certainly question how many people are willing to spend $2k/mo on this. I think it’s pretty hard for most folks to justify basically a mortgage for an AI tool.
        jarredkenny 1y ago
        My napkin math is that I can now accomplish 10x more in a day than I could even one year ago, which means I don't need to hire nearly as many engineers, and I still come out ahead. I use claude code exclusively for the initial version of all new features, then I review and iterate. With the Max plan I can have many of these loops going concurrently in git worktrees. I even built a little script to make the workflow better: http://github.com/jarredkenny/cf http://github.com/jarredkenny/cf
        Forgeties79 1y ago
        Again I understand and I don’t doubt you’re getting insane value out of it but if they believed people would spend $2000 a month for it they would be charging $2000 a month, not 1/10th of that, which is undoubtedly not generating a profit. As I said above, I don’t think a single AI company is remotely in the black yet. They are driven by speculation and investment and they need to figure out real quick how they’re going to survive when that money dries up. People are not going to fork out 24k a year for these tools. I don’t think they’ll spend even $10k. People scoff at paying $70+ for internet, a thing we all use basically all the time. I have found it rather odd that they have targeted individual consumers for the most part. These all seem like enterprise solutions that need to charge large sums and target large companies tbh. My guess is a lot of them think it will get cheaper and easier to provide the same level of service and that they won’t have to make such dramatic increases in their pricing. Time will tell, but I’m skeptical
        nl 1y ago
        > As I said above, I don’t think a single AI company is remotely in the black yet. As I note above, Anthropic probably is in the black. $4B ARR, and spending less than $100M on training models.
    - nl 1y ago
      It's possible Anthropic is cash-flow positive now. Claude 3.7 Sonnet supposedly cost "a few tens of millions of dollars"[1], and they recently hit $4B ARR[2]. Those numbers seem to give a fair bit of room for salaries, and it would be surprising if there wasn't a sustainable business in there. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/25/anthropics-latest-flagship-ai-might-not-have-been-incredibly-costly-to-train/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/25/anthropics-latest-flagship... [2] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-revenue-hits-4-billion-annual-pace-competition-cursor-intensifies https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-revenue-hi...
      - joks 1y ago
        Cost to train and cost to operate are two very different things
  - acmj 1y ago
    Are there studies to show those paying $200/month to openai/claude are more productive?
    - radley 1y ago
      It's subjective, but the high monthly fee would suggest so. At the very least, they're getting an experience that those without are not.
    - jfim 1y ago
      Anecdotally, I can take on and complete the side projects I've always wanted to do but didn't due to the large amounts of yak shaving or unfamiliarity with parts of the stack. It's the difference between "hey wouldn't it be cool to have a Monte Carlo simulator for retirement planning with multidimensional search for the safe withdrawal rate depending on savings rate, age of retirement, and other assumptions" and doing it in an afternoon with some prompts.
      - OccamsMirror 1y ago
        For curiosity, how complex are these side projects? My experience is that Claude Code can absolutely nail simple apps. But as the complexity increases it seems to lose its ability to work through things without having to burn tokens on constantly reminding it of the patterns it needs to follow. At the very least it diminishes the enjoyment of it.
        ido 1y ago
        Simple apps are the majority of use-cases though - to me this feels like what programming/using a computer should have been all along: if I want to do something I’m curious about I just try with Claude whereas in the past I’d mostly be too lazy/tired to program after hours in my free time (even though my programming ability exceed Claude’s).
        OccamsMirror 1y ago
        Well that's why I'm curious. I've been reading a lot of people talking about how the Max plan has 100x their productivity and they're getting a ton of value out of Claude Code. I too have had moments where Claude Code did amazing things for me. But I find myself in a bit of a valley of despair at the moment as I'm trying to force it to do things I'm finding out that it's not good at. I'm just worried that I'm doing it wrong.
- christina97 1y ago
  The point is that if a minority is prepared to pay $200 per month, then what is the majority prepared to pay? I also don’t think this is such an extreme priority, I also know multiple people in real life with these kinds of selections.
  - jrflowers 1y ago
    >if a minority is prepared to pay $200 per month, then what is the majority prepared to pay? Nothing. Most people will not pay for a chat bot unless forced to by cramming it into software that they already have to use
    - bicx 1y ago
      It's a generic chat LLM product, but ChatGPT now has over 20 million paid subscribers. https://www.theverge.com/openai/640894/chatgpt-has-hit-20-million-paid-subscribers https://www.theverge.com/openai/640894/chatgpt-has-hit-20-mi...
      - sgt 1y ago
        So $415m revenue per month, annualized $5 billion / yr. Let's say we use a revenue multiple of 4x, that means OpenAI should be valued at $20 billion USD just based on this. Then one obviously has several other factors, given the nature of OpenAI and future potential. Maybe 10x more. Which puts the current valuations I've heard pretty much in the right ballpark. Crazy, but it could make sense.
    - swat535 1y ago
      Forget chat bots, most people will not pay for Software, period. This is _especially_ true for developers in general, which is very ironic considering how our livelihood is dependent on Software.
      - oytis 1y ago
        Yeah, cause we want to be in control of software, understandably. It's hard to charge for software users have full control of - except for donations. That's #1 reason for me to not use any gen AI at the moment - I'm keeping an eye on when (if) open-weight models become useful on consumer hardware though.
- wrsh07 1y ago
  Yes, but that doesn't mean they aren't finding real value The challenge with the bubble/not bubble framing is the question of long term value. If the labs stopped spending money today, they would recoup their costs. Quickly. There are possible risks (could prices go to zero because of a loss leader?), but I think anthropic and OpenAI are both sufficiently differentiated that they would be profitable/extremely successful companies by all accounts if they stopped spending today. So the question is: at what point does any of this stop being true?
  - Graphon1 1y ago
    > I think anthropic and OpenAI are both sufficiently differentiated that they would be profitable/extremely successful companies by all accounts if they stopped spending today. Maybe. But that would probably be temporary. The market is sufficiently dynamic that any advantages they have right now, probably isn't stable defensible longer term. Hence the need to keep spending. But what do I know? I'm not a VC.
- bicx 1y ago
  Are there available numbers to support this? Software engineering in the U.S. is well-compensated. $200/mo is a small amount to pay if it makes a big difference in productivity.
  - joks 1y ago
    Perceived productivity or actual productivity?
  - benburleson 1y ago
    Which raises the question: If the productivity gains are realized by the employer, is the employer not paying this subscription?
    - unshavedyak 1y ago
      My day job in talks to do that. I'm partly responsible for that decision, and i'm using my personal $200/m plan to test the idea. My assessment so far is that it is well worth it, but only if you're invested in using the tool correctly. It can cause as much harm as it can increase productivity and i'm quite fearful of how we'll handle this at day-job. I also think it's worth saying that imo, this is a very different fear than what drives "butts in seats" arguments. Ie i'm not worried that $Company will not get their value out of the Engineer and instead the bot will do the work for them. I'm concerned that Engineer will use the tool poorly and cause more work for reviewers having to deal with high LOC. Reviews are difficult and "AI" provides a quick path to slop. I've found my $200 well worth it, but the #1 difficulty i've had is not getting features to work, but in getting the output to be scalable and maintainable code. Sidenote, one of the things i've found most productive is deterministic tooling wrapping the LLM. Eg robust linters like Rust Clippy set to automatically run after Claude Code (via hooks) helps bend the LLM away from many bad patterns. It's far from perfect of course, but it's the thing i think we need most atm. Determinism around the spaghetti-chaos-monkeys.
bakugo 1y ago
A fool and his money are soon parted.
OtherShrezzing 1y ago
What do you do with $200/mo subscription to Anthropic? I’d consider myself a power user and I’ve never come close to a rate limit on the $20 subscription.
- Implicated 1y ago
  If you're using Claude Code with any regularity then the $200/m plan is better than a Costco membership in value.
- lumost 1y ago
  Anecdotally, usage rises precipitously when you are building a system from scratch with unlimited ai access.
- crazylogger 1y ago
  Depends a lot on the way people use them. If you discusses a plan with CC well upfront, covering all integration points where things might go off rail, perhaps checkpoint the plan in a file then start a fresh CC session for coding, then CC is usually going to one shot a 2k-LoC feature uninterrupted, which is very token efficient. If the plan is not crystal clear, people end up arguing with CC over this and that. Token usage will be bad.
vonnik 1y ago
I personally find gemini 2.5 pro and o4.1 mini to handle complexity better than claude code. i was a power user of claude code for a couple months but its bias to action repeatedly led me down the wrong path. what am i missing?
- OccamsMirror 1y ago
  I'm finding myself agreeing with you... After also being a Max plan power user. Now I just find myself exasperated at its choices and constant forgetfulness.
- rtcoms 1y ago
  how do you integrate that with a code editor ?

ironmagma 1y ago

Or so you think.. [1] https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... [2] https://futurism.com/companies-fixing-ai-replacement-mistakes https://futurism.com/companies-fixing-ai-replacement-mistake...

d3m0t3p 1y ago
Your first link is (in my opinion) highly biased in the samples they choose, they hired maintainers from open-source repos (people with multi years of experience, on their specific repo). So indeed, IF you are in that case: Many years on the same project with multiple years experience then it is not usefull, otherwise it might be. This means it might be usefull for junior and for experienced devs who are switching projects. It is a tool like any other, indeed if you have a workflow that you optimized through years of usage it won't help.
- fsndz 1y ago
  Exactly. I think the study is a good reminder that we really have to be careful about the productivity gains attributed to AI. Main takeaway imo, despite limitations from the study, is AI is not a panacea, it can increase productivity, but only if used 'well' and with the good workflows in place, and in the right context.
- bakugo 1y ago
  > This means it might be usefull for junior and for experienced devs who are switching projects. In other words: it might be useful for people who don't understand the generated code well enough to know that it's incorrect or unmaintainable.
fsndz 1y ago
I mean, hacker news is still the same aren't they using AI to completely make this website more of whatever it was before ????
teruakohatu 1y ago
> Or so you think.. > [1] https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... You are welcomed to your point of view, but for me while one agent is finding an obscure bug, I have another agent optimising or refactoring, while I am working on something else. Its hard to believe I am deluded in thinking I am spending more time on a task. I think the research does highlight that training is important. I don't throws devs agents and expect them to be productive.

hugs 1y ago

I'm easily getting $10K/month of value from my Anthropic subscription. (Rough estimate of how much I would have paid someone else to create the things I've (co)created with Claude Code so far.) If this is a bubble, I just hope I can finish all the projects I want to finish before it pops (or before they raise their prices to $9K/month because they read this comment.)

fsndz 1y ago
and people are still saying vibe coding is overrated? nonsense: https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-vibe-coding-is-overrated https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-vibe-coding-is-overrated
bakugo 1y ago
> I'm easily getting $10K/month of value from my Anthropic subscription. Are those things created by Claude actually making you that much in real money every month? Because the amount of money it would cost to pay someone to create something, and the value that something brings to you once it's made are largely unrelated.
- hugs 1y ago
  They are tools I want/need for my business (like creating software libraries for various things). My $10K number is how much I would have paid a contractor in the past to code it for me.
  - lelanthran 1y ago
    > I'm easily getting $10K/month of value from my Anthropic subscription. (Rough estimate of how much I would have paid someone else to create the things I've (co)created with Claude Code so far.) I know it's hard to place a value on how much a utility saves a business, but honestly this math is like the piracy math and we didn't buy it back then either. Some teenager downloading 20k songs does not mean that they saved $20k[1], nor does it mean that the record labels lost $20k. In your case, the relevant question is "how much did your revenue increase by after you started 10x your utility code?" [1] Assuming the songs are sold on the market for $1 each.

alecco 1y ago

Agree. But I think Anthropic is the outlier. Maybe ElevenLabs, too.

cootsnuck 1y ago

They're still gonna be an estimated $3 billion in the hole though. Jury still out of there is really "something there".

logsr 1y ago

growing ARR is easy when you are selling dollars for cents. people hyping ARR as an meaningful investment indicator are a dead giveaway that we are in fact in a bubble.

Keyframe 1y ago

For sure, but then again - Nvidia $4T?! I can't shake the feeling though that with Nvidia we're looking at another Sun type of situation from _the bubble_. Remember the dot in dot com?

mark_l_watson 1y ago
NVidia is being propped up by the US government. Huawei’s new chips are lower tech but would probably hit a good ‘practical sweet spot’ for AI data centers in many countries around the world but our current administration is threatening economic violence against any countries who choose to use more cost effective Huawei AI chips. I don’t want to descend into talking politics, but I want to say that geopolitics, the rising geopolitical ‘south’, etc., is fascinating stuff - much more interesting and entertaining than anything fictional on Netflicks or HBO!
- SJC_Hacker 1y ago
  Then why didn't DeepSeek use the Huawei chips, and as opposed to the H800s ?

hn_throwaway_99 1y ago

"Sooner or later the bubble's gonna burst" and "There's definitely something there" aren't mutually exclusive - in fact they often go together. It makes me perhaps a little sad to say that "I'm showing my age" by bringing up the .com boom/bust, but this feels exactly the same. The late 90s/early 00s were the dawn of the consumer Internet, and all of that tech vastly changed global society and brought you companies like Google and Amazon. It also brought you Pets.com, Webvan, and the bajillion other companies chronicled in "Fucked Company". You mention Anthropic, which I think is in a good a position as any to be one of the winners. I'm much less convinced about tons of the others. Look at Cursor - they were a first moving leader, but I know tons of people (myself included) who have cancelled their subscription because there are now better options.

pqtyw 1y ago
Not really much a of stuck bubble this time, though. Besides Nvidia and a handful of other HW companies, at least. Almost all of the very high valuations are for private companies and usually the amount of actual money involved in is relatively low.
ttrmw 1y ago
what're you finding better than cursor now?
- rock_hard 1y ago
  Devin is light years ahead of Cursor. It’s not even the same category! I stopped writing code by hand almost entirely and my output (measured in landed PRs) has been 10x And when I write code myself then it’s gnarly stuff and I want AI to get out of my way…so I just use Webstorm
- andrewmutz 1y ago
  Cline is absolutely fantastic when you combine it with Sonnet 4. Always use plan mode first and always have it write tests first (have it do TDD). It changed me from a skeptic to a believer and now I use it full time.

dom96 1y ago

I pay $0 and that's already enough for me. Genuinely, what are you getting for your $200? I cannot fathom paying that much for what seems like I get basically for free anyway.

tekawade 1y ago

Genuinely curious for the value add with Claude code here. Some perspective and/or data is appreciated.

zaphirplane 1y ago

Why are you paying for that? Are you employed as a dev and paying out of your pocket or are you a hobbyist or ?

babyshake 1y ago

The big question is to what extent they hit a plateau and are commoditized. What happens when there is a fully open stack that gets Claude Code level results but at a fraction of the cost? Not saying that will happen, but that seems to be the scenario for a bubble bursting.

v5v3 1y ago

Unless they are paying annually, the next big thing could see those $200 a month premium users gone.

westoque 1y ago

> They're getting my $200 a month and it's easily the best money I spend Can you explain? I don't see how $200 makes that much difference than what I get from paying $20/month with OpenAI? What's the use case?

999900000999 1y ago

Microsoft is obviously the elephant in the room. I decide to try out the agent built into VS Code. It basically matches most of these fly by night "agent" ides which are mostly just VS Code forks anyway. But it's weird. Because Microsoft can use Anthropic's API, funnel them revenue and take a loss on Copilot. We're all getting this stuff heavily subsidized by either VC money or big corp money. Microsoft can eat billions in losses on this if they become *the* provider of choice. This stuff isn't perfect, but this is the worst it'll ever be. In 2 years it'll be able to replace many of us.

csomar 1y ago

1. If you're maxing out your subscription, they're burning money on you. 2. They don't have a moat. DeepSeek and Kimi are already good enough to destroy any high margins they're hoping to generate from compute. Just because something is highly useful doesn't mean it's highly profitable. Water is essential to life, but it's dirt cheap in most of the world. Same goes for food.

mark_l_watson 1y ago
I agree. I was experimenting with tool use with Kimi K2 APIs yesterday - very effective, and so incredibly inexpensive. I am retired, now doing independent research, so my requirements are very different than most people here who are still in the job market or growing their own business. I find a combination of local Ollama models, with very inexpensive APis like Moonshot’s Kimi with occasional Gemini 2.5 Pro use, and occasionally using gemini-cli provides extraordinary value. Am I missing out by not using one or more $200-$300 a month subscriptions? Probably but I don’t care.

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rsynnott 1y ago

Economic bubbles _usually_ aren't based on things which are entirely worthless; there's generally _something_ there (just not enough something to sustain the valuations). There are exceptions (NFTs, arguably cryptocurrency as a whole, and of course tulips), but those _are_ the exceptions.

Lalabadie 1y ago

The bubble isn't the value available to buyers, it's the x00% multiplier created by speculation.

freejazz 1y ago

Yeah, the difference between the "something there" and the $4b valuation is the bubble.

__loam 1y ago

It's so funny to see people in this industry get super excited about revenue while never mentioning costs.

beefnugs 1y ago

So how much is it worth? what if it balloons to 5x the amount? what if "they" just decide this is too powerful so only corporate accounts worth $xx,000 a month, and plebs get limited per month for $x,000?