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For folks not following the drama: Anthropic's $200/month subscription for Claude Code is much cheaper than Anthropic's pay-as-you-go API. In a month of Claude

For folks not following the drama: Anthropic's $200/month subscription for Claude Code is much cheaper than Anthropic's pay-as-you-go API. In a month of Claude Code, it's easy to use so many LLM tokens that it would have cost you more than $1,000 if you'd paid via the API. Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscription, not the open-source OpenCode CLI. They want OpenCode users to pay API prices, which could be 5x or more. So, of course, OpenCode has implemented a workaround, so that folks paying "only" $200/month can use their preferred OpenCode CLI at Anthropic's all-you-can-eat token buffet. https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/7410#issuecomment-3727177435 https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/7410#issuecomme... Everything about this is ridiculous, and it's all Anthropic's fault. Anthropic shouldn't have an all-you-can-eat plan for $200 when their pay-as-you-go plan would cost more than $1,000+ for comparable usage. Their subscription plans should just sell you API credits at, like, 20% off. More importantly, Anthropic should have open sourced their Claude Code CLI a year ago. (They can and should just open source it now.)

weird-eye-issue 9mo ago
By this logic ChatGPT shouldn't exist either and should be charged by API pricing
casparvitch 9mo ago
I guess one issue is that you pay $200/month whether you use it or not. Potentially this could be better for Anthropic. What was not necessarily foreseeable (ok maybe it was) back when that started was that users have invented all kinds of ways to supervise their agents to be as efficient as possible. If they control the client, you can't do that.
- isolli 9mo ago
  Why is supervising one's agents to be as efficient as possible a problem for Anthropic?
  - casparvitch 9mo ago
    More inference = more cost (to Anthropic)
  - dpark 9mo ago
    When people say efficient here, they mean cost efficient, extracting as much work per dollar from Anthropic as possible. This is the opposite of Anthropic’s view of efficiency, which would be providing the minimal amount of service for the most amount of money.
- vidarh 9mo ago
  I can easily get Claude Code to run for 8-10 hours unsupervised without stopping with sub-agents entirely within Claude Code. I think it is more likely that if you stick with Claude Code, then you are more likely to stick with Opus/Sonnet, whereas if you use a third party CLI you might be more likely to mix and match or switch away entirely. It's in their interest to get you invested in their tooling.
  - KronisLV 9mo ago
    > if you use a third party CLI you might be more likely to mix and match or switch away entirely. I really like doing this, be it with OpenCode or Copilot or Cline/RooCode/KiloCode: I do have a Cerebras Code subscription (50 USD a month for a lot of tokens but only an okayish model) whereas the rest I use by paying per-token. Monthly spend ends up being somewhere between 100-150 USD total, obviously depending on what I do and the proportion of simple vs complex tasks. If Sonnet isn’t great for a given task, I can go for GPT-5 or Gemini 3.
    - vidarh 9mo ago
      I don't do this much because I really like Opus 4.5, and so far I haven't hit the limits on the $200 subscription much, but I do have some projects where I might need far higher limits. As a matter of principle, I really would like the flexibility though, as while I love Opus now, who knows which model I will prefer next month.
  - mlrtime 9mo ago
    On the flip side I started using Claude with other LLMs (openai) because my Pro sub gets maxed out quickly and I want a cheaper alternative to finish a project. I just use claude code proxy or litellm and set the ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL to my proxy and chose another LLM.
    - vidarh 9mo ago
      That would seem to be a very good reason for them to make Claude Code good enough that people would prefer doing that over the inverse... But also, they're a bit schizophrenic about what they want Claude Code to be, given you can stream JSON to/from Claude Code to use it as a headless backend including with your subscriptions.
- ignat980 9mo ago
  What kind of ways to supervise?
  - denysvitali 9mo ago
    ralph-loop & co
- labcomputer 9mo ago
  > I guess one issue is that you pay $200/month whether you use it or not. I can easily churn through $100 in an 8 hour work day with API billing. $200/month seems like an incredibly good deal, even if they apply some throttling.
hahahahhaah 9mo ago
Anthropic and all AI are playing chicken with each other. You need to win userbase and that is worth losing money for but if you sell discount tokens for Loveable clones to profit from that is not in your interest. Anthropic is futher complicated by mission.
3abiton 9mo ago
> Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscription, not the open-source OpenCode CLI. Because they are harvesting all the data they can harvest through CLI to train further models. API access in contrast provides much more limited data
- eli 9mo ago
  Claude Code only trains on data if you opt in
  - CSSer 9mo ago
    I used to be less cynical, but I could see them not honoring that, legal or not. The real answer, regardless of how you feel about that conversation, is that Claude Code, not any model, is the product.
    - eli 9mo ago
      I couldn't. Aside from violating laws in various countries and opening them up to lawsuits, it would be extremely bad for their enterprise business if they were caught stealing user data.
      - jrvarela56 9mo ago
        If they believe it would get them AGI they would risk it.
      - grumbelbart2 9mo ago
        Maybe. But the data is there, imagine financial troubles, someone buys in and uses the data for whatever they want. Much like 23andme. If you want something to stay a secret, you don't send it to that LLM, or you use a zero-retention contract.
        eli 9mo ago
OGEnthusiast 9mo ago
> More importantly, Anthropic should have open sourced their Claude Code CLI a year ago. (They can and should just open source it now.) Isn't the whole thesis behind LLM coding that you can easily clone the CLI using an LLM? Otherwise what are you paying $200/mo for?
- underdeserver 9mo ago
  In some sense that's what OpenCode is, and Anthropic's not having that.
  - OGEnthusiast 9mo ago
    This whole thing just seems like a "I never thought the leopards would eat my face" by all the people who have been shilling LLMs non-stop.
    - eli 9mo ago
      Doesn't seem like it has much to do with LLMs at all, just typical vendor lock-in nonsense like how Apple's own apps get entitlements not available to any other developer.
Xevion 9mo ago
> Anthropic shouldn't have an all-you-can-eat plan for $200 when their pay-as-you-go plan would cost more than $1,000+ for comparable usage. Their subscription plans should just sell you API credits at, like, 20% off. Sorry, I don't understand this. Either you're saying A) Everyone paying $200/mo should now pay $800/mo to match this 20% off figure you're theorizing... or B) Maybe you're implying that the $1,000+ costs are too high and they should be lowered, to like, what, $250/mo? (250 - 20% = $200) Which confuses me, because neither option is feasible or ever gonna happen.
- tsimionescu 9mo ago
  Not the OP, but it seems pretty clear to me - they're suggesting that fixed per-month pricing with unlimited usage shouldn't exist at all, as it doesn't really make sense for a product that has per token costs. Instead, they're saying that a 200$/month subscription should pay for something like $250 worth of pay-per-token API tokens, and additionally give preferential pricing for using up more tokens than that. So, if the normal API pricing were 10$ per million tokens, a 200$ per month subscription should offer 25M tokens for free, and allow you to use more tokens at a 9$/1M token rate. This way, if you used 50M tokens in a month, you'd pay 445$ with a subscription, versus paying 500$ with pay-as-you-go. This is still a good discount, but doesn't create perverse incentives, as the current model does.
sheepscreek 9mo ago
Update: Touché. The repo is just plugins and skills, not the meat. In any case, another workaround would be using ACP that’s supported by Zed. Let’s editing tools access the power of CLI agents directly. ——— > Anthropic should have open sourced their Claude Code CLI a year ago https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code It has been open source for a while now. Probably 4-6 months. > Anthropic shouldn't have an all-you-can-eat plan for $200 when their pay-as-you-go plan would cost more than $1,000+ for comparable usage. Their subscription plans should just sell you API credits at, like, 20% off. That's a very odd thing to wish for. I love my subscriptions and wouldn't have it any other way.
- ukuina 9mo ago
  That repo does not contain the source code for Claude Code.
- baby 9mo ago
  You can't use it as an SDK though, unlike codex
  - adastra22 9mo ago
    You can though? https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview
    - baby 9mo ago
      That's to build your own agent, similar to the openai agent sdk
      - adastra22 9mo ago
        How is that not what is being asked for?
        baby 9mo ago
baby 9mo ago
Aren't you happy that you can use claude code unlimited for only 200/month? I don't really get your point tbh
- Aurornis 9mo ago
  I’d bet almost everyone who opts to buy the $200 plan is happy with the deal they’re getting relative to API pricing. I think some people get triggered by the inconsistency in pricing or the idea of having a fixed cost for somewhat vague usage limits. In practice it’s a great deal for anyone using the model at that level.
- piokoch 9mo ago
  It is not unlimited, being not careful with your context management, you hit the limits quickly.
  - abhijat 9mo ago
    Isn't the context window the same for all plans, 200k? You would hit usage limits?
    - billyjobob 9mo ago
      If you send the full 200k tokens on every request you will get very few requests before you hit the token limit. Caching reduces the number sent but I don't know how much they can cache?
- mhast 9mo ago
  Even at the Max plan it's not unlimited. IIRC they say the limit is something like 20x the $20 plan. With "normal use" you're unlikely to hit the limit though, unless you only use the Opus model and do things in parallell.
mannanj 9mo ago
How is it different from what OpenAI and Codex, and Gemini offer?
krembo 9mo ago
I wonder how are these pricings compared to running Claude over bedrock
- weird-eye-issue 9mo ago
  The price is the same whether you run it on Bedrock or Anthropic....
bakugo 9mo ago
> Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno I do, it's called vendor lock-in. The product they're trying to sell is not the $200 subscription, it's the entire Claude Code ecosystem. For the average person, the words "AI" and "ChatGPT" are synonims. OpenAI's competitors have long conceded this loss, and for the most part, they're not even trying to compete, because it's clear to everyone that there is no clear path to monetization in this market - the average joe isn't going to pay for a $100/mo subscription to ask a chatbot to do their homework or write a chocolate cake recipe, so good luck making money there. The programming market is an entirely different story, though. It's clear that corporations are willing to pay decent money to replace human programmers with a service that does their work in a fraction of the time (and even the programmers themselves are willing to pay independently to do less work, even if it will ultimately make them obsolete), and they don't care enough about quality for that to be an issue. So everyone is currently racing to capture this potentially profitable market, and Claude Code is Anthropic's take on this. Simply selling the subscription on its own without any lock-in isn't the goal, because it's clearly not profitable, nor is it currently meant to be, it's a loss leader. The actual goal is to get people invested long-term in the Claude Code ecosystem as a whole, so that when the financial reality catches up to the hype and prices have to go up 5x to start making real money, those people feel compelled to keep paying, instead of seeking out cheaper alternatives, or simply giving up on the whole idea. This is why using the subscription as an API for other apps isn't allowed, why Claude Code is closed source, why it doesn't support third party OpenAI-compatible APIs, and why it reads a file called CLAUDE.md instead of something more generic.
iamkonstantin 9mo ago
What's ridiculous is that the subscription at 180€/month (excl. VAT) is already absurdly expensive for what you get. I doubt many would sign up for the per-API usage as it's just not sustainable pricing (as a user).
- thunfischtoast 9mo ago
  That entirely depends on your business case. If that call costing 50 Cent has done something for me which would have taken me more than 1 minute of paid working time to do it's sustainable.
- anonzzzies 9mo ago
  For the bizarre amount of work that gets done for that 180 euro, it is really cheap. We are just getting used to it and sinking prices everywhere, it is just that CC is the best (might be taste or bias, I at least think so), so we are staying with it for now. If it gets more expensive, we will go and try others for production instead of just trying them to get a feel for the competition as we do now.
- baq 9mo ago
  It pays for itself in a day for some folks. It is a lot but it’s still cheap.
- elAhmo 9mo ago
  This take is ridiculous. Nearly everyone who uses Max agrees that what they get for the money paid is an amazing deal. If you don't use or understand how LLMs fit in your workflows, you are not the target customer. But for people who use it daily, it is a relatively small investment compared to the time saved.
  - Majromax 9mo ago
    > If you don't use or understand how LLMs fit in your workflows, you are not the target customer. I feel like this is a major area of divergence. The "vibes" are bifurcating between "coding agents are great!" and "coding agents are all hype!", with increasing levels of in-group communication. How should I, an agent-curious user, begin to unravel this mess if $200 is significantly more than pocket change? The pro-agent camp remarks that these frontier models are qualitatively better and using older/cheaper approaches would give a misleading impression, so "buy the discount agent" doesn't even seem like a reasonable starting point.
globular-toast 9mo ago
> More importantly, Anthropic should have open sourced their Claude Code CLI a year ago. (They can and should just open source it now.) I assume they're embarrassed by it. Didn't one of their devs recently say it's 100% vibe coded?
wooger 9mo ago
It's hard to understand what Anthropic are getting from forcing more people to use Claude Code vs any other tools via the API. Why do they care? Do they somehow get better analytics or do they dream that there's a magical lock-in effect... from a buggy CLI?
- elAhmo 9mo ago
  Not that hard to understand, they want to control how their users use their product. A CLI they built, even acquiring the framework it was built in, is a way to achieve that.
  - touristtam 9mo ago
    But to make a "gauche" analogy, that would be like Microsoft not letting you browse their websites without using their browser (Edge).
    - weikju 9mo ago
      Don’t give them any ideas!
      - fragmede 9mo ago
        ActiveX has entered the chat.
  - Max-Limelihood 9mo ago
    But why do they want to control that? It’s none of their business.
- sho 9mo ago
  I suspect that they lose control over the cheaper models CC can choose for you for eg. file summaries or web fetch. Indeed, they lose web fetch and whatever telemetry it gives them completely. It's not unreasonable to assume that without the ability to push haiku use aggresively for summarization, the average user in OC vs CC costs more.
moltar 9mo ago
To extend your all you can eat analogy. It’s similar to how all you can eat restaurants allow you to eat all you can within the bounds of the restaurant, but you aren’t allowed to bring the food out with you.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- jbstack 9mo ago
  It's not really a fair analogy. Restaurants don't want you taking food away because they want to limit the amount you eat to a single meal, knowing that you'll stop when you get full. If you take food out you can eat more by waiting until the next meal when you're hungry again. You don't "get full" and "get hungry again" by switching UIs. You can consume the same amount whether you switch or you don't switch.
  - samrolken 9mo ago
    Claude Code does a lot of work in optimizing context usage, how much output is included by tools and how that's done, and when to compact. This very well may make the cost of providing the subscription lower to Anthropic when Claude Code is used. It's well within the realm of possibility if not likelihood that other tools don't have the same incentive to optimize the buffet usage. Not sure where that goes in the analogies here but maybe something about smaller plates.
  - dpark 9mo ago
    > You don't "get full" and "get hungry again" by switching UIs. You can consume the same amount whether you switch or you don't switch. This is actually a compelling argument for Claude Code getting the discount but not extending it to other cases. Claude Code, being subsidized by the company, is incentivized to minimize token usage. Third parties that piggyback on the same flat rate subscription, are not. i.e. Claude code wants you to eat less. Of course, I don’t believe at all that this is why Anthropic has blocked this use case. But it is a reasonable argument.
  - mrgoldenbrown 9mo ago
icsrutil 9mo ago
> They can and should just open source it now Why you have this idea? why they should open source it now?
piokoch 9mo ago
My problem with CC is that it is trying to be very creative. I am asking it to fix some test, or create a new test. What it is doing? It is running grep to find all tests in the code base and parses them. This eats a lot of tokens. Then it runs the test, as if I could not do this myself, it reads the output, sometimes very long (so more and more tokens are burned) and so on. If people had to pay for this cleverness and creativity an API price, they would be a bit shocked and give up quickly CC. Using Aider with Claude Sonnet I am eating much less tokens than CC does.
llmslave2 9mo ago
[flagged]
kar1181 9mo ago
Anthropic want you to use claude code cli badly and are prepared to be very generous if you do. People want to take that generosity without the reciprocity. I don't normally like to come down on the side of the megabigcorp but in this case anthropic aren't being evil. Not yet anyway.
- redbluered 9mo ago
  I think they are. The key question is about why they want to you to use the CLI. If you're not the customer, you're the product. There's also a monopolistic aspect to this. Having the best model isn't something over can legally exploit to gain advantage in adjacent markets. It reeks of "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run," Windows showing spurious error messages for DR-DOS, and Borland C++ losing to the then-inferior Visual C++ due to late support of new Windows features. And Internet Explorer bundling versus Netscape. Yes, Microsoft badly wanted you to use Office, Visual C++, MS-DOS, and IE, but using Windows to get that was illegal. Microsoft lost in court, paid a nominal fine, and executives were crying all the way to the bank.
  - senordevnyc 9mo ago
    If you're not the customer, you're the product. You are the customer, you're paying them directly.
    - ilvez 9mo ago
      We are both in this case..
- dheatov 9mo ago
  Assuming the actual price for many user is closer to 1k USD/mth than to 200 USD/mth, and the actual price is closer to their target margin to be a viable business, they're practically subsidising usage after 200 USD/mth. Together with other AI-TECH doing the same, they fabricate a false sense of "AI is capable AND affordable", which imo is evil.
  - 9mo ago
danmaz74 9mo ago
> More importantly, Anthropic should have open sourced their Claude Code CLI a year ago. (They can and should just open source it now.) "Should have" for what reason? I would be happy if they open sourced Claude Code, but the reality is that Claude Code is what makes Anthropic so relevant in the programming more, much more than the Claude models themselves. Asking them to give it away for free to their competitors seems a bit much.
- mrbungie 9mo ago
  Well OpenCode already exists and you can connect it to multiple providers, so you could just say that the agentic CLI harness business model as a service/billable feature is no more. In hindsight I would say it never made sense in the first place.
  - danmaz74 9mo ago
    When I compared OpenCode and Claude Code head to head a couple of months ago, Claude Code worked much better for me. I don't know if they closed the gap in the meantime, but for sure Claude Code has improved since then.
    - vmg12 9mo ago
      OpenCode launched a couple of months ago so that makes sense that it's worse. It's much better than Claude Code now. Somehow for the same model, opencode completes the same work faster than claude code and the ux is much better.
      - rovr138 9mo ago
        You win by adoption. Here adoption is a combination on the tool and the model. If people can’t pay the model to use the tool, they might not use the tool even if it’s better. That’s what anthropic is doing. It might be faster, but it’s more expensive.
        9mo ago
sourcecodeplz 9mo ago
It is and was open source from the start? https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code
- c0balt 9mo ago
  Unless I'm severely mistaken that's not the source code for claude-code. It's a few official plugins and some helper scripts
- vovavili 9mo ago
  Look a bit closer to the contents of this repo. There is basically no code.
skerit 9mo ago
> Anthropic shouldn't have an all-you-can-eat plan for $200 when their pay-as-you-go plan would cost more than $1,000+ for comparable usage. Their subscription plans should just sell you API credits at, like, 20% off I have the "all-you-can-eat" plan _because_ I know what I'm getting and how much it'll cost me. I don't see anything wrong with this. It's just a big time-limited amount of tokens you can use. Of course it sucks that it's limited to Claude-Code and Claude.ai. But the other providers have very similar subscriptions. Even the original ChatGTP pro subscription gives you a lot more tokens for the $20 it costs compared to the API cost. I always assumed tokens over the API cost that much, because that's just what people are willing to pay. And what people are willing to pay for small pay-as-you-go tasks vs large-scale agentic coding just doesn't line up. And then there's the psychological factor: if Claude messed up and wasted a bunch of tokens, I'm going to be super pissed that those specific tokens will have cost me $30. But when it's just a little blip on my usage limit, I don't really mind.
juped 9mo ago
I'm baffled that people, unknown to me, have apparently been considering Claude Code, the program, some kind of "secret sauce". It's a tool harness. Claude could one-shot write it for you, lol.
rolymath 9mo ago
What an incredibly entitled message. If you know what anthropic should and shouldn't do, go start your own AI company.
- petesergeant 9mo ago
  Right? Lots of "Anthropic should do x because that's what makes sense to me".
j45 9mo ago
Claude Code is unusually efficient in the use if tokens in top of it all.
steveharman 9mo ago
I believe there are a number of cli tools which also use Anthropic's Max plan (subscription) - this isn't just an OpenCode issue. I had the TaskMaster AI tool hooked up to my Anthropic sub, as well as a couple of other things - Kilo Code and and Roo Code iirc? From discussions at the time (6 months ago) this "use your Anthropic sub" functionality was listed by at least one of the above projects as "thanks to the functionality of the Anthropic SDK you can now use your sub...." implying it was officially sanctioned rather than via a "workaround".
reactordev 9mo ago
It’s all about the data. They want you to use their tool so they can collect data.
adam_patarino 9mo ago
They are subsidizing Claude code so they can use your data to train better coding models. You’re paying them to show their models how to code better.
- stemlord 9mo ago
  If true I wonder what kind of feedback loop is happening by training on human behavior that's directly influenced by the output of the same model
  - adam_patarino 9mo ago
    We build our fine tuning and reinforcement pipeline at cortex.build by synthesizing interactions between a user, the agent loops, and a codebase. The exact data they get from users in Claude Code. That data is critical to improve tool call use (both in correctness but also to improve when the agent chooses to use that tool). It's also important for the context rewrites Claude does. They rewrite your prompt and continuously manage the back-and-forth with the model. So does Cortex, just more aggressively with a more powerful context graph.
stingraycharles 9mo ago
What part of a TOS is ridiculous? Claude Code is obviously a loss leader to them, but developer momentum / market share is important to them and they consider it worth it. What part of “OpenCode broke the TOS of something well defined” makes you think it’s all Anthropic’s fault?
- mnky9800n 9mo ago
  My guess is that ultimately the use of Claude code will provide the training data to make most of what you do now in Claude code irrelevant.
  - FuckButtons 9mo ago
    My guess is that ultimately the use of Claude code will provide the training data to make most of what you do irrelevant. FTFY.
- fc417fc802 9mo ago
  Poor behavior is still poor behavior even if the relevant ToS aligns with it.
  - anamexis 9mo ago
    Why is it poor behavior though?
    - fc417fc802 9mo ago
      Restricting users from using third party tools is commonly viewed as poor behavior. I'm not inclined to rehash that debate here, although I might respond to specific (contextually relevant) counterpoints if you feel like making them.
- ForHackernews 9mo ago
  Do you think Anthropic followed all the ToS of every website on the internet when scraping them for training data?
mirzap 9mo ago
I tend to think that their margins on API pricing are significantly higher. They likely gave up some of that margin to grow the Claude Code user base, though it probably still runs at a thin profit. Businesses are simply better customers than individuals and are willing to pay much more.
giancarlostoro 9mo ago
> More importantly, Anthropic should have open sourced their Claude Code CLI a year ago. (They can and should just open source it now.) It's not like if it houses some top secret AI models inside of it, and it would make way more sense, and probably expand the capabilities of Claude Code itself. Do they lose out to having OpenAI or other competitors basically stealing their approach?
motbus3 9mo ago
I guess we will find out on the updated TOCs very soon
heliumtera 9mo ago
>But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ They definitely want their absolutely proprietary software with sudo privilege on your machine. I wonder why they would want that geeez
- rovr138 9mo ago
  it doesn't need sudo privileges...
  - heliumtera 9mo ago
    Yeah, it is not necessary. Being able to run unprivileged commands on millions of machines is already a stupidly powerful thing
dathinab 9mo ago
I guess it's another case of: - effective moneytizeability of a lot of AI products seem questionable - so AI cost strongly subsidized in all kinds of ways - which is causing all kind of strange dynamics and is very much incompatible with "free market self regulation" (hence why a company long term running by investor money _and_ under-pricing any competition which isn't subsidized is theoretically not legal (in the US). Not that the US seem to care to actually run a functioning self regulating free market, even going back as far as Amazone. Turns out moving "state subsidized" to "subsidized by rich" somehow makes it no longer problematic / anti-free-market /non-liberal ... /s))
xtiansimon 9mo ago
Sorry, ClaudeCode is $200/mo? I’m not using it now, but was thinking about giving it a try. The website shows $200/year for Pro: “$17 Per month with annual subscription discount ($200 billed up front). $20 if billed monthly.” https://claude.com/pricing https://claude.com/pricing What are you referring to that’s 10x that price? (Conversely, I’m wondering why Pro costs 1/10 the value of whatever you’re referring to?!?)
- vadansky 9mo ago
  Keep scrolling down, there is a Max option
- crassus_ed 9mo ago
  I got a pro subscription yesterday. With it you get a certain amount of tokens and you have a certain limit every 5 hours and every week. Once the limit is reached, you can choose to pay-per-token, upgrade your plan, or just wait until it refreshes. The more expensive subscription variants just contain more tokens, that’s all.
  - xtiansimon 9mo ago
    Right. I understand the potential for maximum usage (and abusing) of Claude in production. I don't suspect Claude will get caught too easily giving free beer. We'll both find out if Pro's token limits are sufficient for spending a weekend on a learning project, and what the fallback looks like.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 9mo ago
  They don't exactly put it front and center. Click "usage limits" (at the bottom; https://support.claude.com/en/articles/9797557-usage-limit-best-practices https://support.claude.com/en/articles/9797557-usage-limit-b...) then "Max plan" in the first list (https://support.claude.com/en/articles/11014257-about-claude-s-max-plan-usage https://support.claude.com/en/articles/11014257-about-claude...). There is a $200/mo price which people are likely referring to with "20x more usage per session" (which kinda bothers me because I'd bet my bottom dollar it's 20x "as much" but that's a lost cause).
rienbdj 9mo ago
What can we learn from this? The model is not a moat They need to own the point of interaction to drive company valuation. Users can more about tool switching costs that the particular model they use.
parliament32 9mo ago
> let's sell a loss leader > oh no, people are actually buying the loss leader I'm looking forward to the upcoming reckoning when all these AI companies start actually charging users what the services cost.
- HDThoreaun 9mo ago
  I see zero reason to believe the $200 subscription is losing money. Anthropic makes subscriptions cheaper because 1. Most users dont use all their allocated tokens 2. subscriptions create a lock in effect, even if its a weak one 3. Easier to raise money when you can point to your ARR from subscriptions 4. Lowering revenue variance month to month is very valuable for businesses
arbirk 9mo ago
I agree with the principle, but reality dictates that users and exposure is the real currency. So while annoying it is understandable that Anthropic subsidizes their own direct users.
HDThoreaun 9mo ago
> Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? Most subscribers dont use up all their allocated tokens. Theyre banning these third parties because they consistently do use all their allocated tokens.
RayVR 9mo ago
Why should anthropic open source Claude Code CLI? I understand you and some others want it, maybe it would be better for the community, but is it what’s best for anthropic? Why should subscribers get your specific discount rather than what anthropic has calculated the discount should be?
tom_m 9mo ago
That's the entire reason I don't use Claude's models. I don't want to use Claude Code. I want to use their models, just not their crappy software.
edmundsauto 9mo ago
My guess is the subscription plans provide a way of controlling the base load better, because of how the "session duration" and token quota per session and week work. People can get tremendous value, but a lot of that value is only available at night (theoretically when their GPUs are most likely to have less contention). So it's kind of a pricing strategy around their excess capacity. (For comparison, when first announced, AWS spot instances were like 10x cheaper than reserved.)
gejose 9mo ago
> Everything about this is ridiculous, and it's all Anthropic's fault. Anthropic shouldn't have an all-you-can-eat plan for $200 when their pay-as-you-go plan would cost more than $1,000+ for comparable usage Hard disagree. Companies can and do subsidize products to gather market share. It's just a loss leader [1]. The big money for them is likely satisfied software engineers pushing their employers to pay for more Anthropic products in an enterprise setting. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader
siva7 9mo ago
I would say everything about your comment is ridiculous, lacking basic understanding of product strategy. Irritates me that HN crowd upvotes this at the top.

weird-eye-issue 9mo ago

By this logic ChatGPT shouldn't exist either and should be charged by API pricing

casparvitch 9mo ago

I guess one issue is that you pay $200/month whether you use it or not. Potentially this could be better for Anthropic. What was not necessarily foreseeable (ok maybe it was) back when that started was that users have invented all kinds of ways to supervise their agents to be as efficient as possible. If they control the client, you can't do that.

isolli 9mo ago
Why is supervising one's agents to be as efficient as possible a problem for Anthropic?
- casparvitch 9mo ago
  More inference = more cost (to Anthropic)
- dpark 9mo ago
  When people say efficient here, they mean cost efficient, extracting as much work per dollar from Anthropic as possible. This is the opposite of Anthropic’s view of efficiency, which would be providing the minimal amount of service for the most amount of money.
vidarh 9mo ago
I can easily get Claude Code to run for 8-10 hours unsupervised without stopping with sub-agents entirely within Claude Code. I think it is more likely that if you stick with Claude Code, then you are more likely to stick with Opus/Sonnet, whereas if you use a third party CLI you might be more likely to mix and match or switch away entirely. It's in their interest to get you invested in their tooling.
- KronisLV 9mo ago
  > if you use a third party CLI you might be more likely to mix and match or switch away entirely. I really like doing this, be it with OpenCode or Copilot or Cline/RooCode/KiloCode: I do have a Cerebras Code subscription (50 USD a month for a lot of tokens but only an okayish model) whereas the rest I use by paying per-token. Monthly spend ends up being somewhere between 100-150 USD total, obviously depending on what I do and the proportion of simple vs complex tasks. If Sonnet isn’t great for a given task, I can go for GPT-5 or Gemini 3.
  - vidarh 9mo ago
    I don't do this much because I really like Opus 4.5, and so far I haven't hit the limits on the $200 subscription much, but I do have some projects where I might need far higher limits. As a matter of principle, I really would like the flexibility though, as while I love Opus now, who knows which model I will prefer next month.
- mlrtime 9mo ago
  On the flip side I started using Claude with other LLMs (openai) because my Pro sub gets maxed out quickly and I want a cheaper alternative to finish a project. I just use claude code proxy or litellm and set the ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL to my proxy and chose another LLM.
  - vidarh 9mo ago
    That would seem to be a very good reason for them to make Claude Code good enough that people would prefer doing that over the inverse... But also, they're a bit schizophrenic about what they want Claude Code to be, given you can stream JSON to/from Claude Code to use it as a headless backend including with your subscriptions.
ignat980 9mo ago
What kind of ways to supervise?
- denysvitali 9mo ago
  ralph-loop & co
labcomputer 9mo ago
> I guess one issue is that you pay $200/month whether you use it or not. I can easily churn through $100 in an 8 hour work day with API billing. $200/month seems like an incredibly good deal, even if they apply some throttling.

hahahahhaah 9mo ago

Anthropic and all AI are playing chicken with each other. You need to win userbase and that is worth losing money for but if you sell discount tokens for Loveable clones to profit from that is not in your interest. Anthropic is futher complicated by mission.

3abiton 9mo ago

> Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscription, not the open-source OpenCode CLI. Because they are harvesting all the data they can harvest through CLI to train further models. API access in contrast provides much more limited data

eli 9mo ago
Claude Code only trains on data if you opt in
- CSSer 9mo ago
  I used to be less cynical, but I could see them not honoring that, legal or not. The real answer, regardless of how you feel about that conversation, is that Claude Code, not any model, is the product.
  - eli 9mo ago
    I couldn't. Aside from violating laws in various countries and opening them up to lawsuits, it would be extremely bad for their enterprise business if they were caught stealing user data.
    - jrvarela56 9mo ago
      If they believe it would get them AGI they would risk it.
    - grumbelbart2 9mo ago
      Maybe. But the data is there, imagine financial troubles, someone buys in and uses the data for whatever they want. Much like 23andme. If you want something to stay a secret, you don't send it to that LLM, or you use a zero-retention contract.
      - eli 9mo ago

OGEnthusiast 9mo ago

> More importantly, Anthropic should have open sourced their Claude Code CLI a year ago. (They can and should just open source it now.) Isn't the whole thesis behind LLM coding that you can easily clone the CLI using an LLM? Otherwise what are you paying $200/mo for?

underdeserver 9mo ago
In some sense that's what OpenCode is, and Anthropic's not having that.
- OGEnthusiast 9mo ago
  This whole thing just seems like a "I never thought the leopards would eat my face" by all the people who have been shilling LLMs non-stop.
  - eli 9mo ago
    Doesn't seem like it has much to do with LLMs at all, just typical vendor lock-in nonsense like how Apple's own apps get entitlements not available to any other developer.

Xevion 9mo ago

> Anthropic shouldn't have an all-you-can-eat plan for $200 when their pay-as-you-go plan would cost more than $1,000+ for comparable usage. Their subscription plans should just sell you API credits at, like, 20% off. Sorry, I don't understand this. Either you're saying A) Everyone paying $200/mo should now pay $800/mo to match this 20% off figure you're theorizing... or B) Maybe you're implying that the $1,000+ costs are too high and they should be lowered, to like, what, $250/mo? (250 - 20% = $200) Which confuses me, because neither option is feasible or ever gonna happen.

tsimionescu 9mo ago
Not the OP, but it seems pretty clear to me - they're suggesting that fixed per-month pricing with unlimited usage shouldn't exist at all, as it doesn't really make sense for a product that has per token costs. Instead, they're saying that a 200$/month subscription should pay for something like $250 worth of pay-per-token API tokens, and additionally give preferential pricing for using up more tokens than that. So, if the normal API pricing were 10$ per million tokens, a 200$ per month subscription should offer 25M tokens for free, and allow you to use more tokens at a 9$/1M token rate. This way, if you used 50M tokens in a month, you'd pay 445$ with a subscription, versus paying 500$ with pay-as-you-go. This is still a good discount, but doesn't create perverse incentives, as the current model does.

sheepscreek 9mo ago

Update: Touché. The repo is just plugins and skills, not the meat. In any case, another workaround would be using ACP that’s supported by Zed. Let’s editing tools access the power of CLI agents directly. ——— > Anthropic should have open sourced their Claude Code CLI a year ago https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code It has been open source for a while now. Probably 4-6 months. > Anthropic shouldn't have an all-you-can-eat plan for $200 when their pay-as-you-go plan would cost more than $1,000+ for comparable usage. Their subscription plans should just sell you API credits at, like, 20% off. That's a very odd thing to wish for. I love my subscriptions and wouldn't have it any other way.

ukuina 9mo ago
That repo does not contain the source code for Claude Code.
baby 9mo ago
You can't use it as an SDK though, unlike codex
- adastra22 9mo ago
  You can though? https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview
  - baby 9mo ago
    That's to build your own agent, similar to the openai agent sdk
    - adastra22 9mo ago
      How is that not what is being asked for?
      - baby 9mo ago

baby 9mo ago

Aren't you happy that you can use claude code unlimited for only 200/month? I don't really get your point tbh

Aurornis 9mo ago
I’d bet almost everyone who opts to buy the $200 plan is happy with the deal they’re getting relative to API pricing. I think some people get triggered by the inconsistency in pricing or the idea of having a fixed cost for somewhat vague usage limits. In practice it’s a great deal for anyone using the model at that level.
piokoch 9mo ago
It is not unlimited, being not careful with your context management, you hit the limits quickly.
- abhijat 9mo ago
  Isn't the context window the same for all plans, 200k? You would hit usage limits?
  - billyjobob 9mo ago
    If you send the full 200k tokens on every request you will get very few requests before you hit the token limit. Caching reduces the number sent but I don't know how much they can cache?
mhast 9mo ago
Even at the Max plan it's not unlimited. IIRC they say the limit is something like 20x the $20 plan. With "normal use" you're unlikely to hit the limit though, unless you only use the Opus model and do things in parallell.

mannanj 9mo ago

How is it different from what OpenAI and Codex, and Gemini offer?

krembo 9mo ago

I wonder how are these pricings compared to running Claude over bedrock

weird-eye-issue 9mo ago
The price is the same whether you run it on Bedrock or Anthropic....

bakugo 9mo ago

> Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno I do, it's called vendor lock-in. The product they're trying to sell is not the $200 subscription, it's the entire Claude Code ecosystem. For the average person, the words "AI" and "ChatGPT" are synonims. OpenAI's competitors have long conceded this loss, and for the most part, they're not even trying to compete, because it's clear to everyone that there is no clear path to monetization in this market - the average joe isn't going to pay for a $100/mo subscription to ask a chatbot to do their homework or write a chocolate cake recipe, so good luck making money there. The programming market is an entirely different story, though. It's clear that corporations are willing to pay decent money to replace human programmers with a service that does their work in a fraction of the time (and even the programmers themselves are willing to pay independently to do less work, even if it will ultimately make them obsolete), and they don't care enough about quality for that to be an issue. So everyone is currently racing to capture this potentially profitable market, and Claude Code is Anthropic's take on this. Simply selling the subscription on its own without any lock-in isn't the goal, because it's clearly not profitable, nor is it currently meant to be, it's a loss leader. The actual goal is to get people invested long-term in the Claude Code ecosystem as a whole, so that when the financial reality catches up to the hype and prices have to go up 5x to start making real money, those people feel compelled to keep paying, instead of seeking out cheaper alternatives, or simply giving up on the whole idea. This is why using the subscription as an API for other apps isn't allowed, why Claude Code is closed source, why it doesn't support third party OpenAI-compatible APIs, and why it reads a file called CLAUDE.md instead of something more generic.

iamkonstantin 9mo ago

What's ridiculous is that the subscription at 180€/month (excl. VAT) is already absurdly expensive for what you get. I doubt many would sign up for the per-API usage as it's just not sustainable pricing (as a user).

thunfischtoast 9mo ago
That entirely depends on your business case. If that call costing 50 Cent has done something for me which would have taken me more than 1 minute of paid working time to do it's sustainable.
anonzzzies 9mo ago
For the bizarre amount of work that gets done for that 180 euro, it is really cheap. We are just getting used to it and sinking prices everywhere, it is just that CC is the best (might be taste or bias, I at least think so), so we are staying with it for now. If it gets more expensive, we will go and try others for production instead of just trying them to get a feel for the competition as we do now.
baq 9mo ago
It pays for itself in a day for some folks. It is a lot but it’s still cheap.
elAhmo 9mo ago
This take is ridiculous. Nearly everyone who uses Max agrees that what they get for the money paid is an amazing deal. If you don't use or understand how LLMs fit in your workflows, you are not the target customer. But for people who use it daily, it is a relatively small investment compared to the time saved.
- Majromax 9mo ago
  > If you don't use or understand how LLMs fit in your workflows, you are not the target customer. I feel like this is a major area of divergence. The "vibes" are bifurcating between "coding agents are great!" and "coding agents are all hype!", with increasing levels of in-group communication. How should I, an agent-curious user, begin to unravel this mess if $200 is significantly more than pocket change? The pro-agent camp remarks that these frontier models are qualitatively better and using older/cheaper approaches would give a misleading impression, so "buy the discount agent" doesn't even seem like a reasonable starting point.

globular-toast 9mo ago

> More importantly, Anthropic should have open sourced their Claude Code CLI a year ago. (They can and should just open source it now.) I assume they're embarrassed by it. Didn't one of their devs recently say it's 100% vibe coded?

wooger 9mo ago

It's hard to understand what Anthropic are getting from forcing more people to use Claude Code vs any other tools via the API. Why do they care? Do they somehow get better analytics or do they dream that there's a magical lock-in effect... from a buggy CLI?

elAhmo 9mo ago
Not that hard to understand, they want to control how their users use their product. A CLI they built, even acquiring the framework it was built in, is a way to achieve that.
- touristtam 9mo ago
  But to make a "gauche" analogy, that would be like Microsoft not letting you browse their websites without using their browser (Edge).
  - weikju 9mo ago
    Don’t give them any ideas!
    - fragmede 9mo ago
      ActiveX has entered the chat.
- Max-Limelihood 9mo ago
  But why do they want to control that? It’s none of their business.
sho 9mo ago
I suspect that they lose control over the cheaper models CC can choose for you for eg. file summaries or web fetch. Indeed, they lose web fetch and whatever telemetry it gives them completely. It's not unreasonable to assume that without the ability to push haiku use aggresively for summarization, the average user in OC vs CC costs more.

moltar 9mo ago

To extend your all you can eat analogy. It’s similar to how all you can eat restaurants allow you to eat all you can within the bounds of the restaurant, but you aren’t allowed to bring the food out with you.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
jbstack 9mo ago
It's not really a fair analogy. Restaurants don't want you taking food away because they want to limit the amount you eat to a single meal, knowing that you'll stop when you get full. If you take food out you can eat more by waiting until the next meal when you're hungry again. You don't "get full" and "get hungry again" by switching UIs. You can consume the same amount whether you switch or you don't switch.
- samrolken 9mo ago
  Claude Code does a lot of work in optimizing context usage, how much output is included by tools and how that's done, and when to compact. This very well may make the cost of providing the subscription lower to Anthropic when Claude Code is used. It's well within the realm of possibility if not likelihood that other tools don't have the same incentive to optimize the buffet usage. Not sure where that goes in the analogies here but maybe something about smaller plates.
- dpark 9mo ago
  > You don't "get full" and "get hungry again" by switching UIs. You can consume the same amount whether you switch or you don't switch. This is actually a compelling argument for Claude Code getting the discount but not extending it to other cases. Claude Code, being subsidized by the company, is incentivized to minimize token usage. Third parties that piggyback on the same flat rate subscription, are not. i.e. Claude code wants you to eat less. Of course, I don’t believe at all that this is why Anthropic has blocked this use case. But it is a reasonable argument.
- mrgoldenbrown 9mo ago

icsrutil 9mo ago

> They can and should just open source it now Why you have this idea? why they should open source it now?

piokoch 9mo ago

My problem with CC is that it is trying to be very creative. I am asking it to fix some test, or create a new test. What it is doing? It is running grep to find all tests in the code base and parses them. This eats a lot of tokens. Then it runs the test, as if I could not do this myself, it reads the output, sometimes very long (so more and more tokens are burned) and so on. If people had to pay for this cleverness and creativity an API price, they would be a bit shocked and give up quickly CC. Using Aider with Claude Sonnet I am eating much less tokens than CC does.

llmslave2 9mo ago

[flagged]

kar1181 9mo ago

Anthropic want you to use claude code cli badly and are prepared to be very generous if you do. People want to take that generosity without the reciprocity. I don't normally like to come down on the side of the megabigcorp but in this case anthropic aren't being evil. Not yet anyway.

redbluered 9mo ago
I think they are. The key question is about why they want to you to use the CLI. If you're not the customer, you're the product. There's also a monopolistic aspect to this. Having the best model isn't something over can legally exploit to gain advantage in adjacent markets. It reeks of "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run," Windows showing spurious error messages for DR-DOS, and Borland C++ losing to the then-inferior Visual C++ due to late support of new Windows features. And Internet Explorer bundling versus Netscape. Yes, Microsoft badly wanted you to use Office, Visual C++, MS-DOS, and IE, but using Windows to get that was illegal. Microsoft lost in court, paid a nominal fine, and executives were crying all the way to the bank.
- senordevnyc 9mo ago
  If you're not the customer, you're the product. You are the customer, you're paying them directly.
  - ilvez 9mo ago
    We are both in this case..
dheatov 9mo ago
Assuming the actual price for many user is closer to 1k USD/mth than to 200 USD/mth, and the actual price is closer to their target margin to be a viable business, they're practically subsidising usage after 200 USD/mth. Together with other AI-TECH doing the same, they fabricate a false sense of "AI is capable AND affordable", which imo is evil.
- 9mo ago

danmaz74 9mo ago

> More importantly, Anthropic should have open sourced their Claude Code CLI a year ago. (They can and should just open source it now.) "Should have" for what reason? I would be happy if they open sourced Claude Code, but the reality is that Claude Code is what makes Anthropic so relevant in the programming more, much more than the Claude models themselves. Asking them to give it away for free to their competitors seems a bit much.

mrbungie 9mo ago
Well OpenCode already exists and you can connect it to multiple providers, so you could just say that the agentic CLI harness business model as a service/billable feature is no more. In hindsight I would say it never made sense in the first place.
- danmaz74 9mo ago
  When I compared OpenCode and Claude Code head to head a couple of months ago, Claude Code worked much better for me. I don't know if they closed the gap in the meantime, but for sure Claude Code has improved since then.
  - vmg12 9mo ago
    OpenCode launched a couple of months ago so that makes sense that it's worse. It's much better than Claude Code now. Somehow for the same model, opencode completes the same work faster than claude code and the ux is much better.
    - rovr138 9mo ago
      You win by adoption. Here adoption is a combination on the tool and the model. If people can’t pay the model to use the tool, they might not use the tool even if it’s better. That’s what anthropic is doing. It might be faster, but it’s more expensive.
      - 9mo ago

sourcecodeplz 9mo ago

It is and was open source from the start? https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code

c0balt 9mo ago
Unless I'm severely mistaken that's not the source code for claude-code. It's a few official plugins and some helper scripts
vovavili 9mo ago
Look a bit closer to the contents of this repo. There is basically no code.

skerit 9mo ago

> Anthropic shouldn't have an all-you-can-eat plan for $200 when their pay-as-you-go plan would cost more than $1,000+ for comparable usage. Their subscription plans should just sell you API credits at, like, 20% off I have the "all-you-can-eat" plan _because_ I know what I'm getting and how much it'll cost me. I don't see anything wrong with this. It's just a big time-limited amount of tokens you can use. Of course it sucks that it's limited to Claude-Code and Claude.ai. But the other providers have very similar subscriptions. Even the original ChatGTP pro subscription gives you a lot more tokens for the $20 it costs compared to the API cost. I always assumed tokens over the API cost that much, because that's just what people are willing to pay. And what people are willing to pay for small pay-as-you-go tasks vs large-scale agentic coding just doesn't line up. And then there's the psychological factor: if Claude messed up and wasted a bunch of tokens, I'm going to be super pissed that those specific tokens will have cost me $30. But when it's just a little blip on my usage limit, I don't really mind.

juped 9mo ago

I'm baffled that people, unknown to me, have apparently been considering Claude Code, the program, some kind of "secret sauce". It's a tool harness. Claude could one-shot write it for you, lol.

rolymath 9mo ago

What an incredibly entitled message. If you know what anthropic should and shouldn't do, go start your own AI company.

petesergeant 9mo ago
Right? Lots of "Anthropic should do x because that's what makes sense to me".

j45 9mo ago

Claude Code is unusually efficient in the use if tokens in top of it all.

steveharman 9mo ago

I believe there are a number of cli tools which also use Anthropic's Max plan (subscription) - this isn't just an OpenCode issue. I had the TaskMaster AI tool hooked up to my Anthropic sub, as well as a couple of other things - Kilo Code and and Roo Code iirc? From discussions at the time (6 months ago) this "use your Anthropic sub" functionality was listed by at least one of the above projects as "thanks to the functionality of the Anthropic SDK you can now use your sub...." implying it was officially sanctioned rather than via a "workaround".

reactordev 9mo ago

It’s all about the data. They want you to use their tool so they can collect data.

adam_patarino 9mo ago

They are subsidizing Claude code so they can use your data to train better coding models. You’re paying them to show their models how to code better.

stemlord 9mo ago
If true I wonder what kind of feedback loop is happening by training on human behavior that's directly influenced by the output of the same model
- adam_patarino 9mo ago
  We build our fine tuning and reinforcement pipeline at cortex.build by synthesizing interactions between a user, the agent loops, and a codebase. The exact data they get from users in Claude Code. That data is critical to improve tool call use (both in correctness but also to improve when the agent chooses to use that tool). It's also important for the context rewrites Claude does. They rewrite your prompt and continuously manage the back-and-forth with the model. So does Cortex, just more aggressively with a more powerful context graph.

stingraycharles 9mo ago

What part of a TOS is ridiculous? Claude Code is obviously a loss leader to them, but developer momentum / market share is important to them and they consider it worth it. What part of “OpenCode broke the TOS of something well defined” makes you think it’s all Anthropic’s fault?

mnky9800n 9mo ago
My guess is that ultimately the use of Claude code will provide the training data to make most of what you do now in Claude code irrelevant.
- FuckButtons 9mo ago
  My guess is that ultimately the use of Claude code will provide the training data to make most of what you do irrelevant. FTFY.
fc417fc802 9mo ago
Poor behavior is still poor behavior even if the relevant ToS aligns with it.
- anamexis 9mo ago
  Why is it poor behavior though?
  - fc417fc802 9mo ago
    Restricting users from using third party tools is commonly viewed as poor behavior. I'm not inclined to rehash that debate here, although I might respond to specific (contextually relevant) counterpoints if you feel like making them.
ForHackernews 9mo ago
Do you think Anthropic followed all the ToS of every website on the internet when scraping them for training data?

mirzap 9mo ago

I tend to think that their margins on API pricing are significantly higher. They likely gave up some of that margin to grow the Claude Code user base, though it probably still runs at a thin profit. Businesses are simply better customers than individuals and are willing to pay much more.

giancarlostoro 9mo ago

> More importantly, Anthropic should have open sourced their Claude Code CLI a year ago. (They can and should just open source it now.) It's not like if it houses some top secret AI models inside of it, and it would make way more sense, and probably expand the capabilities of Claude Code itself. Do they lose out to having OpenAI or other competitors basically stealing their approach?

motbus3 9mo ago

I guess we will find out on the updated TOCs very soon

heliumtera 9mo ago

>But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ They definitely want their absolutely proprietary software with sudo privilege on your machine. I wonder why they would want that geeez

rovr138 9mo ago
it doesn't need sudo privileges...
- heliumtera 9mo ago
  Yeah, it is not necessary. Being able to run unprivileged commands on millions of machines is already a stupidly powerful thing

dathinab 9mo ago

I guess it's another case of: - effective moneytizeability of a lot of AI products seem questionable - so AI cost strongly subsidized in all kinds of ways - which is causing all kind of strange dynamics and is very much incompatible with "free market self regulation" (hence why a company long term running by investor money _and_ under-pricing any competition which isn't subsidized is theoretically not legal (in the US). Not that the US seem to care to actually run a functioning self regulating free market, even going back as far as Amazone. Turns out moving "state subsidized" to "subsidized by rich" somehow makes it no longer problematic / anti-free-market /non-liberal ... /s))

xtiansimon 9mo ago

Sorry, ClaudeCode is $200/mo? I’m not using it now, but was thinking about giving it a try. The website shows $200/year for Pro: “$17 Per month with annual subscription discount ($200 billed up front). $20 if billed monthly.” https://claude.com/pricing https://claude.com/pricing What are you referring to that’s 10x that price? (Conversely, I’m wondering why Pro costs 1/10 the value of whatever you’re referring to?!?)

vadansky 9mo ago
Keep scrolling down, there is a Max option
crassus_ed 9mo ago
I got a pro subscription yesterday. With it you get a certain amount of tokens and you have a certain limit every 5 hours and every week. Once the limit is reached, you can choose to pay-per-token, upgrade your plan, or just wait until it refreshes. The more expensive subscription variants just contain more tokens, that’s all.
- xtiansimon 9mo ago
  Right. I understand the potential for maximum usage (and abusing) of Claude in production. I don't suspect Claude will get caught too easily giving free beer. We'll both find out if Pro's token limits are sufficient for spending a weekend on a learning project, and what the fallback looks like.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 9mo ago
They don't exactly put it front and center. Click "usage limits" (at the bottom; https://support.claude.com/en/articles/9797557-usage-limit-best-practices https://support.claude.com/en/articles/9797557-usage-limit-b...) then "Max plan" in the first list (https://support.claude.com/en/articles/11014257-about-claude-s-max-plan-usage https://support.claude.com/en/articles/11014257-about-claude...). There is a $200/mo price which people are likely referring to with "20x more usage per session" (which kinda bothers me because I'd bet my bottom dollar it's 20x "as much" but that's a lost cause).

rienbdj 9mo ago

What can we learn from this? The model is not a moat They need to own the point of interaction to drive company valuation. Users can more about tool switching costs that the particular model they use.

parliament32 9mo ago

> let's sell a loss leader > oh no, people are actually buying the loss leader I'm looking forward to the upcoming reckoning when all these AI companies start actually charging users what the services cost.

HDThoreaun 9mo ago
I see zero reason to believe the $200 subscription is losing money. Anthropic makes subscriptions cheaper because 1. Most users dont use all their allocated tokens 2. subscriptions create a lock in effect, even if its a weak one 3. Easier to raise money when you can point to your ARR from subscriptions 4. Lowering revenue variance month to month is very valuable for businesses

arbirk 9mo ago

I agree with the principle, but reality dictates that users and exposure is the real currency. So while annoying it is understandable that Anthropic subsidizes their own direct users.

HDThoreaun 9mo ago

> Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? Most subscribers dont use up all their allocated tokens. Theyre banning these third parties because they consistently do use all their allocated tokens.

RayVR 9mo ago

Why should anthropic open source Claude Code CLI? I understand you and some others want it, maybe it would be better for the community, but is it what’s best for anthropic? Why should subscribers get your specific discount rather than what anthropic has calculated the discount should be?

tom_m 9mo ago

That's the entire reason I don't use Claude's models. I don't want to use Claude Code. I want to use their models, just not their crappy software.

edmundsauto 9mo ago

My guess is the subscription plans provide a way of controlling the base load better, because of how the "session duration" and token quota per session and week work. People can get tremendous value, but a lot of that value is only available at night (theoretically when their GPUs are most likely to have less contention). So it's kind of a pricing strategy around their excess capacity. (For comparison, when first announced, AWS spot instances were like 10x cheaper than reserved.)

gejose 9mo ago

> Everything about this is ridiculous, and it's all Anthropic's fault. Anthropic shouldn't have an all-you-can-eat plan for $200 when their pay-as-you-go plan would cost more than $1,000+ for comparable usage Hard disagree. Companies can and do subsidize products to gather market share. It's just a loss leader [1]. The big money for them is likely satisfied software engineers pushing their employers to pay for more Anthropic products in an enterprise setting. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader

siva7 9mo ago

I would say everything about your comment is ridiculous, lacking basic understanding of product strategy. Irritates me that HN crowd upvotes this at the top.