6 ms·

I learned today that the Anthropic "Enterprise" plan - the one big companies use because they need governance features and audit logs and all of that jazz - is

by simonw 5mo ago

I learned today that the Anthropic "Enterprise" plan - the one big companies use because they need governance features and audit logs and all of that jazz - is billed at API token rates (plus $20/seat/month). So large companies are getting billed a lot more than those discount subscription plans.

alexriddle 5mo ago
Anything over 150 seats means you need to pay at token rates plus the $20/user. My day job is operational (no coding at all) and I'm spending ~$300 a month on a few chats with Claude/Cowork a day over the course of a month.
- stymaar 5mo ago
  I hope your company is keeping the input/response pair in case they need to break free at some point.
  - dd8601fn 5mo ago
    Wouldn’t people mostly just want any artifacts?
    - speed_spread 5mo ago
      Like Slack history, LLM history can be used to build searchable knowledge base. Questions are often more valuable than answers.
- m_kos 5mo ago
  $300 is my employer's monthly cap on Claude Enterprise. It lasts me at most a week of moderate use. I would much rather get Codex Pro and Claude Pro or Max, which would cost ≤ $200. For $300, one could also add Gemini Ultra to the mix so I could have all three review each other's code, etc. Claude can be very good but enterprise pricing doesn't make sense to me.
  - lunar_mycroft 5mo ago
    The $200 plan you're talking about is subsidized by Anthropic. They cannot afford to keep offering that to everyone indefinitely. Absolute best case scenario for current users is that they can continue to subsidize it as way to sell enterprise plans, but there's no way that they can keep offering it to everyone at those prices.
    - wahnfrieden 5mo ago
      They can if it is a way to get individuals hooked on it to then introduce it at their workplaces, who pay enterprise rates.
      - lunar_mycroft 5mo ago
        Right, they can do it to sell enterprise plans, but they can't offer said plans to those enterprise customers indefinitely. So if your employer wants to spend $200/month on tokens, you're going to get however many tokens $200 buys you each month, not the order of magnitude more you can get with a consumer subscription.
        wahnfrieden 5mo ago
        That’s what I’m saying. Enterprise customers don’t use the subscription plan
        addedGone 5mo ago
        Except that they do, we do. A lot of startups pile up enormous amount of accounts, companies don't need the Enterprise Anthropic solution, they can just subscribe to many accounts and have their own staff KYC for each (1 codex, 1 claude, 1 google and so-on).
        Bnjoroge 5mo ago
        I imagine it’s also really trivial to build some kind of local “enterprise” proxy that gives you the same visibility in usage as the anthropic dashboard would give you. I use one for aggregating all my subs.
- stavros 5mo ago
  We deployed OpenWebUI with the Claude API the other day for employees. Someone sent ten messages (which appeared to just be reasonable day-to-day work), and we paid $200 for it. There were 44M input tokens, 100k output tokens, no cache hits at all. OpenWebUI reports 3M tokens used, Claude reports 44M, and I have no idea where the rest of the tokens went. This was all on a brand new API key, installed directly to the service, too. With this kind of opaque billing, how can I reasonably deploy any AI?
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - SyneRyder 5mo ago
    No cache hits seems ominous, could this be an OpenWebUI issue? It also seems ominous that Anthropic models are basically nowhere on the OpenWebUI leaderboards. I'm only doing a cursory search, but it seems OpenWebUI doesn't support Anthropic caching, and they don't intend to? Other providers handle caching automatically (apparently?) but caching has to be specifically managed by the client with Anthropic. If that's correct that OpenWebUI doesn't support it, it would really send your costs spiralling, because you're being billed for all the tokens in the entire multi-turn conversation on every turn: https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/issues/4887 https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/issues/4887 I have no experience with OpenWebUI though (honestly, first time I've heard of it). Just trying to be helpful. If I'm completely incorrect then apologies in advance for sending you down the wrong path.
    - stavros 5mo ago
      Really? Huh, I've never heard of Anthropic caching needing to be specifically enabled. I'll look into that, thank you! Sounds like the culprit.
datadrivenangel 5mo ago
I've heard that the $20/seat gets waved if you have large enough committed spend.
- isoprophlex 5mo ago
  Would they even care at that scale, if the average employee spends $3000 every month because mgmt mandates slopmaxxing?
jgreid 5mo ago
Governance and audit trail are incredibly valuable to large enterprise organizations, especially those working in regulated spaces. Companies will pay a premium if the security/privacy/compliance issues are handled effectively.
- zaphirplane 5mo ago
  What is the governance and audit trail on offer ?
zackify 5mo ago
We are on it at my job. It saves money due to other parts of the org not using as many tokens. The real cost effective way is giving a team $20 cursor $20-100 Claude $20-200 codex. I'm spending 1k on Claude enterprise easily and that's with trying to spread it on codex and cursor using pi.
pyreko 5mo ago
Yep, where I work I know people easily spending over a few thousand dollars a month.
htrp 5mo ago
> I learned today that the Anthropic "Enterprise" plan - the one big companies use because they need governance features and audit logs and all of that jazz - is billed at API token rates (plus $20/seat/month). Can large enterprises just not use the API ? I have audit logs and what seem to be enterprise features through my anthropic account (platform.claude.ai)
- thewebguyd 5mo ago
  The devs can, sure. The "enterprise plan" is more for that + giving Claude to all the non-technical employees for access to the chatbot + Cowork. Plus SSO and all that jazz.
- simonw 5mo ago
  They can do that, but I expect they see individual user accounts and enterprise account management and easy rollout of Claude.ai/Cowork/Claude Code/etc as worth an extra $20/month/person.
- opsnooperfax 5mo ago
  Your CISO is paying to not be responsible. That’s it. That’s always the reason.
- acdha 5mo ago
  Enterprises can, but then they have to show their auditors that this has been done in a way which is robust and can’t be bypassed, and they have to build the kind of reports people need to be convinced of that — nothing is ever “just” in enterprise IT. Longer term, you also have to be careful about building things around details which could change at any time. OpenAI and Anthropic have a ton of pressure to start banking huge profits and they very closely monitor customer activity. A time-honored strategy in this space is to shuffle the features enterprise customers depend on but which aren’t deal-breakers for most other customers into expensive enterprise plans. There’s possibly some counter pressure from companies like Google which have healthier finances but I wouldn’t count on that since they also have MBAs who’d be all too happy to invent pretexts to hike their prices to match.
chinathrow 5mo ago
Do we know that they all pay the API rates or will they negotiate individually?

by simonw 5mo ago

alexriddle 5mo ago

Anything over 150 seats means you need to pay at token rates plus the $20/user. My day job is operational (no coding at all) and I'm spending ~$300 a month on a few chats with Claude/Cowork a day over the course of a month.

stymaar 5mo ago
I hope your company is keeping the input/response pair in case they need to break free at some point.
- dd8601fn 5mo ago
  Wouldn’t people mostly just want any artifacts?
  - speed_spread 5mo ago
    Like Slack history, LLM history can be used to build searchable knowledge base. Questions are often more valuable than answers.
m_kos 5mo ago
$300 is my employer's monthly cap on Claude Enterprise. It lasts me at most a week of moderate use. I would much rather get Codex Pro and Claude Pro or Max, which would cost ≤ $200. For $300, one could also add Gemini Ultra to the mix so I could have all three review each other's code, etc. Claude can be very good but enterprise pricing doesn't make sense to me.
- lunar_mycroft 5mo ago
  The $200 plan you're talking about is subsidized by Anthropic. They cannot afford to keep offering that to everyone indefinitely. Absolute best case scenario for current users is that they can continue to subsidize it as way to sell enterprise plans, but there's no way that they can keep offering it to everyone at those prices.
  - wahnfrieden 5mo ago
    They can if it is a way to get individuals hooked on it to then introduce it at their workplaces, who pay enterprise rates.
    - lunar_mycroft 5mo ago
      Right, they can do it to sell enterprise plans, but they can't offer said plans to those enterprise customers indefinitely. So if your employer wants to spend $200/month on tokens, you're going to get however many tokens $200 buys you each month, not the order of magnitude more you can get with a consumer subscription.
      - wahnfrieden 5mo ago
        That’s what I’m saying. Enterprise customers don’t use the subscription plan
        addedGone 5mo ago
        Except that they do, we do. A lot of startups pile up enormous amount of accounts, companies don't need the Enterprise Anthropic solution, they can just subscribe to many accounts and have their own staff KYC for each (1 codex, 1 claude, 1 google and so-on).
        Bnjoroge 5mo ago
        I imagine it’s also really trivial to build some kind of local “enterprise” proxy that gives you the same visibility in usage as the anthropic dashboard would give you. I use one for aggregating all my subs.
stavros 5mo ago
We deployed OpenWebUI with the Claude API the other day for employees. Someone sent ten messages (which appeared to just be reasonable day-to-day work), and we paid $200 for it. There were 44M input tokens, 100k output tokens, no cache hits at all. OpenWebUI reports 3M tokens used, Claude reports 44M, and I have no idea where the rest of the tokens went. This was all on a brand new API key, installed directly to the service, too. With this kind of opaque billing, how can I reasonably deploy any AI?
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- SyneRyder 5mo ago
  No cache hits seems ominous, could this be an OpenWebUI issue? It also seems ominous that Anthropic models are basically nowhere on the OpenWebUI leaderboards. I'm only doing a cursory search, but it seems OpenWebUI doesn't support Anthropic caching, and they don't intend to? Other providers handle caching automatically (apparently?) but caching has to be specifically managed by the client with Anthropic. If that's correct that OpenWebUI doesn't support it, it would really send your costs spiralling, because you're being billed for all the tokens in the entire multi-turn conversation on every turn: https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/issues/4887 https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/issues/4887 I have no experience with OpenWebUI though (honestly, first time I've heard of it). Just trying to be helpful. If I'm completely incorrect then apologies in advance for sending you down the wrong path.
  - stavros 5mo ago
    Really? Huh, I've never heard of Anthropic caching needing to be specifically enabled. I'll look into that, thank you! Sounds like the culprit.

datadrivenangel 5mo ago

I've heard that the $20/seat gets waved if you have large enough committed spend.

isoprophlex 5mo ago
Would they even care at that scale, if the average employee spends $3000 every month because mgmt mandates slopmaxxing?

jgreid 5mo ago

Governance and audit trail are incredibly valuable to large enterprise organizations, especially those working in regulated spaces. Companies will pay a premium if the security/privacy/compliance issues are handled effectively.

zaphirplane 5mo ago
What is the governance and audit trail on offer ?

zackify 5mo ago

We are on it at my job. It saves money due to other parts of the org not using as many tokens. The real cost effective way is giving a team $20 cursor $20-100 Claude $20-200 codex. I'm spending 1k on Claude enterprise easily and that's with trying to spread it on codex and cursor using pi.

pyreko 5mo ago

Yep, where I work I know people easily spending over a few thousand dollars a month.

htrp 5mo ago

> I learned today that the Anthropic "Enterprise" plan - the one big companies use because they need governance features and audit logs and all of that jazz - is billed at API token rates (plus $20/seat/month). Can large enterprises just not use the API ? I have audit logs and what seem to be enterprise features through my anthropic account (platform.claude.ai)

thewebguyd 5mo ago
The devs can, sure. The "enterprise plan" is more for that + giving Claude to all the non-technical employees for access to the chatbot + Cowork. Plus SSO and all that jazz.
simonw 5mo ago
They can do that, but I expect they see individual user accounts and enterprise account management and easy rollout of Claude.ai/Cowork/Claude Code/etc as worth an extra $20/month/person.
opsnooperfax 5mo ago
Your CISO is paying to not be responsible. That’s it. That’s always the reason.
acdha 5mo ago
Enterprises can, but then they have to show their auditors that this has been done in a way which is robust and can’t be bypassed, and they have to build the kind of reports people need to be convinced of that — nothing is ever “just” in enterprise IT. Longer term, you also have to be careful about building things around details which could change at any time. OpenAI and Anthropic have a ton of pressure to start banking huge profits and they very closely monitor customer activity. A time-honored strategy in this space is to shuffle the features enterprise customers depend on but which aren’t deal-breakers for most other customers into expensive enterprise plans. There’s possibly some counter pressure from companies like Google which have healthier finances but I wouldn’t count on that since they also have MBAs who’d be all too happy to invent pretexts to hike their prices to match.

chinathrow 5mo ago

Do we know that they all pay the API rates or will they negotiate individually?