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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

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.
      - lunar_mycroft 5mo ago
        That will be clamped down on by Anthropic (and other providers) for the same reason they don't offer those plans to enterprise customers already.
        addedGone 5mo ago
        Yes, but why not do that while it's available?
      - wahnfrieden 5mo ago
        Startups do but do you know large enterprises that do?
      - ilikehurdles 5mo ago
        We definitely pay enterprise api costs. Only way to get google vertex integration, and Enterprise is too sensitive to let all of their data leave their moat.
MASNeo 5mo ago
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goosejuice 5mo ago
> They cannot afford to keep offering that to everyone indefinitely. Common talking point. There's enough evidence for the counter argument that this is essentially misinformation. I have no idea why it's so often repeated with confidence.
- cdata 5mo ago
  > There's enough evidence for the counter argument that this is essentially misinformation. > No evidence is shared Help an open-minded critic out.
  - goosejuice 5mo ago
    Brand new industry, massive capital, dropping inference costs, increasing availability of compute, cost centers / subsidized subscriptions are common in SaaS, heavy competition, no public information on actual utilization rates. How much is Waymo burning a year? 3B on 300M ARR? Anthropic is what 5B on 20B ARR? Waymo is 3x older. Why don't we hear such confident statements about how subsidized their rides are? It's one thing to speculate it's another to parade it as fact. Even if the S1 reveals an unprofitable business today, you can still only claim it's unlikely.
    - lmm 5mo ago
      > How much is Waymo burning a year? 3B on 300M ARR? Anthropic is what 5B on 20B ARR? Waymo is 3x older. Why don't we hear such confident statements about how subsidized their rides are? We do. We hear it less often because no-one is talking about how Waymo changes how we all need to work or whatever, that's all.
    - lunar_mycroft 5mo ago
      Do people commonly argue Waymo isn't subsidizing rates? Also, we do have some evidence for my position: - We know that the consumer Claude plans provide _way_ more tokens than you could get if you were paying API prices. This is a huge part of why Anthropic's limits on other harnesses for subscription customers is such a big deal. So either their profit margin on API tokens is absurdly high, most consumer subscribers don't come anywhere near their rate limits, or they're losing money on the consumer subscriptions. - It appears that complains about people running into rate limits are common, which suggests the "consumers usually don't use much of their subscription" explanation is incorrect. - We also know that Anthropic has just become profitable, almost certainly driven mostly by enterprise customers. This rules out the "they make a very high profit margin on the API" explanation, since if that was the case they'd likely have been profitable much earlier. Taken together, I think the case that their consumer subscriptions lose them money on net is pretty strong, even though their enterprise subscriptions (and API pricing) does make them a profit.

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.
    - lunar_mycroft 5mo ago
      That will be clamped down on by Anthropic (and other providers) for the same reason they don't offer those plans to enterprise customers already.
      - addedGone 5mo ago
        Yes, but why not do that while it's available?
    - wahnfrieden 5mo ago
      Startups do but do you know large enterprises that do?
    - ilikehurdles 5mo ago
      We definitely pay enterprise api costs. Only way to get google vertex integration, and Enterprise is too sensitive to let all of their data leave their moat.

MASNeo 5mo ago

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goosejuice 5mo ago

> They cannot afford to keep offering that to everyone indefinitely. Common talking point. There's enough evidence for the counter argument that this is essentially misinformation. I have no idea why it's so often repeated with confidence.

cdata 5mo ago
> There's enough evidence for the counter argument that this is essentially misinformation. > No evidence is shared Help an open-minded critic out.
- goosejuice 5mo ago
  Brand new industry, massive capital, dropping inference costs, increasing availability of compute, cost centers / subsidized subscriptions are common in SaaS, heavy competition, no public information on actual utilization rates. How much is Waymo burning a year? 3B on 300M ARR? Anthropic is what 5B on 20B ARR? Waymo is 3x older. Why don't we hear such confident statements about how subsidized their rides are? It's one thing to speculate it's another to parade it as fact. Even if the S1 reveals an unprofitable business today, you can still only claim it's unlikely.
  - lmm 5mo ago
    > How much is Waymo burning a year? 3B on 300M ARR? Anthropic is what 5B on 20B ARR? Waymo is 3x older. Why don't we hear such confident statements about how subsidized their rides are? We do. We hear it less often because no-one is talking about how Waymo changes how we all need to work or whatever, that's all.
  - lunar_mycroft 5mo ago
    Do people commonly argue Waymo isn't subsidizing rates? Also, we do have some evidence for my position: - We know that the consumer Claude plans provide _way_ more tokens than you could get if you were paying API prices. This is a huge part of why Anthropic's limits on other harnesses for subscription customers is such a big deal. So either their profit margin on API tokens is absurdly high, most consumer subscribers don't come anywhere near their rate limits, or they're losing money on the consumer subscriptions. - It appears that complains about people running into rate limits are common, which suggests the "consumers usually don't use much of their subscription" explanation is incorrect. - We also know that Anthropic has just become profitable, almost certainly driven mostly by enterprise customers. This rules out the "they make a very high profit margin on the API" explanation, since if that was the case they'd likely have been profitable much earlier. Taken together, I think the case that their consumer subscriptions lose them money on net is pretty strong, even though their enterprise subscriptions (and API pricing) does make them a profit.