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My opinion is that claude code uses more tokens simply because Anthropic makes more money that way and forces people into their subscriptions. This is supported
by korrectional 3mo ago
My opinion is that claude code uses more tokens simply because Anthropic makes more money that way and forces people into their subscriptions. This is supported by the fact that they won't let you use your sub on a different coding agent. I use pi btw.
- paxys 3mo agoYou're making the opposite argument. Anthropic is incentivized to use less tokens in Claude Code because people are paying a fixed monthly fee for subscriptions.
- FuckButtons 3mo agoNope, that’s not true, because they want you to pay for the higher subscription bracket.
- jchook 3mo agoCan confirm — they got me paying $100/mo this way. Also I think it’s well known that OpenAI is the much less expensive option (in tokens and $$). For the same $20 you get a lot more mileage. Curious if folks have strong opinions about the overall UX of OpenCode vs CC…
- erikus 3mo agoFor me as well, at least this month to use more of Fable. We'll see if they extend Fable access because of people like me.
- bpodgursky 3mo agoIf they wanted to play games with sub tiers they would just change the rate limits rather than wasting inference.
- crewindream 3mo agoFlip side is customer psychology. Choosing a more expensive tier leaves better emotion. Also i doubt there was jira ticket with “make llm more verbose”, rather ticket with “bug makes llms too verbose” gets prioritised taking revenue impact into account.
- tjoff 3mo agoWell since what you get for your subscription is unknown it would be trivial to get that result without burning tokens. Especially since compute is such a scarce resource.
- tokioyoyo 3mo agoGenerally, companies with >150 people can’t use subs. So yeah, it’s mostly a funnel for devs/small companies to eventually vet for the product and convince their enterprise to use it as well.
- paxys 3mo agoThat strategy only makes sense if there's an abundance of tokens, but that's not the case. AI companies are spending a ton of resources on improving token efficiency because they are all severely GPU constrained. Anthropic instead nudges you to move to a higher tier by setting rate limits.
- FuckButtons 3mo agoAlso not true, they want you to pay for a higher subscription bracket and then use only marginally more than you would have, which I think they’re doing quite effectively for most people based on my interactions.
- int_19h 3mo agoHigher subscription brackets are likely worse for them. I recall seeing someone calculate that a fully maxed out highest subscription bracket is something like $15K in tokens? And people paying $100 or $200 are much more likely to max it out for purely psychological reasons - it crosses that threshold where I want to see my money's worth in full. Whereas people on $20 subs are more likely to be there just to get access to better models and features, and are not necessarily even doing any substantial work.
- hinkley 3mo agoIt's always more complicated than that because the prestige and Early Adopter users are what drag other people to also be customers to avoid FOMO. Your gym members who got a subscription aspirationally and don't show up are absolutely subsidizing the power lifter who is introducing wear on (tens of?) thousands of dollars of equipment three times a week, but if the regulars weren't there you wouldn't have sold those subscriptions at all. Without a poster child there's no poster.
- skeptic_ai 3mo agoThey could just use less tokens and finish your quota sooner. So even tho I think are a bad company, I can’t say they do this for the reason you said.
- VulgarExigency 3mo agoEnterprise users are not paying a fixed fee, though
- whazor 3mo agoYeah, I strongly recommend against Claude Enterprise, it is ridiculously expensive and hard to control costs.
- maxgashkov 3mo agoNot really. The incentive is to make you hooked on the process, so you bring the same process to the workplace, and start paying corporate prices, not individual subscription prices. For that to work Claude Code, prompt, and the rest of the mechanics has to be more or less uniform.
- toddmorey 3mo agoI thought I read somewhere that according to filings for going public, subscription revenue is tiny… like 5%. Edit: consumer Claude subs are the 5%. I’d bet most all of CC subs lump in under enterprise. - API & Enterprise: 75% to 85% of total revenue. - Business Subscriptions: Roughly 10% to 15%. - Individual Subscriptions: About 5%.
- Quot 3mo agoThe vast majority of my company's enterprise plan use is through Claude Code even though we have access to the API and could be using OpenCode instead. I don't fully agree with the premise that they intentionally increase system prompts, but the enterprise plan usage is going to make that a huge income for Anthropic.
- FinnKuhn 3mo agoSo the incentive to have Claude Code use more tokens should be even stronger then as AI & Enterprise are using consumption based pricing.
- miroljub 3mo agoThe fact that individuals are more likely to use the alternatives than businesses is telling. Anthropic is fine, as long as someone else (a clueless employer drinking Dario Koolaid) is paying for it. But the moment you have to pay for it, people just bail and go for DeepSeek, Kimmi, OpenRouter, OpenCode Go and other alternatives that give more bang for the buck than Anthropic.
- bel8 3mo agoYep. That's my case. I now have unlimited Anthropic and OpenAI plans at work because CEOs bought the hype. But for personal projects $10/mo OpenCode Go serves me with DeepSeek V4 Flash, MiMo 2.5 and GLM 5.2.
- hvb2 3mo ago> This is supported by the fact that they won't let you use your sub on a different coding agent I mean, that's a very weak argument? Isn't a much more plausible explanation that with your tooling you'll have more of a lock-in than with just your model?
- notnullorvoid 3mo agoNeither is mutually exclusive. They get lock-in, and through that lock-in are more effectively able to inflate token usage.
- lanthissa 3mo agothe amount of system prompt wastage going on in orgs is insane. we identified 400k in annual burn for zero value in just one section of our large company. and the interesting thing about system prompt wastage is its a cost that scales non linearly with subagent use.
- hobofan 3mo ago> I use pi btw Not sure if intentionally meant as a reference, but it gives "I use Arch btw" vibes.
- diurnalist 3mo agoPi is one of the ways out of this problem (OpenCode another) so I took it as an intentional reference as it is highly relevant. I also use Pi as my daily driver and I think it's a wise choice to figure out how to decouple yourself from lab-specific harnesses that you have little control or observability over.
- disiplus 3mo ago[dead]
- claw-el 3mo agoOnce I realized that Anthropic is a token merchant, I start to understand Anthropic’s decision more. They are always finding reasons for you to use more tokens through them unless the users revolt or demand some guardrails.
- stefan_ 3mo agoBut they gave us double the tokens! Then a limited time more usage! Then even more tokens "off peak" times! Then some new model released but apparently it inherently used 1.69x tokens! Then Fable is here but "it uses much more usage". But only until ~~the US banned it~~ ~~7th July~~ ~~19th July~~ who even knows. At this point I think Dario is just in his wellness retreat adjusting a revenue/profit dial.
- hinkley 3mo agoAh, the ol' retail switcharoo. Increase the price by 70% and then cut it by 50%, resulting in a 15% cut that sounds like a major deal.
- athrowaway3z 3mo agoI bailed on Anthropic the moment they started blocking alternative harnesses like pi on their subscription plans.
- WhyNotHugo 3mo ago> My opinion is that claude code uses more tokens simply because Anthropic makes more money that way and forces people into their subscriptions. OTOH, this makes typical subscriptions usages consume more tokens, which are included in their flat fee. This sounds more like incompetence than malice.
- flockonus 3mo agoIt would be true if there was a unified "Anthropic" entity making every decision from pure rationality. Instead, more tokens increase Claude Code team's metrics of token usage, which most likely has a KPI around token usage and adoption. To remind Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". ..also to parent's point, yes the upsell is only appealing once user run's out of tokens.
- AdieuToLogic 3mo ago> I use pi btw. When using Pi, one way to significantly reduce input tokens it yields is to ignore common bookkeeping "dot directories", such as `.git`. How to do so can be found with the following interactive Pi prompt: How do I configure Pi to ignore git related artifacts, such as the project's .git directory? Other local assets to consider ignoring are `.pi`, `.agents`, `*.md`, and language specific output directories such as `__pycache__`, `bin`, `obj`, `target`, etc.
- shusaku 3mo agoAnecdotally at least Claude code uses less api money for me than other harnesses. I think people might be missing some caching discount?