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>You don't feel they want to give you a dependable service for an, albeit premium, price. It's a constant bargaining game We all know that the subscription pri

>You don't feel they want to give you a dependable service for an, albeit premium, price. It's a constant bargaining game We all know that the subscription prices are not at all sustainable for these providers. You all do, right? Yes, they're struggling to segment the market and find a way to make money, and that basically relies upon emptying the pockets of whales. As someone enjoying a hilariously subsidized Max plan, I understand that, and I don't think they're trying to scam me in some way. And both sides of this equation understand that the market is competitive, and maybe more competitive than they thought it would be. Like, would you rather they did pull Fable when they first said they would? Or that they'd cut quota? I wouldn't. But I'm glad that Kimi K3 and GPT 5.6 Sol and the latest GLM and Qwen and...I love that this has forced Anthropic to change plans. I'm not going to hold that against them.

zsoltkacsandi 1mo ago
> We all know that the subscription prices are not at all sustainable for these providers. You all do, right? I don’t think it is fair to expect from people to know or understand this. If you buy something or subscribe to a service there is a price tag on it. You get X for Y amount of price. That is how consumers conditioned for decades. They do not care what is your customer acquisition strategy. If Antrophic cannot provide reliable services on that price, customers will be unsatisfied.
- llm_nerd 1mo ago
  >If Antrophic cannot provide reliable services on that price, customers will be unsatisfied. The complaint wasn't "I paid for X and now they say they aren't going to give me X", it was "I paid for X, and they said hey guess what we're doing a promo and you get a bonus extra 2X, and also you get special limited time access to our new product Y", that's a hell of a thing to complain about. Look, I pay a lot of money to Anthropic and I'm pretty happy that competitors have forced them to abandon their plans to add premium charges on these bonuses, but it's pretty ridiculous seeing the whining and gnashing, somehow turning this into complaints. It very much has a "oh no my lobster is too buttery, my blanket too warm" kind of feel to it.
PeterStuer 1mo ago
Do you have actual data on the marginal costs of inferencing, or are you using the term 'subsedizing' loosely as in 'discount', meaning a lower price compared to another price for the same offer?
- llm_nerd 1mo ago
  Look up the burn rate for OpenAI and Anthropic. Despite the fact that these companies have managed to hook a lot of F500 companies into paying millions for token-level API pricing, they are bleeding cash at a catastrophic rate. And we know subscription tokens come at about a 1/30th the cost of the API pricing (presuming you use your quota). Yes, they are most certainly subsidizing the subscription plans. I mean, at least for people who utilize them to the quota.
  - PeterStuer 1mo ago
    The question is specifically about the marginal cost of the inferencing part exclusively. Not the R&D spend. AFAIK, there has never been a statement on that from neither OpenAI nor Anthropic. What it actually costs to serve one more token determines wether it is "subsidized" at a certain price point. That it is sold for more elsewhere is not evidence.
    - llm_nerd 1mo ago
      How would that number help at all or change the discussion? Is R&D not a real expense? I mean, this argument would have merit if they built something that they're going to monetize for decades, but cutting edge models now grow obsolete in a 6 month time window. There is zero financial analysis where they aren't massively subsidizing the subscriptions, and people have to invent ignorant "oh just ignore most of the cost of providing the product" to try to pretend there is.
watwut 1mo ago
I dont see why user should care. OK, they are selling at loss so that they can build a monopoly. That is not something positive or good, not something to cheer on.
- llm_nerd 1mo ago
  This discussion does not concern whether the user "cares". And clearly from my comment I don't "care". But it explains why a nascent, hyper-competitive (I mean, clearly not remotely a monopoly) market has such erratic policies and pricing.

zsoltkacsandi 1mo ago

> We all know that the subscription prices are not at all sustainable for these providers. You all do, right? I don’t think it is fair to expect from people to know or understand this. If you buy something or subscribe to a service there is a price tag on it. You get X for Y amount of price. That is how consumers conditioned for decades. They do not care what is your customer acquisition strategy. If Antrophic cannot provide reliable services on that price, customers will be unsatisfied.

llm_nerd 1mo ago
>If Antrophic cannot provide reliable services on that price, customers will be unsatisfied. The complaint wasn't "I paid for X and now they say they aren't going to give me X", it was "I paid for X, and they said hey guess what we're doing a promo and you get a bonus extra 2X, and also you get special limited time access to our new product Y", that's a hell of a thing to complain about. Look, I pay a lot of money to Anthropic and I'm pretty happy that competitors have forced them to abandon their plans to add premium charges on these bonuses, but it's pretty ridiculous seeing the whining and gnashing, somehow turning this into complaints. It very much has a "oh no my lobster is too buttery, my blanket too warm" kind of feel to it.

PeterStuer 1mo ago

Do you have actual data on the marginal costs of inferencing, or are you using the term 'subsedizing' loosely as in 'discount', meaning a lower price compared to another price for the same offer?

llm_nerd 1mo ago
Look up the burn rate for OpenAI and Anthropic. Despite the fact that these companies have managed to hook a lot of F500 companies into paying millions for token-level API pricing, they are bleeding cash at a catastrophic rate. And we know subscription tokens come at about a 1/30th the cost of the API pricing (presuming you use your quota). Yes, they are most certainly subsidizing the subscription plans. I mean, at least for people who utilize them to the quota.
- PeterStuer 1mo ago
  The question is specifically about the marginal cost of the inferencing part exclusively. Not the R&D spend. AFAIK, there has never been a statement on that from neither OpenAI nor Anthropic. What it actually costs to serve one more token determines wether it is "subsidized" at a certain price point. That it is sold for more elsewhere is not evidence.
  - llm_nerd 1mo ago
    How would that number help at all or change the discussion? Is R&D not a real expense? I mean, this argument would have merit if they built something that they're going to monetize for decades, but cutting edge models now grow obsolete in a 6 month time window. There is zero financial analysis where they aren't massively subsidizing the subscriptions, and people have to invent ignorant "oh just ignore most of the cost of providing the product" to try to pretend there is.

watwut 1mo ago

I dont see why user should care. OK, they are selling at loss so that they can build a monopoly. That is not something positive or good, not something to cheer on.

llm_nerd 1mo ago
This discussion does not concern whether the user "cares". And clearly from my comment I don't "care". But it explains why a nascent, hyper-competitive (I mean, clearly not remotely a monopoly) market has such erratic policies and pricing.