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No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user

martinalderson.com

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Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user

#61

Post by bandrami »

versteegen wrote: post #35
fnord77 wrote: post #23

> I'm fairly confident the Forbes sources are confusing retail API prices with actual compute costs Aren't they losing money on the retail API pricing, too? > ... comparisons to artificially low priced Chinese providers... Yeah, no this article does not pass the sniff test.

> Aren't they losing money on the retail API pricing, too? No, they aren't, and probably neither is anyone else offering API pricing. And Anthropic's API margins may be higher than anyone else. For example, DeepSeek released numbers showing that R1 was served at approximately "a cost profit margin of 545%" (meaning 82% of revenue is profit), see my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46663852

Weird that they're all looking for outside money then

Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user

#62

Post by serial_dev »

lelanthran wrote: post #54
hirako2000 wrote: post #44

> Qwen 3.5 397B-A17B is a good comparison It is not. It's a terrible comparison. Qwen, deepseek and other Chinese models are known for their 10x or even better efficiency compared to Anthropic's. That's why the difference between open router prices and those official providers isn't that different. Plus who knows what open routed providers do in term quantization. They may be getting 100x better efficiency, thus the…

> That being said not all users max out their plan, These are not cell phone plans which the average joe takes, they are plans purchased with the explicit goal of software development. I would guess that 99 out of every 100 plans are purchased with the explicit goal of maxing them out.

I’m not maxing them out… I have issues that I need to fix, features I need to develop, and I have things I want to learn.

When I have a feeling that these tools will speed me up, I use them.

My client pays for a couple of these tools in an enterprise deal, and I suspect most of us on the team work like that.

If my goal was to max out every tool my client pays, I’d be working 24hrs a day and see no sunlight ever.

I guess it’s like the all you can eat buffet. Everybody eats a lot, but if you eat so much that you throw up and get sick, you are special.

Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user

#63

Post by bob1029 »

eaglelamp wrote: post #31

If Anthropic's compute is fully saturated then the Claude code power users do represent an opportunity cost to Anthropic much closer to $5,000 then $500. Anthropic's models may be similar in parameter size to model's on open router, but none of the others are in the headlines nearly as much (especially recently) so the comparison is extremely flawed. The argument in this article is like comparing the cost of a Rolex…

> If Anthropic's compute is fully saturated then the Claude code power users do represent an opportunity cost to Anthropic much closer to $5,000 then $500.

I think it's the other way around? Sparse use of GPU farms should be the more expensive thing. Full saturation means that we can exploit batching effects throughout.

Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user

#65

Post by aurareturn »

Chamix wrote: post #48
aurareturn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is targeting H20 because that's all they were officially allowed to buy.

I generally agree, back of the napkin math shows H20 cluster of 8gpu * 96gb = 768gb = 768B parameters on FP8 (no NVFP4 on Hopper), which lines up pretty nicely with the sizes of recent open source Chinese models. However, I'd say its relatively well assumed in realpolitik land that Chinese labs managed to acquire plenty of H100/200 clusters and even meaningful numbers of B200 systems semi-illicitly before the regulat…

They do not have enough H200 or Blackwell systems to server 1.6 billion people and the world so I doubt it's in any meaningful number.

Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user

#66

Post by Chamix »

aurareturn wrote: post #65
Chamix wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree, back of the napkin math shows H20 cluster of 8gpu * 96gb = 768gb = 768B parameters on FP8 (no NVFP4 on Hopper), which lines up pretty nicely with the sizes of recent open source Chinese models. However, I'd say its relatively well assumed in realpolitik land that Chinese labs managed to acquire plenty of H100/200 clusters and even meaningful numbers of B200 systems semi-illicitly before the regulat…

They do not have enough H200 or Blackwell systems to server 1.6 billion people and the world so I doubt it's in any meaningful number.

I assure you, the number of people paying to use Qwen3-Max or other similar proprietary endpoints is far less than 1.6 billion.

Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user

#67

Post by anonzzzies »

I calculated only last weekend that my team would cost, if we would run Claude Code on retail API costs, around $200k/mo. We pay $1400/month in Max subscriptions. So that's $50k/user... But what tokens CC is reporting in their json -> a lot of this must be cached etc, so doubt it's anywhere near $50k cost, but not sure how to figure out what it would cost and I'm sure as hell not going to try.

Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user

#68

Post by rustystump »

lelanthran wrote: post #54
hirako2000 wrote: post #44

> Qwen 3.5 397B-A17B is a good comparison It is not. It's a terrible comparison. Qwen, deepseek and other Chinese models are known for their 10x or even better efficiency compared to Anthropic's. That's why the difference between open router prices and those official providers isn't that different. Plus who knows what open routed providers do in term quantization. They may be getting 100x better efficiency, thus the…

> That being said not all users max out their plan, These are not cell phone plans which the average joe takes, they are plans purchased with the explicit goal of software development. I would guess that 99 out of every 100 plans are purchased with the explicit goal of maxing them out.

In saas this is not true. Most saas is highly profitable or was i suppose because they knew that most of their customers would never max out their plans.

Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user

#69

Post by solumunus »

lelanthran wrote: post #54
hirako2000 wrote: post #44

> Qwen 3.5 397B-A17B is a good comparison It is not. It's a terrible comparison. Qwen, deepseek and other Chinese models are known for their 10x or even better efficiency compared to Anthropic's. That's why the difference between open router prices and those official providers isn't that different. Plus who knows what open routed providers do in term quantization. They may be getting 100x better efficiency, thus the…

> That being said not all users max out their plan, These are not cell phone plans which the average joe takes, they are plans purchased with the explicit goal of software development. I would guess that 99 out of every 100 plans are purchased with the explicit goal of maxing them out.

There’s absolutely no way that’s true.

Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user

#70

Post by darkwater »

Well, IDK, I have used CC with API billing pretty extensively and managed to spend ~$1000 in one month more or less. Moved to a Max 20x subscription and using it a bit less (I'm still scared) but not THAT less and I'm around 10% weekly usage. I'm not counting the tokens, though.
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