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

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

#101

Post by MaxikCZ »

dtech wrote: post #95
MaxikCZ wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are Anthropic currently unable to sell subscriptions because they don’t have capacity? Absolutely! Im currently paying $170 to google to use Opus in antigravity without limit in full agent mode, because I tried Anthropic $20 subscription and busted my limit within a single prompt. Im not gonna pay them $200 only to find out I hit the limit after 20 or even 50 prompts. And after 2 more months my price is going to do…

This has a absolutely nothing to do with whether they're limited by available compute...

What? Wouldn't they give me more than 1 prompt of compute for my $20, if they had spare?

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

#102

Post by jychang »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #96
jychang wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice, tps is a reflection of vram memory bandwidth during inference. So the tps tells you a lot about the hardware you're running on. Comparing tps ratios- by saying a model is roughly 2x faster or slower than another model- can tell you a lot about the active param count. I won't say it'll tell you everything; I have no clue what optimizations Opus may have, which can range from native FP4 experts to spec dec…

> In practice, tps is a reflection of vram memory bandwidth during inference. > Comparing tps ratios- by saying a model is roughly 2x faster or slower than another model- can tell you a lot about the active param count. You sure about that? I thought you could shard between GPUs along layer boundaries during inference (but not training obviously). You just end up with an increasingly deep pipeline. So time to first t…

That doesn't work. Think about it a bit more.

Hint: what's in the kv cache when you start processing the 2nd token?

And that's called layer parallelism (as opposed to tensor parallelism). It allows you to run larger models (pooling vram across gpus) but does not allow you to run models faster.

Tensor parallelism DOES allow you to run models faster across multiple GPUs, but you're limited to how fast you can synchronize the all-reduce. And in general, models would have the same boost on the same hardware- so the chinese models would have the same perf multiplier as Opus.

Note that providers generally use tensor parallelism as much as they can, for all models. That usually means 8x or so.

In reality, tps ends up being a pretty good proxy for active param size when comparing different models at the same inference provider.

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

#103

Post by bloppe »

serial_dev wrote: post #62
lelanthran wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 gu…

[flagged]

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

#104

Post by Weaver_zhu »

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…

Agree, but I guess the Opus 4.6 is 10x larger, rather than Chinese models being 10x more efficient. It is said that GPT-4 is already a 1.6T model, and Llama 4 behemoth is also much bigger than Chinese open-weight models. Chinese tech companies are short of frontier GPUs, but they did a lot of innovations on inference efficiency (Deepseek CEO Liang himself shows up in the author list of the related published papers).

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

#105

Post by jychang »

re-thc wrote: post #99
jychang wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a tautology. People think chinese models are 10x more efficient because they're 10x cheaper, and then you use that to claim that they're 10x more efficient. Opus isn't that expensive to host. Look at Amazon Bedrock's t/s numbers for Opus 4.5 vs other chinese models. They're around the same order of magnitude- which means that Opus has roughly the same amount of active params as the chinese models. Also, you ca…

> That's a tautology. People think chinese models are 10x more efficient because they're 10x cheaper They do have different infrastructure / electricity costs and they might not run on nvidia hardware. It's not just the models.

Except there are providers that serve both chinese models AND opus as well. On the same hardware.

Namely, Amazon Bedrock and Google Vertex.

That means normalized infrastructure costs, normalized electricity costs, and normalized hardware performance. Normalized inference software stack, even (most likely). It's about a close of a 1 to 1 comparison as you can get.

Both Amazon and Google serve Opus at roughly ~1/2 the speed of the chinese models. Note that they are not incentivized to slow down the serving of Opus or the chinese models! So that tells you the ratio of active params for Opus and for the chinese models.

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

#106

Post by aweb »

anonzzzies wrote: post #67

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.

I'm surprised, isn't it forbidden to use the Max plan as part of a company? Just curious, as I thought it was forbidden by the ToS but I'm not sure if I have a good understanding of it

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

#107

Post by bloppe »

aweb wrote: post #106
anonzzzies wrote: post #67

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.

I'm surprised, isn't it forbidden to use the Max plan as part of a company? Just curious, as I thought it was forbidden by the ToS but I'm not sure if I have a good understanding of it

If that were true, then everyone I know is violating that tos

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

#108

Post by aurareturn »

bandrami wrote: post #61
versteegen wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Inference is profitable. No one is selling at a loss. It’s training to keep up with competitors that is causing losses.

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

#109

Post by overrun11 »

A huge number of people are convinced that OpenAI and Anthropic are selling inference tokens at a loss despite the fact that there's no evidence this is true and a lot of evidence that it isn't. It's just become a meme uncritically regurgitated.

This sloppy Forbes article has polluted the epistemic environment because now theres a source to point to as "evidence."

So yes this post author's estimation isn't perfect but it is far more rigorous than the original Forbes article which doesn't appear to even understand the difference between Anthropic's API costs and its compute costs.

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

#110

Post by esrauch »

MaxikCZ wrote: post #101
dtech wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has a absolutely nothing to do with whether they're limited by available compute...

What? Wouldn't they give me more than 1 prompt of compute for my $20, if they had spare?

I don't think that logically follows.

They have a business model and are trying to capture more revenue, fully saturating your computer isn't obviously a good business strategy.

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