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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

#111

Post by jychang »

Weaver_zhu wrote: post #104
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).

No, Opus cannot be 10x larger than the chinese models.

If Opus was 10x larger than the chinese models, then Google Vertex/Amazon Bedrock would serve it 10x slower than Deepseek/Kimi/etc.

That's not the case. They're in the same order of magnitude of speed.

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

#112

Post by ineedaj0b »

What CC costs internally is not public. How efficient it is, is not public.

…You could take efficiency improvement rates from previous models releases (from x -> y) and assume; they have already made “improvements” internally. This is likely closer to what their real costs are.

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

#113

Post by quikoa »

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 they believe a sufficient number is locked in then they may consider doing this later.

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

#114

Post by faangguyindia »

Claude subscription is equivalant of spot instance

And APIs are on-demand service equivalant.

Priority is set to APIs and leftover compute is used by Subscription Plans.

When there is no capacity, subscriptions are routed to Highly Quantized cheaper models behind the scenes.

Selling subscription makes it cheaper to run such inference at scale otherwise many times your capacity is just sitting there idle.

Also, these subscription help you train your model further on predictable workflow (because the model creators also controls the Client like qwen code, claude code, anti gravity etc...)

This is probably why they will ban you for violating TOS that you cannot use their subscription service model with other tools.

They aren't just selling subscription, but the subscription cost also help them become better at the thing they are selling which is coding for coding models like Qwen, Claude etc...

I've used qwen code, codex and claude.

Codex is 2x better than Qwen code and Claude is 2x better than Codex.

So I'd hope the Claude Opus is atleast 4-5x more expensive to run than flagship Qwen Code model hosted by Alibaba.

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

#115

Post by codemog »

scandox wrote: post #93
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 fascinated to know the kind of work that allows you to intelligently allocate so much resources. I use Claude extensively and feel that I great value out of it but I reach a limit in terms of what I can do that makes sense relatively quickly it seems.

[flagged]

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

#116

Post by lukan »

scandox wrote: post #93
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 fascinated to know the kind of work that allows you to intelligently allocate so much resources. I use Claude extensively and feel that I great value out of it but I reach a limit in terms of what I can do that makes sense relatively quickly it seems.

Same for me, but I suppose it is letting agents more loose and less checking of the code and rather throw away lots of generated output.

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

#117

Post by popcorncowboy »

faangguyindia wrote: post #114

Claude subscription is equivalant of spot instance And APIs are on-demand service equivalant. Priority is set to APIs and leftover compute is used by Subscription Plans. When there is no capacity, subscriptions are routed to Highly Quantized cheaper models behind the scenes. Selling subscription makes it cheaper to run such inference at scale otherwise many times your capacity is just sitting there idle. Also, these…

> Claude is 2x better than Codex

This hasn't been true in a long time.

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

#118

Post by bakugo »

Weaver_zhu wrote: post #104
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).

GPT-4 was likely much larger than any of the SOTA models we have today, at least in terms of active parameters. Sparse models are the new standard, and the price drop that came with Opus 4.5 made it fairly obvious that Anthropic are not an exception.

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

#120

Post by sieabahlpark »

faangguyindia wrote: post #114

Claude subscription is equivalant of spot instance And APIs are on-demand service equivalant. Priority is set to APIs and leftover compute is used by Subscription Plans. When there is no capacity, subscriptions are routed to Highly Quantized cheaper models behind the scenes. Selling subscription makes it cheaper to run such inference at scale otherwise many times your capacity is just sitting there idle. Also, these…

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