Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

martinalderson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 374 posts

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

#151

Post by bodge5000 »

overrun11 wrote: post #109

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 bu…

> 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

Theres quite a lot of evidence, no proof I'd agree, but then there's no absolute proof I'm aware to the contrary either, so I don't know where you're getting this from.

The two pieces of evidence I'm aware of is that 1) Anthropic doesn't want their subsidised plans being used outside of CC, which would imply that the money their making off it isn't enough, and 2) last time I checked, API spending is capped at $5000 a month

Like I say, neither of these are proof, you can come up with reasonable arguments against them, but once again the same could be said for evidence on the contrary

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

#152

Post by fennecfoxy »

codemog wrote: post #115
scandox wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

Never have I read something that screamed Bay Area more than this lmao.

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

#153

Post by Havoc »

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…

> Plus who knows what open routed providers do in term quantization

The quantisation is shown on the provider section.

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

#154

Post by dryarzeg »

fennecfoxy wrote: post #149
re-thc wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I mean GN has covered the Nvidia black market in China enough that we pretty much know that they run on Nvidia hardware still.

How is this related to the inference, may I ask? Except for some very hardware-specific optimizations of model architecture, there's nothing to prevent one to host these models on your own infrastructure. And that's what actually many OpenRouter providers, at least some of which are based in US, are doing. Because most of Chinese models mentioned here are open-weight (except for Qwen who has one proprietary "Max" model), and literally anyone can host them, not just someone from China. So it just doesn't really matter.

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

#156

Post by hobofan »

vbezhenar wrote: post #155

Why does Claude charge 10x for API, compared to subscriptions? They're not a monopoly, so one would expect margins to be thinner.

Monopoly isn't the only thing that allows you to charge large margins.

API inference access is naturally a lot more costly to provide compared to Chat UI and Claude Code, as there is a lot more load to handle with less latency. In the products they can just smooth over load curves by handling some of the requests slower (which the majority of users in a background Code session won't even notice).

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

#157

Post by sva_ »

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.

Gemini CLI shows how much was saved through caching each session, and it's usually somewhere around 90%

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

#158

Post by behehebd »

neamar wrote: post #74
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.

You can use `npx ccusage` to check your local logs and see how much it would have cost through the API.

[flagged]

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

#160

Post by mike_hearn »

overrun11 wrote: post #109

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 bu…

I'd love to be a fly on the wall when this argument is tried in front of a bankruptcy court. It drives me nuts. Of course there's evidence that they're selling tokens at a loss.

The only thing these companies sell are tokens. That's their entire output. OpenAI is trying to build an ad business but it must be quite small still relative to selling tokens because I've not yet seen a single ad on ChatGPT. It's not like these firms have a huge side business selling Claude-themed baseball caps.

That means the cost of "inference" is all their costs combined. You can't just arbitrarily slice out anything inconvenient and say that's not a part of the cost of generating tokens. The research and training needed to create the models, the salaries of the people who do that, the salaries of the people who build all the serving infrastructure, the loss leader hardcore users - all of it is a part of the cost of generating each token served.

Some people look at the very different prices for serving open weights models and say, see, inference in general is cheap. But those costs are distorted by companies trying to buy mindshare by giving models away for free, and of those, both the top labs keep claiming the Chinese are distilling them like crazy including using many tactics to evade blocks! So apparently the cost of a model like DeepSeek is still partly being subsidized by OpenAI and Anthropic against their will. The cost of those tokens is higher than what's being charged, it's just being shifted onto someone else's books. Nice whilst it lasts, but this situation has been seen many times in the past and eventually people get tired of having costs externalized onto them.

For as long as firms are losing money whilst only selling tokens, that means those tokens are selling at a loss. To not sell tokens at a loss the companies would have to be profitable.

Post reply on HN