Nobody seems to mention free users who have a pretty small limit but there are a lot of users in this category. Who’s subsidizing them?
But that doesn't say anything about whether they can be profitable or not.
No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user
231–240 of 374 posts
Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Omg, I can't believe that's real I wanted to believe that you're essentially trolling, but no - that service exist. And not an upstart, there is coverage going back several years. Our societies are seriously fucked.
On the contrary, this gives me hope it's possible to create value for people even when you compete with hundreds of free Youtube playlists. This is good!
Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everyone who's used Opus knows it's better than the others in a way that isn't captured by the benchmarks. I would describe it as taste. Ah, the "trust me bro" advantage. Couldn't it just be brand identity and familiarity?
I have a project where we've had Opus, Sonnet, Deepseek, Kimi, Qwen create and execute an aggregate total of about 350 plans so far, and the quality difference as measured in plans where the agent failed to complete the tasks on the first run is high enough that it comes out several times higher than Anthropics subscription prices, but probably cheaper than the API prices once we have improved the harness further - a…
Good point on the green/red dashboard. The opportunity cost angle is worth adding though. A failed run isn't just the wasted tokens and retry cost - it's also the task that didn't get done and the engineering required to diagnose why. On anything time-sensitive, that compounds fast.
Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user
#234Agent teams change everything. I can easily burn through 1m tokens in 15 minutes. There's no way the $200 price will hold once everyone is doing it.
Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Inference is profitable Eh. We don't really know that, and the people saying that have an interest in the rest of the world believing it's true.
How are we so sure that deep inside the moon isn't made out of cheese?
I remember Enron. Hell, I remember the S&Ls. I've seen this movie too many times to not know how it ends.
Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cache definitely isn't free! We're in a global RAM shortage and KV caches sit around consuming RAM in the hope that there will be a hit. The gamble with caching is to hold a KV cache in the hope that the user will (a) submit a prompt that can use it and (b) that will get routed to the right server which (c) won't be so busy at the time it can't handle the request. KV caches aren't small so if you lose that bet you've…
Why do you believe that caches are held in RAM? They don’t need RAM performance, and disk is orders of magnitude cheaper.
Because OpenAI specifically say that:
https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/prompt-caching...
> When using the in-memory policy, cached prefixes generally remain active for 5 to 10 minutes of inactivity, up to a maximum of one hour. In-memory cached prefixes are only held within volatile GPU memory.
You can opt-in to storing the caches on local disk but it's not the default. I haven't done the calculations for why they do this, but given that disaggregated parallel prefill and RDMA can recompute the KV cache very fast, you'd need a huge amount of bandwidth from disk to beat it (and flash drives wear out!).
Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
This is all true but it isn't really important for the argument people are making. What is more important is the marginal cost per token. If each token sold is at a marginal loss, their losses would scale with usage, that simply can't be happening with API pricing. But in general, yes I agree with you and I'm sure they are taking a huge loss on Claude Code.
It looks to me like their losses have scaled with usage, though? They keep predicting their losses will increase even as usage has gone stratospheric.
Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user
#238One consideration to me, regardless of the exact burn rate on inference is the assumed increase in revenues via higher fees. One of the bull cases I often see is that the hockey stick revenue growth continues longer/higher than the hockey stick cost growth. Then it all prints money because people are spending 10x/100x/1000x what they are today.
In the real world ..
Where I work, AI is used heavily, we are already tipping into cost management mode at a firm level. Users are being aggressively steered to cheaper models, usage throttled, and cost attribution reports sent. This is already being done at the under-$1k/mo per user cost level. So some indications of revenue per user leveling out already.
Meanwhile everyone I know who works anywhere near a computer has had AI shoved down their throat, with training, usage KPIs, annual goal setting and mandated engagement. So we are already pretty saturated, it's not like theres giant new frontiers of new users.
Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user
#239A 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 t…
This comment defies common usage and accounting practices.
When people say “selling at a loss” they mean negative unit economics. No one ever means this much more expansive definition you’ve invented.
Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user
#240> Cost remains an ever present challenge. Cursor’s larger rivals are willing to subsidize aggressively. According to a person familiar with the company’s internal analysis, Cursor estimated last year that a $200-per-month Claude Code subscription could use up to $2,000 in compute, suggesting significant subsidization by Anthropic. Today, that subsidization appears to be even more aggressive, with that $200 plan able…
This changes... everything.