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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

#241

Post by aerhardt »

jychang wrote: post #52
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'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…

I guess more than a tautology it is an inversion of observed causes and effects?

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

#242

Post by WhitneyLand »

“Cursor has to pay Anthropic's retail API prices (or close to it) for access to Opus 4.6. So to provide a Claude Code-equivalent experience using Opus 4.6, it would cost Cursor ~$5,000 per power user per month. But it would cost Anthropic perhaps $500 max.”

Cursor seems to be in a tough spot. Just heard the swix podcast on their big new cloud agents thing, and it’s looking like a pretty small moat these days.

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

#243

Post by crazygringo »

fulafel wrote: post #36
crazygringo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the very first paragraph of TFA is describing who is under that impression. Literally the first sentence: > My LinkedIn and Twitter feeds are full of screenshots from the recent Forbes article on Cursor claiming that Anthropic's $200/month Claude Code Max plan can consume $5,000 in compute.

That's claiming that worst case, a subscriber _can_ use that much. It's possible that's wrong too, but in any case a lot of services are built on the assumption that the average user doesn't max out the plan. So the article's title is obviously sensationalized.

The article discusses all of that, in great detail.

The title does not seem sensationalized. It's literally a summary of the article.

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

#244

Post by ACCount37 »

Filligree wrote: post #183
coldtea wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't buy the 10x efficiency thing: they are just lagging behind the performance of current SOTA models. They perform much worse than the current models while also costing much less - exactly what I would expect. Define "much worse". +--------------------------------------+-------------+-----------+------------------+ | Benchmark | Claude Opus | DeepSeek | DeepSeek vs Opus | +-------------------------------------…

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. Lots of models get really close on benchmarks, but benchmarks only tell us how good they are at solving a defined problem. Opus is far better at solving ill-defined ones.

One of the main edges Anthropic has is that "personality tuning" gap. "Nice to use" is a differentiator when raw performance isn't.

OpenAI can sometimes get an edge over Anthropic in hard narrow STEM tasks. I trust benchmarks over vibes there - and the benchmarks show the teams trading blows release after release. Tracking Claude Code vs OpenAI Codex on SWE-bench Verified feels like watching the back alley knife fight of the AI frontier.

But the vibe of "how easy is that model to interact with" and "how easy it is to get it to do what you want it to" does matter a lot when you are the one doing the interacting. And Opus makes for a damn good daily driver.

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

#245

Post by cesarvarela »

coldtea wrote: post #187
Filligree wrote: post #183

Earlier 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. Lots of models get really close on benchmarks, but benchmarks only tell us how good they are at solving a defined problem. Opus is far better at solving ill-defined ones.

> 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?

The harness makes a difference too.

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

#246

Post by Majromax »

bodge5000 wrote: post #151
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…

> 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, a

Claude Code use-cases also differ somewhat from general API use, where the former is engineered for high cache utilization. We know from overall API costs (both Anthropic and OpenRouter) that cached inputs cost an order of magnitude less than uncached inputs, but OpenCode/pi/OpenClaw don't necessarily have the same kind of aggressive cache-use optimizations.

Vertically integrated stacks might also be able to have a first layer of globally shared KV cache for the system prompts, if the preamble is not user specific and changes rarely.

> 2) last time I checked, API spending is capped at $5000 a month

Per https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/api/rate-limits, that seems to only be true for general credit-funded accounts. If you contact Anthropic's sales team and set up monthly invoicing, there's evidently no fixed spending limit.

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

#248

Post by itintheory »

bdangubic wrote: post #202
KptMarchewa wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most companies forbid it though, since you're not covered by any legal protection - for example, Anthropic can use your data or code to train new models and more.

This maybe was the case year+ ago but this is no longer the case, used to be most; now it is some/few

Any references on this? I hear this argument a lot. In fact, in a talk on AI last week I heard someone say:

"If you click the thumbs up button to rate a chat, the AI provider will use the contents for training, so our company's policy is never to click the thumbs up button"

That seemed so farcical I had a hard time taking this person seriously. Enterprise plans must give some strong guarantees around data usage, right?

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

#249

Post by tartoran »

amelius wrote: post #231
tartoran wrote: post #230

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.

I assume they project that some of the free users will be converted to paying users at some point. Whether it turns profitable in the end it's another story. Have no idea..

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

#250

Post by beepbooptheory »

simianwords wrote: post #50
functionmouse wrote: post #2

Was anyone under the impression that it does? Serious question. I've never heard that, personally.

You would be surprised because there are lots of posters here who think that the cost is so enormous that this whole industry is unviable.

Is that conceit somehow intrinsically absurd? Or is everyone just supposed to just know?

Like I wish it was simple as "if it wasn't viable, they wouldn't be in business," but alas that argument is kinda the more naive one in this world. Right?

Or is there some intuition about energy/cost here all the dump posters miss, that you could tell us about?

Please, anything, my company is dying.

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