No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by vidarh » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 2:38 PM UTC

Bombthecat wrote: post #224

vidarh wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In 12 months, opus will be better than now and you still won't use it lol

I still won't use what? I use Opus now, and I will use Opus then too, but as I clearly stated:

My default model has now dropped to Sonnet, because Sonnet can now do most of my tasks, and we already use Kimi, Deepseek, and Qwen.

They're just not cost-effective enough to be my main driver yet. They are however cheap enough that for things where the Claude TOS does not let me use my subscription, they still add substantial value. Just not nearly as much as I'd like.

The bulk of my tasks won't get harder as time passes, and so will move down the value chain as the cheaper models get better.

For the small proportion of my tasks that benefits from a smarter model, I will use the smartest model I can afford.

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

#262

Post by vidarh » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 2:40 PM UTC

oren1531 wrote: post #233

vidarh wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. At the moment it's close enough to be a wash for some cases, or tilts seriously one direction or other for others. I expect improved harnesses means more and more we'll just be able to re-run a couple of times, and fall back to "escalating" to Sonnet or even Opus, but whenever it involves egineering time, that's a big deal.

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

#263

Post by nullstyle » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

raggi wrote: post #216

jychang wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Deployments like bedrock have no where near SOTA operational efficiency, 1-2 OOM behind. The hardware is much closer, but pipeline, schedule, cache, recomposition, routing etc optimizations blow naive end to end architectures out of the water.

Evidence?

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

#264

Post by maxdo » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 3:03 PM UTC

tartoran wrote: post #227

maxdo wrote: post #199

I'm using API directly for software developement, i'm on path to pay ~$5k this month per user, some less , some more, with daily use is just growing more and more.

What kind of software development do you do? Are you running a gas town? I assume you make your money back but still, are you sure you’re not wasting your tokens away?

Lots of greenfield sub projects around same product , bug fixes , ticket management etc . With my price per hour it still Make sense, even though it’s on the edge of been not that great.

Yeah , I tried gasTown. Not using it extensively.

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

#265

Post by vessenes » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #252

There's a huge difference between cost of inference and profit margin of the "big" providers, and the cost of inference for cloud-hosted open-weights. It's the same as R&D cost of the pharmaceutical industry, versus cost of producing generic drugs. One is massively expensive, the other is cheap. That said, for inference , the margins for OpenAI were estimated at 70% [1] [2], and the margins for Anthropic were estimat…

Thank you for real data. Please moderate the use of the word profitable talking to engineers! We get the same circle jerk over and over here.

Profit implies a GAAP accrual of some sort. On any accrual schedule tied to reality, the companies are profitable now - that is, inference margin on each given model has more than paid for capital costs of training and deploying those models.

That the companies get to show a loss is a feature of cash-basis accounting: they made $100m net on that last model? Good news, We’re spending $1b on the next! Infinite tax losses!

The companies will not be cashflow positive for years. Why does this persnickety difference matter? It matters to me because I care about the engineers here - and they seem collectively likely to either short every AI company IPOing, or just quietly ignore AI impact on their livelihood, or head off into a corner and go catatonic - all based on a worldview that “this is collective insanity and everything here is going to eventually go bankrupt” — none of those are good outcomes. Shorting might be, but it should be done judiciously, and understanding the financial factors at play. So, anyway, long plea over - but, allow me to plead: cashflow positive if you want to make the point you were making.

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

#266

Post by crakhamster01 » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 3:08 PM UTC

amonith wrote: post #177

ajkjk wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternate theory... a few months into the LLMism phenomenon, people are starting to copy the LLM writing style without realizing it :(

This happens to non-native English speakers a lot (like me). My style of writing is heavily influenced by everything I read. And since I also do research using LLMs, I'll probably sound more and more as an AI as well, just by reading its responses constantly. I just don't know what's supposed to be natural writing anymore. It's not in the books, disappears from the internet, what's left? Some old blogs for now maybe.

The wave of LLM-style writing taking over the internet is definitely a bit scary. Feels like a similar problem to GenAI code/style eventually dominating the data that LLMs are trained on.

But luckily there's a large body of well written books/blogs/talks/speeches out there. Also anecdotally, I feel like a lot of the "bad writing" I see online these days is usually in the tech sphere.

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

#267

Post by F7F7F7 » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 3:08 PM UTC

irthomasthomas wrote: post #174

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…

Opus doubled in speed with version 4.5, leading me to speculate that they had promoted a sonnet size model. The new faster opus was the same speed as Gemini 3 flash running on the same TPUs. I think anthropics margins are probably the highest in the industry, but they have to chop that up with google by renting their TPUs.

The conspiracy theorist side of me whispers "instead of the rumored Sonnet 5.0 you got Opus 4.6...suspicious"

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

#268

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 3:25 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#269

Post by eaglelamp » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 3:28 PM UTC

bob1029 wrote: post #63

eaglelamp wrote: post #31

If Anthropic's compute is fully saturated then the Claude code power users do represent an opportunity cost to Anthropic much closer to $5,000 then $500. Anthropic's models may be similar in parameter size to model's on open router, but none of the others are in the headlines nearly as much (especially recently) so the comparison is extremely flawed. The argument in this article is like comparing the cost of a Rolex…

> If Anthropic's compute is fully saturated then the Claude code power users do represent an opportunity cost to Anthropic much closer to $5,000 then $500. I think it's the other way around? Sparse use of GPU farms should be the more expensive thing. Full saturation means that we can exploit batching effects throughout.

If they have spare capacity then there is no opportunity cost to selling $100 subscriptions for exactly that reason. If they don’t have spare capacity then, at the margin, they could replace a subscription user with API calls that make them $5000: that’s opportunity cost.

If you own equity in Anthropic you should care about that cost. Maybe you are willing to tolerate it to win market share, but for you to make the most profit you need that cost to shrink.

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

#270

Post by sheepscreek » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 3:38 PM UTC

TL;DR the premise for the calculation is completely flawed even if the conclusion is correct

> Qwen 3.5 397B-A17B is a good comparison point. It's a large MoE model, broadly comparable in architecture size to what Opus 4.6 is likely to be.

I stopped reading here. Frontier models have been rumoured to be in TRILLIONS of parameters since the days of GPT-4. Besides, with agents, I think they’re using more specialized models under the hood for certain tasks like exploration and web searches.

So while their cost won’t be $5000 or anywhere close, I still think it would be in the hundreds for heavy users. They may very well be losing money to the top 5-10% MAX users. Their real margin likely comes from business API customers.

Here’s an interesting bit - OpenAI filed a document with the SEC recently that gave us a peek into its finances. The cost of all infrastructure stood at just ~30% of all revenue generated. That is a phenomenal improvement. I fell off the chair when I first learned that.