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The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

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Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#51

Post by ealready_value »

infecto wrote: post #41
ealready_value wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, it seemed very clear that was the playbook for about a year now. Its been regularly assumed they're selling plans as a major loss-leader because people can "spend" thousands of dollars a months on a plan if they were charged at API rates. I think there's good evidence that even the API rates are sold at a loss. I think its assumed in the LLM model business that the models themselves are not a go…

The simpler explanation is probably some mix of marketing and also an expected use from people paying for a plan. The money to be made is not from plans ever. It’s in everyone’s best interest for these companies to accurately oversubscribe plans. Enterprise is where the money is to be made and I don’t feel that pricing has changed much on that end.

I had never thought of it that way, but it seems very likely that Enterprise oversubscribing is in the mix. Which does tie in nicely with this change; if a few devs are using their max plan to programmatically run parts of the business that could break the oversubscribes assumption.

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#53

Post by infecto »

ealready_value wrote: post #51
infecto wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simpler explanation is probably some mix of marketing and also an expected use from people paying for a plan. The money to be made is not from plans ever. It’s in everyone’s best interest for these companies to accurately oversubscribe plans. Enterprise is where the money is to be made and I don’t feel that pricing has changed much on that end.

I had never thought of it that way, but it seems very likely that Enterprise oversubscribing is in the mix. Which does tie in nicely with this change; if a few devs are using their max plan to programmatically run parts of the business that could break the oversubscribes assumption.

There are no Enterprise plans though only on demand usage which at worst is charged retail token costs and with volume negotiated token rates.

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#54

Post by parliament32 »

AlexandrB wrote: post #45
parliament32 wrote: post #18

It really is the doordash/uber playbook all over again eh? Sell at a massive loss, gain userbase, then gradually boil the frog by adding fees, removing features, and increasing prices. Except instead of doing this a few years down the line, they're speedrunning the tighten-the-noose phase. Unfortunately the competition is nipping at their heels so there's a good chance this blows up in their faces.

How do we tell the doordash/uber playbook from the moviepass playbook? Because the latter would be awful to build your business on.

Moviepass (afaik) was an attempt at the exact same playbook, it just failed.

Anthropic will also fail when the competition is.. near-equivalent-capability DeepSeek/Qwen/Llama on a $1k GPU with a break-even of 5 months of subscription costs. The value is simply not there for what they would need to charge to become profitable.

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#55

Post by infecto »

hdndjsbbs wrote: post #46
infecto wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people are being too generous with these comparisons. Not defending Anthropic but at the same time they are releasing new features and adjusting cost at pretty record speed for a new industry. Uber/doordash were subsidizing cost for what felt like a decade. Anthropic and related companies are adjusting price within months. To me the bigger takeaway is that these business are seeing massive volume in use and f…

They have to speedrun boiling the frog because the capital expenditure is insane. Remains to be seen just how fast you can boil a frog before the frog notices

Disagree. Most businesses of size are going to enterprise agreements which are all on demand rates. Those rates have not been changing other than the underlying cost to the model API rates fluctuating. You could make argument they are secretly using that has the price lever.

With volume enterprises can already negotiate lower token rates. I don’t see a boiling the frog situation.

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#58

Post by cycomanic »

adampunk wrote: post #7
jameskilton wrote: post #2

> At Anthropic, we build AI to serve humanity’s long-term well-being. If Anthropic actually cared about humans, they would have the best customer support (staffed by humans, for humans) and communications team (again, staffed by humans, for humans). As both of these are actually on par with Silicon Valley standards (between medicore and atrociously bad), Anthropic cannot and should not be trusted with anything to do…

How would you staff a support line for a product with a billion users?

It's funny how silicon valley bros always talk like making real world things is essentially impossible. I mean walmart or aldi are serving > 200 million customers a week, how do they manage that I can tell you that's much harder than customer support for an online product.

As a side note, how do you make up that billion user number? Claude has 10 million users.

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#60

Post by quietsegfault »

ochronus wrote: post #43

Yeah, claude code is mostly unusable at this point. It's been in a constant decline for a good 1-2 months. It's more like a scam now.

What are the biggest problems you've seen? Is it mostly related to limits for the subscription plans?

Within my circles (mostly big enterprises), I see more and more of my friends using Claude, and spending money on it, so they must be getting some sort of value out of it. For my uses, I've also been successful with Claude Code, though someone else is paying for my tokens.

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