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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

#91

Post by vidarh »

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.

I have no problem believing that a Claude Max plan can consume equivalent to $5000 worth of retail Opus use, but one interesting thing you'll see if you e.g. have Claude write agents for you, is that it's pretty aggressive about setting agents to use Sonnet or even Haiku, so not only will most people not exhaust their plans, but a lot of people who do will do so in part using the cheaper models. When you then factor in Anthropics reported margins, and their ability to prioritise traffic (e.g. I'd assume that if their capacity is maxed out they'd throttle subscribers in favour of paid by the token? Maybe not, but it's what I'd do), I'd expect the real cost to them of a maximised plan to be much lower.

Also, while Opus certainly is a lot better than even the best Chinese models, when I max out my Claude plan, I make do with Kimi 2.5. When factoring in the re-run of changes because of the lower quality, I'd spend maybe 2x as much per unit of work I were to pay token prices for all my monthly use w/Kimi.

I'd still prefer Claude if the price comes down to 1x, as it's less hassle w/the harder changes, but their lead is effectively less than a year.

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

#92

Post by vidarh »

bandrami wrote: post #61
versteegen wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Aren't they losing money on the retail API pricing, too? No, they aren't, and probably neither is anyone else offering API pricing. And Anthropic's API margins may be higher than anyone else. For example, DeepSeek released numbers showing that R1 was served at approximately "a cost profit margin of 545%" (meaning 82% of revenue is profit), see my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46663852

Weird that they're all looking for outside money then

They're all looking for outside money because they're all looking for outside money, and so need to keep up with their competitors investments in training. It's a game of chicken. Once their ability to raise more abates, they'll slow down new training runs, and fund that out of inference margins instead, but the first one to be forced to do so will risk losing market share.

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

#93

Post by scandox »

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.

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.

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

#94

Post by kaliqt »

eaglelamp wrote: post #43
Aeolun wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opportunity cost is not the same thing as actual cost. They might have made more money if they were capable of selling the API instead of CC, but I would never tell my company to use CC all the time if I didn’t have a personal subscription.

You’re looking through the wrong end of the telescope. An investor is buying opportunity and it is a real cost to them.

Still makes no sense as they’d lose revenue, data, and scale if they don’t subsidize.

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

#95

Post by dtech »

MaxikCZ wrote: post #89
d1sxeyes wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But opportunity cost is not actual cost. “If everyone just kept paying but used our service less we would be more profitable” is true, but not in any meaningful way. Are Anthropic currently unable to sell subscriptions because they don’t have capacity?

> Are Anthropic currently unable to sell subscriptions because they don’t have capacity? Absolutely! Im currently paying $170 to google to use Opus in antigravity without limit in full agent mode, because I tried Anthropic $20 subscription and busted my limit within a single prompt. Im not gonna pay them $200 only to find out I hit the limit after 20 or even 50 prompts. And after 2 more months my price is going to do…

This has a absolutely nothing to do with whether they're limited by available compute...

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

#96

Post by fc417fc802 »

jychang wrote: post #77
simianwords wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure you can use tps as a proxy?

In practice, tps is a reflection of vram memory bandwidth during inference. So the tps tells you a lot about the hardware you're running on. Comparing tps ratios- by saying a model is roughly 2x faster or slower than another model- can tell you a lot about the active param count. I won't say it'll tell you everything; I have no clue what optimizations Opus may have, which can range from native FP4 experts to spec dec…

> In practice, tps is a reflection of vram memory bandwidth during inference.

> Comparing tps ratios- by saying a model is roughly 2x faster or slower than another model- can tell you a lot about the active param count.

You sure about that? I thought you could shard between GPUs along layer boundaries during inference (but not training obviously). You just end up with an increasingly deep pipeline. So time to first token increases but aggregate tps also increases as you add additional hardware.

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

#97

Post by ajkjk »

crakhamster01 wrote: post #78
lovecg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t get past all the LLM-isms. Do people really not care about AI-slopifying their writing? It’s like learning about bad kerning, you see it everywhere.

I had a similar reaction to OP for a different post a few weeks back - I think some analysis on the health economy. Initially as I was reading I thought - "Wow, I've never read a financial article written so clearly". Everything in layman's terms. But as I continued to read, I began to notice the LLM-isms. Oversimplified concepts, "the honest truth" "like X for Y", etc. Maybe the common factor here is not having deep…

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

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

#98

Post by nottorp »

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…

You know who also loves to use the term "opportunity cost"?

The entertainment industry. They still tell you about how much money they're leaving on the table because people pirate stuff.

What would happen in reality for entertainment is people would "consume" far less "content".

And what would happen in reality for Anthropic is people would start asking themselves if the unpredictability is worth the price. Or at best switch to pay as you go and use the API far less.

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

#99

Post by re-thc »

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…

> 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.

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