[skort]

Right, but these companies are selling their products on the basis that you can offload a good amount of the thinking. And it seems a good deal of investment in AI is also based on this premise. I don't disagree with you, but it's sorta fucked that so much money has been pumped into this and that markets seem to still be okay with it all.

[AlexandrB]

They're not selling them, they're still giving them away. Once the VC money runs out we'll see what the actual cost of this stuff is.

[blitzar]

> They're not selling them

I have a receipt of sale that says otherwise.

[ath3nd]

Oh, you beautiful summer child. They are losing money on you . Do you think they are doing that out of the goodness of your heart? They are luring you in, making you dependent on them at a net loss while the VC money are lasting.

When you are totally hooked and they are fully out of money, that's when you'd realize the long con you've been dragged into. At this very moment, that they are tightening the usage limits they are not telling you, and you still think the peanuts you are paying them now would be enough in the future? It's called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification and you better know that you are in it.

[blitzar]

I am buying from willing sellers at the current fair market price. The belief that there will be "one true king" in this race has been incepted by VCs and hype men, and is misguided at best and dangerous at worst.

Like many of the companies that have gone before them, if / when the value proposition is gone, and I get less than 10x the amount I spend, I will be gone.

[ath3nd]

It's just a rumor atm but Claude weekly limits seem to be coming:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1ma3wm6/weekly_...

> Like many of the companies that have gone before them, if / when the value proposition is gone, and I get less than 10x the amount I spend, I will be gone.

Seems you'd soon be going. Well it was fun while it lasted (all 3 months of it).

[matltc]

Not a rumor anymore! Got this in my inbox (I'm a Pro subscriber):

Hi there,

Next month, we're introducing new weekly rate limits for Claude subscribers, affecting less than 5% of users based on current usage patterns.

Claude Code, especially as part of our subscription bundle, has seen unprecedented growth. At the same time, we’ve identified policy violations like account sharing and reselling access—and advanced usage patterns like running Claude 24/7 in the background—that are impacting system capacity for all. Our new rate limits address these issues and provide a more equitable experience for all users.

What’s changing:

Starting August 28, we're introducing weekly usage limits alongside our existing 5-hour limits:

Current: Usage limit that resets every 5 hours (no change) New: Overall weekly limit that resets every 7 days New: Claude Opus 4 weekly limit that resets every 7 days As we learn more about how developers use Claude Code, we may adjust usage limits to better serve our community.

What this means for you:

Most users won't notice any difference. The weekly limits are designed to support typical daily use across your projects. Most Pro users can expect 40-80 hours of Sonnet 4 within their weekly rate limits. This will vary based on factors such as codebase size and user settings like auto-accept mode. Users running multiple Claude Code instances in parallel will hit their limits sooner. You can manage or cancel your subscription anytime in Settings. We take these decisions seriously. We're committed to supporting long-running use cases through other options in the future, but until then, weekly limits will help us maintain reliable service for everyone.

We also recognize that during this same period, users have encountered several reliability and performance issues. We've been working to fix these as quickly as possible, and will continue addressing any remaining issues over the coming days and weeks.

–The Anthropic Team

[spongebobstoes]

most inference runs at 40%+ margin

[darylteo]

Is this like saying a gym runs at 40%+ margin because 80% of users don't really use it heavily or forget they even had a subscription? Would be interested to see the breakdown of that number.

[wongarsu]

That's how nearly every subscription service works, yes. Some fraction has a subscription and doesn't use it, another large chunk only uses a fraction of their usage limits, and a tiny fraction uses the service to it's full potential. Almost no subscription would be profitable if every customer used it to its full potential

[TeMPOraL]

TL;DR: their subscriptions have an extra built-in margin closer to 70%, because the entry price, target audience and clever choice of rate limiting period, all keep utilization low.

----

In this case I'd imagine it's more of an assumption that almost all such subscriptions will have less than 33% utilization, and excepting few outliers, even the heaviest users won't exceed 60-70% utilization on average.

"33% or less" is, of course, people using a CC subscription only at work. Take an idealized case - using CC only during regular working hours, no overtime: then, even if you use it to the limit all the time, you only use it for 1⁄3 of the day (8h), and 5 days a week - the expected utilization in this scenario is 8/24 × 5/7 = 24%. So you're paying a $200 subscription, but actually getting at most $50 of usage out of it.

Now, throw in a rate limit that refreshes in periods of 5 hours - a value I believe was carefully chosen to achieve this very effect - and the maximum utilization possible (maxing out limit, waiting for refresh, and maxing out again, in under 8 hours wall-clock time), is still 10 hours equivalent, so 10/24 × 5/7 = 30%. If you just plan to use CC to the first limit and then take meetings for the rest of the day, your max utilization drops to 15%.

Of course people do overtime, use same subscription for personal stuff after work and on weekends, or just run a business, etc. -- but they also need to eat and sleep, so interactively, you'd still expect them to stay below 75% (83% if counting in 5-hour blocks) total utilization.

Sharing subscriptions doesn't affect these calculations much - two people maxing out a single subscription is, from the provider side, strictly not greater than two subscriptions with 50% utilization. The math will stop working once a significant fraction of users figure out non-interactive workflows, that run CC 24/7. We'll get there eventually, but we're not there yet. Until then, Anthropic is happy we're all paying $200/month but only getting $50 or less of service out of it.

[ehnto]

Is that for per token costs or in these bundled subscriptions companies are selling?

For example, when playing around with claude code using a per token paid API key, it was going to cost ~$50aud a day with pretty general usage.

But their subscription plan is less than that per month. Them lowering their limits suggests that this wasn't proving profitable at the current limits.

[jrflowers]

Exactly. The enormous margin is why companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are known for being so immensely profitable. Just money printing machines compared to the amount of cash they burn

[csomar]

They'd be still at massive losses. You can spend your monthly subscription price in a day.

[Shorn]

I thought it was understood all the large vendors were losing money bigly on inference and will have to pull the rug eventually.

[oldenlessons]

Cost of revenue should include R&D and amortization. Pointing to EBTIDA is a very old trick.

[manojlds]

Definitely doesn't sound true unless you have the receipts.

[irjustin]

Is that to the $20/mth plan or the 137?

[tecleandor]

Yeah, they are _saying_ that they're selling you a service but there will be surprises...

[gscott]

How long can AI be subsidized in the name of growth? They need to radically increase the price. If I replace a $150k yr employee should I pay $200 a month or $2,000 a month. $200 is too cheap.

[TeMPOraL]

$200 a month with Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 won't let you replace a $12.5k / month employee - but it's cheap enough that everyone, including you and even your employees, will want to see how much utility they can squeeze out of it.

This is a price to get people hooked up, yes, but also to get them to explore all kinds of weird tricks and wacky workflows, especially ones that are prohibitively costly when billed per token. In some sense, this is crowdsourcing R&D - and then when Opus 7 or whatever comes along to take advantage of best practices people worked out, and that turns out to be good enough to replace your $150k/yr / $12.5k/mo employee - then they'll jack up prices to $10k/month or whatever.

[perks_12]

$200 a month gives your $12.5k / month employee a handy assistant who can take care of things you'd love to automate or would employ a junior dev for.

[ath3nd]

And makes your codebase completely unmaintainable, even for Claude. The more Claude runs one does, the more unmaintainable the codebase becomes, and more tokens Claude spends on each subsequent run. It's a perfect ecosystem!

[wqaatwt]

> replace a $150k

Seems tangential? Price entirely depends on what consumers/businesses willing to pay and the degree of competition

[benterix]

> If I replace a $150k yr employee

Based on my experience with Claude Code (which is relatively good TBH), I'd say good luck with that.

[whywhywhywhy]

You can spend $2000 a month if you want, they have an pay what you use option.