[crazylogger]

Anecdotally, a Max subscriber gets something like $100 worth of usage per day. The more people use Claude Code, the more Anthropic loses, so it sounds like a classical "selling a dollar for 85 cents" business to me.

As soon as users are confronted with their true API cost, the appearance of this being a good business falls apart. At the end of the day, there is no moat around large language models - OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, Alibaba, Moonshot... any company can make a SOTA model if they wish, so in the long run it's guaranteed to be a race to the bottom where nobody can turn a profit.

[simonw]

> Anecdotally, a Max subscriber gets something like $100 worth of usage per day.

Where are you getting that number from?

Anthropic added quite strict limits on usage - visible from the /usage method inside Claude Code. I would be surprised if those limits turn out to still result in expensive losses for them.

[crazylogger]

This is just personal experience + reddit anecdotes. I've been using CC from day one (when API pricing was the only way to pay for CC), then I've been on the $20 Pro plan and am getting a solid $5+ worth of usage in each 5h session, times 5-10 sessions per week (so an overall 5-10x subsidy over one month.) And I extrapolated that $200 subscribers must be getting roughly 10x Pro's usage. I do feel the actual limit fluctuates each week as Claude Code engage in this new subsidy war with OAI Codex though.

My theory is this:

- we know from benchmarks that open-weight models like Deepseek R1 and Kimi K2's capabilities are not far behind SOTA GPT/Claude

- open-weight API pricing (e.g. on openrouter) is roughly 1/10~1/5 that of GPT/Claude

- users can more or less choose to hook their agent CLI/IDEs to either closed or open models

If these points are true, then the only reason people are primarily on CC & Codex plans is because they are subsidized by at least 5~10x. When confronted with true costs, users will quickly switch to the lowest inference cost vendor, and we get perfect competition + zero margin for all vendors.

[wahnfrieden]

The benchmarks lie. Go try coding full-time with R1 vs Codex or GPT-5 (in Codex). The latter is firmly preferred even by those who have no issue with budgeting tokens for their productivity.