[KaiserPro]

$170k per buisness customer. That's not including existing debt and opex.

Good luck paying that back, especially as AI is basically commodity now.

[eitally]

Have you seen their 2025 growth curve (and projections)?

https://www.reddit.com/r/EconomyCharts/comments/1lwdwd6/anth...

[sunir]

Growth curves mean nothing if you're selling $0.90 dollars. You have to show a growth curve when price > cost. It's not even clear that value > cost.

I absolutely love Anthropic; but I am worried about the fiscal wall they will hit that will ratchet up my opex as they will need to steeply raise prices.

[simonw]

So the critical question here really is whether they are selling API access to their models for less than the unit cost it takes to serve them.

[manquer]

I don’t think it is only that consideration

While Gross margins numbers are estimates vary widely, 40-60% numbers some analysts throw around seems realistic.

In an equity only company that is good enough metric , but all the major players have long since now transitioned to also raising debt.

The debt would need to be serviced even if fresh training investments stopped fully .

The cost of debt servicing would depend on the interest rates and the economy etc inaddition to the risk of the debt itself.

Quite possible that model companies would need to jack prices even with good gross margins to handle their debt load.

[sunir]

You have to include the carrying cost per customer as well which is mostly labour. Most of SaaS undercounts the payroll attached to a subscription which is why it is so hard to get to positive net margins and maintain lifetime value.

I am sceptical an LLM foundation model company can get away with low human services either directly on its own payroll or by giving up margin to a channel of implementation partners. Thats because the go to market requires organizational change on the customer sites. That is a lot of human surface area.

[ares623]

But inference is cheap! If they stop doing everything and become Inference Inc., they'll be profitable.

[Gigachad]

Until China drops another open weight model you can run yourself at cost price.

[justapassenger]

Are you saying that in next 10 years they'll make more money that there's an atoms in the universe?

[KaiserPro]

have you seen their cost curves and projections as well?

[bangaladore]

The area under that curve is quite a bit less than 50B.

[diamond559]

that is like 3 data point my man and you think you can project them just straight up forever and ever. this is bubble thinking.

[DANmode]

Over a decade?

Also,

> customers that each represent over $100,000 in run-rate revenue—has grown nearly sevenfold in the past year.

isn’t unconvincing.

[KaiserPro]

Lets put that quote in its full context, because its designed to sound much more impressive than it actually is.

> Anthropic serves more than 300,000 business customers, and our number of large accounts—customers that each represent over $100,000 in run-rate revenue—has grown nearly sevenfold in the past year.

Let me deconstruct that:

> Anthropic serves more than 300,000 business customers

Hard fact. No qualification on spend or activity, are they on trails or fully paid with contracts and minimum spend

> and our number of large accounts—customers that each represent over $100,000 in run-rate revenue

run-rate revenue is an extrapolation. (https://www.fool.com/terms/r/run-rate/) That could be buisnesses that trail anthropic for a month, spend 24K and think "fuck thats expensive" and stops spending. average that over 2 months, then times by 12, boom 100k account.

> has grown nearly sevenfold in the past year.

no starting base....

Its unconvincing, because its smoke and mirrors. Give me the numbers of paying customers, over time with revenue. Then show the opex/capex.

[DANmode]

How impulse-buy has business AI licensing got?

Is it really a surprise later, the cost?

[KaiserPro]

Less impulse, more "oh we expected that we'd get more return".

We have a project at the moment thats all based around sharepoint. They have ingested many tens of thousands of documents, and are expecting that MS copilot studio will be able to a) RAG and B) produce meaningful answers with a 4 line prompt.

[DANmode]

Does it take more than a quarter or two to figure that out?

[KaiserPro]

Thats my point right? you get monthly billing, look at the curve and go "oops thats not good"

And then cut spending. The point is, run-rate revenue, which is extrapolated rather than _actual_ can easily mask this change, depending on how its calculated.

[olivermuty]

None of this infra is worth anything more than five years from now.

[EMM_386]

How do you think computing companies work?

They buy hardware, replace it as the years go on, and continue doing business.

The investment isn't just in raw compute - they have to build buildings, pay staff, and other things. For the hardware and software - they just keep pace as all the other computing companies have to.

[tootie]

Also, 800 permanent employees is $62.5M/employee.

[datadrivenangel]

With the 2400 temporary employees it's $14M/job, which is very very capital intensive.

If trends continue, all investment in the economy will be directed by about 6 people at a big AI company, and what will money mean at that point?