[mikeocool]

Yeah — I just created an anthropic API key to experiment with pi, and managed to spend $1 in about 30 minutes doing some basic work with Sonnet.

Extrapolating that out, the subscription pricing is HEAVILY subsidized. For similar work in Claude Code, I use a Pro plan for $20/month, and rarely bang up against the limits.

[causal]

And it scales up - the $200 plan gets you something like 20x what the Pro plan gets you. I've never come close to hitting that limit.

It's obviously capital-subsidized and so I have zero expectation of that lasting, but it's pretty anti-competitive to Cursor and others that rely on API keys.

[selcuka]

Ignoring the training costs, the marginal cost for inference is pretty low for providers. They are estimated to break even or better with their $20/month subscriptions.

That being said, they can't stop launching new models, so training is not a one time task. Therefore one might argue that it is part of the marginal cost.

[walthamstow]

I ran ccusage on my work Max account and I spend what would cost $300 a week if it was billed at API rates.