[simonw]

I learned today that the Anthropic "Enterprise" plan - the one big companies use because they need governance features and audit logs and all of that jazz - is billed at API token rates (plus $20/seat/month).

So large companies are getting billed a lot more than those discount subscription plans.

[alexriddle]

Anything over 150 seats means you need to pay at token rates plus the $20/user. My day job is operational (no coding at all) and I'm spending ~$300 a month on a few chats with Claude/Cowork a day over the course of a month.

[m_kos]

$300 is my employer's monthly cap on Claude Enterprise. It lasts me at most a week of moderate use. I would much rather get Codex Pro and Claude Pro or Max, which would cost ≤ $200. For $300, one could also add Gemini Ultra to the mix so I could have all three review each other's code, etc.

Claude can be very good but enterprise pricing doesn't make sense to me.

[lunar_mycroft]

The $200 plan you're talking about is subsidized by Anthropic. They cannot afford to keep offering that to everyone indefinitely. Absolute best case scenario for current users is that they can continue to subsidize it as way to sell enterprise plans, but there's no way that they can keep offering it to everyone at those prices.

[wahnfrieden]

They can if it is a way to get individuals hooked on it to then introduce it at their workplaces, who pay enterprise rates.

[lunar_mycroft]

Right, they can do it to sell enterprise plans, but they can't offer said plans to those enterprise customers indefinitely. So if your employer wants to spend $200/month on tokens, you're going to get however many tokens $200 buys you each month, not the order of magnitude more you can get with a consumer subscription.

[wahnfrieden]

That’s what I’m saying. Enterprise customers don’t use the subscription plan

[goosejuice]

> They cannot afford to keep offering that to everyone indefinitely.

Common talking point. There's enough evidence for the counter argument that this is essentially misinformation. I have no idea why it's so often repeated with confidence.

[cdata]

> There's enough evidence for the counter argument that this is essentially misinformation.

> No evidence is shared

Help an open-minded critic out.

[goosejuice]

Brand new industry, massive capital, dropping inference costs, increasing availability of compute, cost centers / subsidized subscriptions are common in SaaS, heavy competition, no public information on actual utilization rates.

How much is Waymo burning a year? 3B on 300M ARR? Anthropic is what 5B on 20B ARR? Waymo is 3x older. Why don't we hear such confident statements about how subsidized their rides are?

It's one thing to speculate it's another to parade it as fact. Even if the S1 reveals an unprofitable business today, you can still only claim it's unlikely.

[ilikehurdles]

That’s a shocking number. I don’t know how much my employer is billed, but based on the numbers reported by Claude code in its optional status bar, I’m often exceeding $300 in a day across sessions, when working on meatier tickets.

[stavros]

We deployed OpenWebUI with the Claude API the other day for employees. Someone sent ten messages (which appeared to just be reasonable day-to-day work), and we paid $200 for it. There were 44M input tokens, 100k output tokens, no cache hits at all. OpenWebUI reports 3M tokens used, Claude reports 44M, and I have no idea where the rest of the tokens went. This was all on a brand new API key, installed directly to the service, too.

With this kind of opaque billing, how can I reasonably deploy any AI?

[SyneRyder]

No cache hits seems ominous, could this be an OpenWebUI issue? It also seems ominous that Anthropic models are basically nowhere on the OpenWebUI leaderboards.

I'm only doing a cursory search, but it seems OpenWebUI doesn't support Anthropic caching, and they don't intend to? Other providers handle caching automatically (apparently?) but caching has to be specifically managed by the client with Anthropic. If that's correct that OpenWebUI doesn't support it, it would really send your costs spiralling, because you're being billed for all the tokens in the entire multi-turn conversation on every turn:

https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/issues/4887

I have no experience with OpenWebUI though (honestly, first time I've heard of it). Just trying to be helpful. If I'm completely incorrect then apologies in advance for sending you down the wrong path.

[stavros]

Really? Huh, I've never heard of Anthropic caching needing to be specifically enabled. I'll look into that, thank you! Sounds like the culprit.

[stymaar]

I hope your company is keeping the input/response pair in case they need to break free at some point.

[dd8601fn]

Wouldn’t people mostly just want any artifacts?

[speed_spread]

Like Slack history, LLM history can be used to build searchable knowledge base. Questions are often more valuable than answers.

[jgreid]

Governance and audit trail are incredibly valuable to large enterprise organizations, especially those working in regulated spaces. Companies will pay a premium if the security/privacy/compliance issues are handled effectively.

[zaphirplane]

What is the governance and audit trail on offer ?

[zackify]

We are on it at my job. It saves money due to other parts of the org not using as many tokens.

The real cost effective way is giving a team $20 cursor $20-100 Claude $20-200 codex.

I'm spending 1k on Claude enterprise easily and that's with trying to spread it on codex and cursor using pi.

[htrp]

> I learned today that the Anthropic "Enterprise" plan - the one big companies use because they need governance features and audit logs and all of that jazz - is billed at API token rates (plus $20/seat/month).

Can large enterprises just not use the API ? I have audit logs and what seem to be enterprise features through my anthropic account (platform.claude.ai)

[simonw]

They can do that, but I expect they see individual user accounts and enterprise account management and easy rollout of Claude.ai/Cowork/Claude Code/etc as worth an extra $20/month/person.

[thewebguyd]

The devs can, sure. The "enterprise plan" is more for that + giving Claude to all the non-technical employees for access to the chatbot + Cowork. Plus SSO and all that jazz.

[acdha]

Enterprises can, but then they have to show their auditors that this has been done in a way which is robust and can’t be bypassed, and they have to build the kind of reports people need to be convinced of that — nothing is ever “just” in enterprise IT.

Longer term, you also have to be careful about building things around details which could change at any time. OpenAI and Anthropic have a ton of pressure to start banking huge profits and they very closely monitor customer activity. A time-honored strategy in this space is to shuffle the features enterprise customers depend on but which aren’t deal-breakers for most other customers into expensive enterprise plans. There’s possibly some counter pressure from companies like Google which have healthier finances but I wouldn’t count on that since they also have MBAs who’d be all too happy to invent pretexts to hike their prices to match.

[opsnooperfax]

Your CISO is paying to not be responsible. That’s it. That’s always the reason.

[pyreko]

Yep, where I work I know people easily spending over a few thousand dollars a month.

[datadrivenangel]

I've heard that the $20/seat gets waved if you have large enough committed spend.

[isoprophlex]

Would they even care at that scale, if the average employee spends $3000 every month because mgmt mandates slopmaxxing?

[chinathrow]

Do we know that they all pay the API rates or will they negotiate individually?