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.
$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.
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.
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.
A lot of startups pile up enormous amount of accounts, companies don't need the Enterprise Anthropic solution, they can just subscribe to many accounts and have their own staff KYC for each (1 codex, 1 claude, 1 google and so-on).
> 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.
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.
> 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?
We do. We hear it less often because no-one is talking about how Waymo changes how we all need to work or whatever, that's all.
Do people commonly argue Waymo isn't subsidizing rates?
Also, we do have some evidence for my position:
- We know that the consumer Claude plans provide _way_ more tokens than you could get if you were paying API prices. This is a huge part of why Anthropic's limits on other harnesses for subscription customers is such a big deal. So either their profit margin on API tokens is absurdly high, most consumer subscribers don't come anywhere near their rate limits, or they're losing money on the consumer subscriptions.
- It appears that complains about people running into rate limits are common, which suggests the "consumers usually don't use much of their subscription" explanation is incorrect.
- We also know that Anthropic has just become profitable, almost certainly driven mostly by enterprise customers. This rules out the "they make a very high profit margin on the API" explanation, since if that was the case they'd likely have been profitable much earlier.
Taken together, I think the case that their consumer subscriptions lose them money on net is pretty strong, even though their enterprise subscriptions (and API pricing) does make them a profit.
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.
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?
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:
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.
Claude can be very good but enterprise pricing doesn't make sense to me.