[pembrook]

API pricing drops DRAMATICALLY in enterprise agreements.

As with pretty much anything priced on volume/usage.

Enterprise deals are negotiated ad-hoc, the listed pricing is simply a jumping off point for the final negotiated discount.

If you’re going to give 20,000 employees Claude code you are not going to be spending $1B per year on Anthropic tokens as if you gave everyone an individual API key. Just as Anthropic isn’t paying AWS SES $10,000,000 to send 1 email update to their massive user base when the next Claude version drops.

[taude]

This isn't true at the moment, though. So far there hasn't been the negotiating power. What happens is you end up capping usage for employees at a fixed amount. I think eventually, prices will come down and there will be discounts, but for enterprise accounts at least of our size (<5000), we're paying almost 100% retail, which kind of sucks, because it's expensive, and pretty easy to burn $50 to $100+ in a day, if you're not careful. In fact we got pushed off the former plan to the token-utility one at the last contract negotiation.

Going to be interesting to determing the metrics we give to engineers for determining whether the spend on this is worth it. Measuring PRs, lines of code committed, commits fully generated by agentic workflows, etc.....

[yokoprime]

As someone who has seen the enterprise deals, they are not subsidised in any way shape or form. Anthropic may wave the seat fee, maybe get lower "expected" consumption. This changes what the company pays up front. but token prizing is fixed.

[tomjakubowski]

To confirm, you're saying the enterprise deals you've seen match the prices per token listed here?

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing

[simonw]

> API pricing drops DRAMATICALLY in enterprise agreements

Do you have any numbers or reports to back that up?

[lrae]

> Just as Anthropic isn’t paying AWS SES $10,000,000 to send 1 email update

How much do you think emails cost? That number is just so far off?

But besides that, running SES is also quite a bit cheaper than SOTA ai models with high demand (and comparatively) no competition. And quite a bit more pressure to make money (soon).

[tomjakubowski]

I think it was a figurative example. For what it's worth, $10,000,000 buys you 100 billion (1e11) outbound emails on SES at the sticker price ($0.10/1000 emails). One source puts the number of emails sent worldwide in 2024 at 132 trillion (1.32e14).

https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/456500/daily-number-of-e...

[no-name-here]

But if their “figurative example” was the opposite of reality, then we should similarly assume their other claims were the opposite of true as well?

[tomjakubowski]

How is it the opposite of reality? The commenter exaggerated some numbers, or charitably made a math error, but as far as I know the thrust is correct: AWS is well known for offering discounted rates to high volume customers. In some parlance I hate but will adopt here: the comment is directionally correct.

Do you have any evidence that AWS doesn't offer volume discounts? I have seen plenty of evidence that they do.

Speaking to the subject of this sub-thread, there is pretty good evidence (Anthropic's own pricing page) that Anthropic also offers volume discounts on their API pricing. Five days hence, they have not taken down this language from their platform/API pricing page:

> For higher rate limits or custom pricing arrangements, contact the sales team.

> Volume discounts may be available for high-volume users. These are negotiated on a case-by-case basis.

> Enterprise customers can contact sales for custom pricing.

Simon has ignored all of my comments arguing this point. That makes me reconsider his credibility: why won't he provide any evidence to support his assertion, or admit he may be wrong here?