[epolanski]

All competitors need are their latest model to be either better or similar but much cheaper. And Anthropic has no less than 2 big competitors in the space in US alone providing similar quality models.

There's no moat in LLMs when you're as good as your latest model.

Companies out there aren't in the business of throwing money down the drain.

Take DS4, you can use Deepseek APIs directly with Claude Code, and you're unlikely to notice a difference for the overwhelming majority of your use cases. But your bills run in few $ per day. I'm talking 2 magnitudes less.

[hparadiz]

You forget the institutional inertia of how these things get negotiated from year to year. If something is working for people they tend to wanna keep it. The existing curation of how everything works is cheaper than rolling your own. Sure you can get something running yourself but integrations for a lot of people are worth some of this cost. Also for AI heavy customers (multimedia, video, etc) the sky is the limit and there's not enough processing for it right now.

[epolanski]

That logic works for 20 vs 40$ SaaS subscriptions, not for burning triple/four digits per day in APIs.