alt Hacker NewsI don't think it's a secret that AI companies are losing a ton of money on subscription plans. Hence the stricter rate limits, new $200+ plans, push towards advertising etc. The real money is in per-token billing via the API (and large companies having enough AI FOMO that they blindly pay the enormous invoices every month).
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Depends on how you do the accounting. Are you counting inference costs or are you amortizing next gen model dev costs. "Inference is profitable" is oft repeated and rarely challenged. Most subscription users are low intensity users after all.
I agree; unfortunately when I brought up that they're losing before I get jumped on demanding me to "prove it" and I guess pointing at their balance sheets isn't good enough.
The question I have: how much are they _also_ losing on per-token billing?
But why does it matter which program you use to consume the tokens?
The sounds like a confession that claude code is somewhat wasteful at token use.
Honestly I think I am already sold on AI, who is the first company that is going to show us all how much it really costs and start enshitification? First to market wins right?
They are not losing money on subscription plans. Inference is very cheap - just a few dollars per million tokens. What they’re trying to do is bundle R&D costs with inference so they can fund the training of the next generation of models.
Banning third-party tools has nothing to do with rate limits. They’re trying to position themselves as the Apple of AI companies -a walled garden. They may soon discover that screwing developers is not a good strategy.
They are not 10× better than Codex; on the contrary, in my opinion Codex produces much better code. Even Kimi K2.5 is a very capable model I find on par with Sonnet at least, very close to Opus. Forcing people to use ONLY a broken Claude Code UX with a subscription only ensures they loose advantage they had.