The other way of looking at this is that all the customers paying API rates are giving Anthropic way more than the cost of serving their traffic. They reported an 85% gross margin in their S-1, so this clearly seems to be the case.

Deepseek claim they are earning 38 dollars per GPU hour on inference. If you compare Deepseek Flash's off-peak pricing with Sonnet at API rates, Deepseek is 16x cheaper per 1M output tokens, and 13x to 33x cheaper for input, depending on whether or not it's a cache hit. Inference is very profitable.

You are probably better off upgrading to Max for one month. I’ve done that a few times.

> no way that is remotely close to the actual cost

Anthropic is running 85% gross margins on inference.

We recently switched from paying API prices via Cursor to a Claude subscription. Before we'd be averaging $100-$300 per day, now we have the €90/mo subscription and I haven't even reached the 5h limit yet.

My guess is a mixture of both... There's a reason why enterprise customers have to use API based billing.

(We also had a stint of using Grok 4.7 and that was the same price for our usage. Opus 5.5 seemed smarter though. After taking into account caching both average around $0.60 per 1M tokens)

You might not be representative of the average user. Usually with subscription-based services, you have a minority of hyperusers that the company loses money on and a large majority who only use their subscription occasionally.

Because, like with other subscriptions, most people don’t use even half of it.

OTOH less than $10 gets me more DS4.1 than I can use in a month.

> And my god, $15 of extra credits ended up giving me only 30 minutes of Claude Code before running out.

I've been running into the same thing, and adding separate OpenAI seats for employees rather than paying obscene overages to Anthropic. Thankfully Opus has decreased usage quite a bit, and made this less of an issue as well.

> The subscription prices can not be financially sustainable. There is no way that is remotely close to the actual cost of running.

It's completely unclear to me why this is the conclusion everyone jumps to instead of "holy cow they are milking it on API pricing."

I mean, have you ever run a local model? How much electricity did it cost you to get 1,000 tokens out of it? Like a fairy-dust of a cent?

The AI labs' cost is CapEx. Marginal cost of tokens is zero.

I found this to be a shocking experience as well. Compare the 20x (now ultra 10x or whatever) plan running with 90% cache hit vs some extra credits you put on top. It's pissing in the wind.

Be careful!

They lure you in to do "automatic top up", which gets quite expensive if you dont watch it :-)

> The subscription prices can not be financially sustainable. There is no way that is remotely close to the actual cost of running.

Welcome to... any subscription system ever? If every person with a gym subscription actually went there say three times a week, or every person living in a dorm paying flat rate for electricity started mining bitcoin 24/7, these systems would collapse. That doesn't mean it's not sustainable, it just is how subscription pricing works, by having some people use its offers a ton and others barely at all

because "building things with claude-code" isn't the product they're selling, not really.

they're setting a precedent that artificial intelligence should be free, or at least at-cost (free from profit), but robot labor (API usage) should not. I am all in favor of this dynamic. They built / maintain the robots, so they profit from their labors.

I think every comment is talking about their 20 dollar plan. Enterprise pricing is 20/seat+ api use prices. That pricing is all that matters, the personal use tier is probably tiny

Don't worry, I've probably sent Claude 5 messages on my personal sub the past month, so I got you covered.

>> The subscription prices can not be financially sustainable.

Even if they are a loss leader, they serve a valuable purpose: people who get used to using AI a lot via the subscription then lobby their companies to start using it. IMHO this is one of the reasons Anthropic was able to make major headway into enterprise.