Subscription plans are limited to companies with fewer than 150 users.

Anything above that requires an Enterprise plan, which is billed at API rates.

For businesses anthropic offer a teams plan for up to 150 users which is billed like a collection of individual users i.e. you have a seat, you get some tokens/month, you buy a higher tier seat and you get some more tokens/month. For >150 users you pay $20/month/user just for access to the platform, then all tokens are billed at API rates.

Those personal plans are hard to manage. As an administrator I can't control settings across the org if everyone is on their own plan which means people may be giving sensitive code/data away to Anthropic or sketchy connectors without my knowledge.

So most businesses at least use the Anthropic Team plan, which is $25 or $125 but isn't as generous as the personal max plans. Overage is API rates. Almost all of our devs are over the allotment most months.

Side-anecdote... I have a friend in R&D at one of the big chip companies that claims he racked up a one month 20k Claude bill and has been told to step it down a notch.

Large companies can’t use those plans. The consumer or single dev plans appear highly subsidized based on the difference between rates for the same thing.

Hah I can’t imagine only using a $20/mo plan. (Robotics engineer)

I thought enterprise contracts (ie teams with >x users) offered only API prices. Am I wrong?

The enterprise cost controls that Anthropic offer are blunt, really only allowing for allow/disable specific models and a general monthly hard cap per user. No per-model spend allowance. Their "reduced cost" mode is just Sonnet on Low with no flexibility.

They are frankly reaping what they sow here, enterprises have been very clear about what controls would help us align costs, but they have been very poor at shipping features on that front.

You aren’t allowed to use the flat rates for companies, unless you’re cheating them they’ll come for you eventuallt

> The $20/mo plan ...

Is just the first hit your dealer gives away for free. Treating that as the actual baseline cost for what they need in order to justify current AI valuations requires some truly fraudulent mathematics. Hell, even the current API rates are unsustainable -as-long-as- they need to keep investing into training the next model they will be serving 6 months from now.

The plan has always been to develop these models using borrowed money, get everyone's business process addicted to them, moat off access to alternatives (e.g. chinese / foreign open-weight models), via technical superiority -or- more likely regulatory shenanigans, THEN jack the prices up through the roof starting with direct enterprise customers buying API access but then obviously bubbling down into literally every product / service every human being on this planet purchases. Unfortunately, it's a garbage plan based on a multi-ton house of cards that is about to collapse on everyone.

Yes, in industries where you have legal/regulatory/security restrictions on your data, you pretty much have to pay API rates. Furthermore, if you buy through providers like AWS Bedrock or GCP Whatever-The-Fuck-They-Renamed-Vertex-To, depending on your setup you may not benefit from the pricing on cached tokens. It can anywhere from 10x to 100x the prices you pay.

Most folks I know have companies that deploy the models via Bedrock or Azure foundry and the token cost goes against their spend with those vendors.

Anthropic forces you onto api billing for orgs above a certain size

Yes, any decent size business is paying API rates.

Enterprise plans are billed at API rates, with small discounts only if you’re quite big.

Yes, many companies have Enterprise, for SSO/SCIM, audit logs, data retention, HIPAA, support, org-wide connectors and skills, usage tracking.

That is usage based and therefore expensive.

Putting everyone on their own plan is economical, if you can give those things up.

At the enterprise level, API billing is post-paid, and a lagging indicator on an unlimited expensive resource with bureaucracy between service owner and end user is a recipe for disaster