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But then you pay for the less outrageously subsidized rates of API instead of the a bit less incredibly generous prices of the subscription.
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Its not subsidized, in fact, they probably have very healthy margins on Claude Code.
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Yeah. If you ignore the negligible fact that some investor may want a return on all that money that is going into capex I am pretty sure you can, Enron style, get to the conclusion that any of those companies have “healthy” margins.
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Why do you think that?
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DeepSeek had a theoretical profit margin of 545 % [1] with much inferior GPUs at 1/60th the API price.

Anthropic's Opus 4.6 is a bit bigger, but they'd have to be insanely incompetent to not make a profit on inference.

[1] https://github.com/deepseek-ai/open-infra-index/blob/main/20...

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> they'd have to be insanely incompetent to not make a profit on inference.

Are you aware of how many years Amazon didn’t turn a profit?

Not agreeing with the tactic - just…are you aware of it?

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Because if you don't then current valuations are a bublle propped inflated by burning a mountain of cash.
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That's not how valuations work. A company's valuation is typically based on an NPV (net present value) calculation, which is a power series of its time-discounted future cash flows. Depending on the company's strategy, it's often rational for it to not be profitable for quite a long while, as long as it can give investors the expectation of significant profitability down the line.

Having said that, I do think that there is an investment bubble in AI, but am just arguing that you're not looking at the right signal.

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And that's OpenAI's biz model? :)
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Remember there are no moats in this industry - if anything one company might have a 2 month lead, sometimes. We've also noticed that companies paying OpenAI may swiftly shift to paying Google or Anthropic in a heartbeat.

That means the pricing is going to be competitive. You may still get your wish though, but instead of the price of an engineer remaining the same, it will cut itself down by 95%.

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I don't know about you, but I benefit so much from using Claude at work that I would gladly pay $80,000-$120,000 per year to keep using it.
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Why would you gladly pay more than what it's worth? It's not an engineer you are hiring, it's AI. The whole point of it was to make intelligent workflows cheaper. If it's going to cost as much as an engineer, hire the engineer, at least you'd have an escape goat when things invariably go wrong.
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> an escape goat

Autocorrect hall of famer, there.

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Scapegoat, got it. Can't blame the autocorrect though... I honestly thought it was spelled like that, which is a shame since I've been studying English my entire life as a second language.
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There's a name for this sort of phenomenon...

https://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/242/escape-goat/

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At least that misunderstanding didn’t cause a nuclear accident: https://practical.engineering/blog/2025/4/15/when-kitty-litt...
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Luckily these strayed goats weren't irradiated
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I agree with you, I was just joking.
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Oh now I see... Joke's on me then I guess :D
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It wasn't clear to me that this was a joke either. I assume the same for others since the post is grayed out.
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Oh come on. That pays for more than 10 fte in some countries
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I made this joke with "$1,500-$2000 per month" last night and everyone thought I was serious
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I know people who burned several hundreds a day and still were finding it worth it.
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Were they actually making money though? A lot of the people on the forefront of this AI stuff seem like cult leaders and crackheads to me.
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I'd pay up to $1000 pretty easily just based off the time it saves me personally from a lot of grindy type work which frees me up for more high value stuff.

It's not 10x by any means but it doesn't need to be at most dev salaries to pay for itself. 1.5x alone is probably enough of an improvement for most >jr developers for a company to justify $1000/month.

I suppose if your area of responsibility wasn't very broad the value would decrease pretty quickly so maybe less value for people at very large companies?

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I can see $200 but $1,000 per month seems crazy to me.

Using Claude Code for one year is worth the same as a used sedan (I.E., ~$12,000) to you?

You could be investing that money!

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Yes, easily. Paying for Claude would be investing that money. Assuming 10% return which would be great I'd make an extra $1200 a year investing it. I'm pretty sure over the course of a year of not having to spend time doing low value or repetitive work I can increase productivity enough to more than cover the $13k difference. Developer work scales really well so removing a bunch of the low end and freeing up time for the more difficult problems is going to return a lot of value.
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I would probably pay $2000 a month if I had to - it's a small fraction of my salary, and the productivity boost is worth it.
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It's *worth it* when you're salaried? Compared to investing the money? Do you plan to land a very-high-paying executive role years down the line? Are you already extremely highly paid? Did Claude legitimately 10x your productivity?

edit: Fuck I'm getting trolled

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I'm serious - the productivity boost I'm getting from using AI models is so significant, that it's absolutely worth paying even 2k/month. It saves me a lot of time, and enables me to deliver new features much faster (making me look better for my employer) - both of which would justify spending a small fraction of my own money. I don't have to, because my employer pays for it, but as I said, if I had to, I would pay.
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I am not paying this myself, but the place I work at is definitely paying around 2k a month for my Claude Code usage. I pay 2 x 200, for my personal projects.

I think personal subs are subsidized while corporate ones definitely not. I have CC for my personal projects running 16h a day with multiple instances, but work CC still racks way higher bills with less usage. If I had to guess my work CC is using 4x as little for 5x the cost so at least 20x difference.

I am not going to say it has 10xed or whatever with my productivity, but I would have never ever in that timeframe built all those things that I have now.

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I don't know why you keep insisting that no one is making any money off of this. Claude Code has made me outrageously more productive. Time = Money right?
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What do you use it for, do you have example? For you to be ok with paying 80k to 120k I'm guessing its making you 375-450k a year?
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I'm joking, my point is that it's already quite expensive and I don't think it's making anyone money.
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that means customers will pay minimum 2x that much I think
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STFU right now because the more you bring this up the more likely it'll happen.

Similarly, STFU about the stuff that can give LLMs ideas for how to harm us (you know what I'm talking about, it's reptilian based)

The whole comment thread is likely to have been read by some folks at Anthropic. Already a disaster. Just keep on with the "we hate it unless it gets cheaper" discourse please!!!

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