> The reason gyms can offer flat-rate pricing is that they bet on under-utilization, not that costs are flat.

Yes. In fact i remember hearing about a gym which offered a flat-rate pricing model but explicitly excluded certain professions from partaking in it. I remember the deal was excluding police, bouncers, models, actors and air stewardesses. They had a separate more costly tier for these people. (And I think i heard about it from the indignation the deal has caused online.)

>You can't use the gym model to defend Anthropic's pricing decisions if the two cost structures are nothing alike.

Am I? I think you read something into my comments that I didn't write.

> Under-utilizers aren't paying for AI they have a free tier.

Sure they do. Free tiers suck. I may not always need to use AI, but when I need it, I don't want to immediately get hit by stupidly low quotas and rate limits, or get anything but SOTA models.