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I feel the same until I’m reminded I’m paying Anthropic $100 every month for something that’s indispensable to me now and would probably pay a lot more. Very inelastic demand as long as competition is low at the frontier.
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I pay TMobile $100 a month but they aren't worth a trillion dollars.
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Yes but Tmobile enterprise customers don't pay much more for plans. In fact, they may pay less because of volume.

However, Anthropic can and will charge much more for enterprise customers.

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Anthropic's market is global and the US is 4.5% of the worlds population. Telcos are regional.
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TMobile is effectively a monopolist in many US regions.
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Still not worth a trillion dollars.
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There are no places in the US that Tmobile is the only wireless mobile network provider. While all 3 mobile network providers have weak coverage areas, Verizon is considered to have the most reach.
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Would it still be indispensable to you if you weren't in this industry?
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Are you paying that, or is your work paying for it?

If you’re using it for personal work, why is $100 worth it?

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$100/month isn't much for developer tooling. If you add up how much I spend on hardware upgrades, other SaaS products like backup services, software licenses, and other things it's easy to justify $100/month for a powerful tool.

I pay for my own AI provider subscriptions because keeping work and personal strictly separated is important for me. I do know some people who secretly pay $200/month for Claude and use it at their job even though it's not approved. I do not recommend doing that, but it shows that some people value this for their work.

For developers earning more than $10K per month, spending less than 1% of salary on tooling to make the job easier is easy to justify.

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I too spend over $100 on drugs that make me feel productive but actually am not.
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I’ve been a copilot and ChatGPT subscriber for probably close to two years now, give or take a couple of months, and I had a trusted friend telling me for months to give Claude a try.

It took about two weeks of really running it through its paces, and constantly slamming against the limit on it to convince me I had to upgrade to at least the 100/month sub, and at this point I wouldn’t blink to bump that to the 200/month if necessary.

I 100% believe we’re in a bubble, and that this level of compute isn’t sustainable at this price point, but for as long as I have it, I’m going to run it at the redline.

I’m a solo dev working on a project that I’ve just gone full-time on, after about 1.5 years of part time work. It’s a codebase that I laid the groundwork in, and has very well established systems, standards, and constraints.

The work I’m using Claude to do is the exact work I would be doing myself, but it does it at somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-10x the pace I could have. I don’t know that I could get the same rate of production if I managed a team of 2-3 programmers. Right now, it’s literally almost perfect at taking my iterative suggestions, and implementing them at that accelerated pace.

Honestly the hardest part is dealing with the fact that at the end of the day, I have to understand this codebase perfectly (solo dev and all that), so I have to take in changes to it that are also 5-10x the rate my normal intuition would. But, again, the plus side is that it’s implementing them essentially exactly as I would have, as it has ~20k lines of code that I wrote to use as an example.

If I were to hire even one other programmer, I’d be paying well north of 5k/month, and I’d not only be managing a super computer programmer tool, but an actual human being as well. $100/month might as well be free comparatively.

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If it gets you so much value for $100/month and Anthropic still claims they have 50%+ gross margins, why do you think we are 100% in a bubble?

Doesn’t make any sense.

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>If you’re using it for personal work, why is $100 worth it?

I'm not who you were replying to, but:

My work pays for $100/mo Claude, I pay another $100 to bring it up to $200/mo level because:

    - Partly: I got in the habit back when work was only paying $20 and I was paying the $180.
    - It is not worth it to me to spend braincells trying to optimize my use to slip into the $100 plan, I give everything "Opus, effort max" and with the $200/mo plan I never run out ($100 I'll run out mid-morning).
    - I run a *lot* of experiments, including work-related and personal, to try to understand and improve my AI use skills.
    - I also use it for a lot of personal things, right now I'm using it to help me plan a backyard studio and ADU.
"ccusage" the past month says $1017.

edit: Formatting, ccusage

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I think a lot of people suspect that, but no one is able to help themselves. Manias are a feature/bug of humanity.
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It's an actual bubble specific to AI. This investment is just another example of the bubble. Pre-2008, all the investment would be coming from banks. Post-2008, all the investment came from VCs... but VCs got tapped out, so AI companies went to bigger private capital. They tapped out all the private capital. So now they're making the rounds, making deals with any corporations left with tens/hundreds of billions in cash, because they're the only possible investors left. When all of them are tapped out, and without a release of pressure from the hardware market, the only investor left will be the government. After that it's kaplooie.

You'll notice that all the really big deals have fallen through, because they're based on promises and meeting objectives that can't be met. So it's likely that there will be really big writeoffs but not a huge implosion like 2001/2008. The real losers will be the retail investors who put all their money in a handful of stocks at ridiculous valuations.

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Which big deals have fallen through?
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"Nvidia’s $100 billion OpenAI deal has seemingly vanished" https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/02/five-...

"Disney cancels $1B deal with OpenAI after video platform Sora is shut down: 'The future is human'" https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/disney...

And if I recall correctly the AI datacenter deal isn'tdoing Oracle stock any favours.

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I've got two max 20 plans and totally get value from it.
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How does that work? Are you using separate accounts? Do you just max out one of them and then switch to the other one?

We need to run a SotA coding agent basically 24/7 uninterrupted and so far we didn’t find an easy solution for this (you can get provisioned TPUs for Gemini on GCP but it costs a fortune).

Surely that’s possible for under $5k a month? $10k?

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Actually no. I think we're just getting started.
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It's a mathematical reality rather than 'feeling'. It has become that a few years ago. It becomes even more serious when you consider that the Chinese models are just as good, and they are being just given away to run locally like Deepseek.

Why should anyone feed the SV AI bubble if they can just use cheap Chinese models, even locally if they want to...

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x oil shock (due to Ormuz).
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