I spent $200. If I had been paying API pricing it would have been $2,180.16. The article is about how enterprise customers get charged API pricing, which means if I had been employed by one of those companies I would have cost them $2,180.16.
What am I missing?
We have no market convergence on tokens yet (and it'll differ between LLMs), so it's impossible to say what value you got for your $200.
You seem to be suggesting the price of tokens is entirely disconnected to the cost of providing the service? I don't see much basis for that assumption.
The point being made above is that API pricing is calculated... somehow... seemingly arbitrarily. Possibly untethered to the infrastructure costs entirely: which would be the basis of any 'value', however that holds the labor theory of value, which isn't accurate either. So how do you accurately price these tokens at all (other than through price-discovery: which is slow, messy and fuzzy)?
Like anything else in the economy: at the point where enough customers can pay you, and not enough will go to the cheaper competition.
Also, to just color in the picture here, as I haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere, there is a very large Saas company at the moment who has given everyone unlimited tokens on Claude. And they have a dashboard showing who spends the most. So the "budget" went from about USD500 per per person (split between Claude and cursor) in Jan to... Well a soft limit of USD100k... Per month... Per person.
People can still see the top line sticker price on their spend, but honestly I can't believe that the Saas is paying that full price when the invoice comes in.
That said, there are some finance reports which are probably dropping soon where we will find out!
I shared that assumption until yesterday, when I found out that it wasn't holding for LLM pricing from OpenAI and Anthropic. That's what inspired me to write this piece.
I think those token leaderboards are an obviously terrible idea and will go extinct very quickly now that people are paying attention to costs.
Could be fantastic for small shops while it lasts. The big guys have to pay 10x for precious tokens.
your point is large players won't pay those prices at massive volume. ok
As with pretty much anything priced on volume/usage.
Enterprise deals are negotiated ad-hoc, the listed pricing is simply a jumping off point for the final negotiated discount.
If you’re going to give 20,000 employees Claude code you are not going to be spending $1B per year on Anthropic tokens as if you gave everyone an individual API key. Just as Anthropic isn’t paying AWS SES $10,000,000 to send 1 email update to their massive user base when the next Claude version drops.
Going to be interesting to determing the metrics we give to engineers for determining whether the spend on this is worth it. Measuring PRs, lines of code committed, commits fully generated by agentic workflows, etc.....
Do you have any numbers or reports to back that up?
edit: I missed the "enterprise" feature matrix with the usual audit/compliance stuff to force the biggest enterprise customers onto enterprise plans. Otherwise the "teams" plan is much better value for any business.
orig-continued:
https://claude.com/pricing/team
Teams premium is "Everything in standard, plus more usage*"
And from my experience, it's a very generous usage, I've only hit the limits once or twice, and both times required multi-boxing agents.
I could single-window agentic development all day on opus-4.7 auto-mode without hitting limits.
If you're a business using claude, then that seems like the right plan, the enteprise/API plan seems more suited to where your product is built on top of the agent themselves, so seats/limits aren't really meaningful?
Yes, value is hard to calculate, but luckily market pricing mechanisms exist exactly for this purpose. There isn't a better number to use than what people are willing to pay for them.
So he's saying that on an enterprise plan, he'd be spending $2,180.16. He's not paying that much, but enterprises are.