Or the fixed cost plans reflect the real cost and the people paying API prices give them the profit.
Anyway, none of my customers will let me bill them $1500 more (about $75 per day) because I'm using AI. And what for? I'm not working to move money from the pockets of my customers to the pockets of AI companies.
If plans were at cost and API pricing was marked up that would mean there’s a 90%+ profit margin on tokens and instead of raising money and talking about revenue, Anthropic and OpenAI would be talking about their obscene profits.
[1] the caveat is that the average plan user probably doesn’t use all of their quota, I guess maybe 30% is the average across all users.
The fact that Anthropic is rumoured to have a profitable quarter indicates that their margins on API priced inference are very strong.