So this pricing is just completely outside of our economics and nobody I know would pay that, no company will justify spending $20k/month when they can hire 10 more developers instead.
It is very interesting unfolding of events. Can't wrap my head around it completely.
* Average software dev salary in Q12026: 4945€ / month [1]
* Total cost for the employer: 6616.41€ [2]
For $20k/month, you'd get 2 x full time mid-level developers + 1x junior dev or QA.
So the calculation becomes: which option can produce better results for your specific use-case, "you + Fable" or "you + 2x mid-level developers + 1x QA". (and from personal experience, mid-level in Estonia = senior dev in the US, in terms of skillset and experience.. but YMMV)
(Of course that's simplified. Your full time devs need _some_ level of AI subscription as well + hardware so add a couple of hundred to their salary per month etc so you might only be able to afford 2x mid level devs, instead of 2.5)
(Our team spend on AI devtools comes out to around $1500/person/mo)
This is a good start, but the calculation doesn't include office space and overhead (for every 100 developers there is maybe 5-10 support staff to cover the additional legal / administrative, and don't forget the extra cost in supervisor time to manage them)
Hitting the first calculator I found gave me 50 kSEK costs 69 kSEK. So far from double nowadays.
I understand pension contributions, but what are the other "hidden" costs that could equal the net salary?
The employer pays £6k for National Insurance (atop the employee's NI contributions). Pension: 2-3k. Apprenticeship levy is £300. 3yr-amortised recruitment fee is £4000. Hardware costs: £1000. Office space £5000. Software/tools: £2500. Benefits: £1500. Training: £1000. Other admin overheads £500.
You pay that person for ~250 working-days, but they only attend for ~220, due to annual leave and sick pay, so you get around £62k worth of attendance out of that person in exchange for £70k, of which the employee sees £35k.
This is not visible on your payslip, i.e. if you earn 5k€ brutto, the employer has to pay these shares on top of that.
There is plenty to improve with the system but to call it „retarded“ considering how much good it has brought to the world seems quite wrong to me. I don’t want to work in the pre-Bismarck era
So your "£50k" salary actually costs your employer £56,750, and that's before all the other expenses mentioned elsewhere in this thread such as hardware, office rent etc.
one big enough to license the model and self host on existing infra.
All of the above, of course, depends upon Fable consistently being a 2x-3x SWE at minimum.
It imitates applying knowledge. The imitation may be uncanny, but assigning LLMs intentionality and ToM is a category error.
By analogy, consider that many have referred to classical, deterministic computing as some kind of "thinking" for the last half century+. Does this stop being kosher when the computer has an uncanny propensity for human language? Perhaps, but the computer is still clearly chewing through problems that would have required a lot of human thinking (e.g., arithmetic) in ages past.
I haven't seen any genuine proposals for words to replace the human mind analogues, let alone proposals that the anglosphere would plausibly adopt en masse.
This is not correct. LLMs interpolate in a high dimensional space, so you're actually composing the best matches in a compressed corpus to find novel points/paths in that space. That is problem solving.
Depends entirely on the domain. If you're selling entreprise software, this kind of stuff barely matters for sales.
It can reduce operational costs which is good but there's a limit to how much that's worth.
This means if the deepseek / under 1k alternative is at least x1.2 improvement, fable needs to be x24, which I think is very2 unreasonable. It is possible for it to worth if it can x2 a $20k SWE, though I doubt it can do that.
LlMs are incredible don’t get me wrong, but they are good on tiny contexts (writing a script). Not on software engineering (adding features to Chrome).
Claude keeps telling me this when I argue with it. LMAO.
Our top user is at 10k a month, but the next highest is $2,000.
I would say the average is around $1,000-$1,500 for a developer.
We have completely unrestricted access to Claude, Codex, and Cursor.
Funny enough, the guy spending 10k is not even a dev by trade but an SME in what we work on that just vibe codes apps and somehow has not been cut off yet lol.
I have a single thread of GPT 5.5 medium running basically all work hours and I am around $1,500 a month in spend on Enterprise pricing.
I’ve heard of a few cases of devs racking up bills fast, but it has typically been due to inefficient context usage. Like they just have one super long session with Opus 1M and are getting killed with input token costs and cache misses.
With careful context management and some thought into good approaches to problems, I have personally only rarely even hit $1k in regular use.
I'm guessing he's producing pretty valuable work. We have a few SMEs that vibe code tons of stuff with Claude. The only thing they really need tech for anymore is deployment and helping get their wheels unstuck on occasion.
Multiply this times many, many companies, and you can see how providing AI could theoretically be a good business to be in. Margins may be tight, though.
Also -- I'm convinced someone will figure out more use cases beyond software programming, which will result in many more companies spending $1k+ per employee per month.
It remains to be seen how much of this is a bubble.
I was about to say that. Deepseek is just magnitudes cheaper and absolutely good enough for most things. Anthropic and co just try to milk the cow while its possible. If they cant compete with Deepseek pricing I do not see a bright future for them.
No it doesn’t and will not be. Companies have not realised the cost yet, wait till the end of the financial year and you’ll see a different direction.
DeepSeek v4 is pretty decent, and probably on par with sonnet. I see a future of hybrid models where opus or fable might be used only for complicated features or bugs, but general day to day would be DeepSeek or whatever good models that will be released later.
So what keeps your management from just buying everyone individual flat-rate Max subscriptions, or at least buying them for the users responsible for the sky-high token invoices?
I see a lot of comments like this but I don't understand why some people willingly pay so much more than others for the exact same service. What are you getting that I don't get as a $100/mo Max subscriber?
That's enough to buy a house in my country...
With that said, I still had the Pro plan on Claude, I didn't expect much, but it blew up my 5h allowance on Fable with one simple single prompt, and it didn't even complete lmao
Companies have to pay monthly for the harness app (codex, claude code) and the tokens are priced separately based on standard API pricing.
So Fable is just not usable for $20 plan and barely usable for $100 plan.
- They learn the domain of your product, which means long term ownership and knowledge establishes itself. If you've only ever shipped SaaS slop, you might not know, but lots of companies are solving real world problems that have no better solution. Owning and understanding the code and the domain is key.
- They will learn from their mistakes (no LLM does this).
- Human skill is a REAL moat. Once you build a team that fully understands and is skilled in the domain you work in, these people are going to be the thing that sets you apart. If some of them are particularly social or charming, let them sit in with you for meetings and watch them provide loads of value, for no added cost.
- If Claude or OpenAI is down, they will continue thinking. In fact, they will continue thinking even when off the clock! This is a neat little hack called "consciousness" where you get a lot of work for free!
- You can hire people who punch above their weight; not everyone you hire needs to be a 500k/year staff software prime engineer of doom, you can just spend some time and effort to hire good juniors/competent mediors who will think for themselves (gasp!) and get work done.
- You still get ALL THE BENEFITS OF AI!!!! They can use AI just like you can, or better!
- You get people who you can brainstorm with, which is distinctly different from LLMs because your employees are less likely to want to suck you dry in every sentence just to make sure you spend more tokens. Employees don't care if you love them, they care about the quality of their work if you manage them correctly and reward that.
- They are quite loyal if you treat them right; spend a little more on their well-being, and they will stick around, come in to work every day and deliver cool things with you.
- Humans can only manage, review and give tasks to so many agents. If you add more humans, you can handle more agents.
An expensive LLM and a lot of extra tooling gets you some of this, yes, but not all of it. With humans you can still do the expensive LLM and extra tooling if you end up making enough money anyway.
- AI isn't bound by need for rest, vacations, sick days, or labor laws
- AI doesn't bounce from company to company, taking your business knowledge with it (actually this isn't technically true based on the practices of AI companies, but that's not a technical requirement)
- AI doesn't join a union and stop work in demand for higher pay or workers rights
This is what CEOS and capitalists are thinking. For capital, the best outcome is to not have any labor at all. And if you can do that when your competitors can't, then you have a huge market advantage. (Slop notwithstanding)
I'm not saying this is a "good thing" but this is what drives the market. Less labor revenue in the long term and money printing machines.