I don't get how this is such a common issue. Are companies paying API rates for devs? The $20/mo plan pretty much works fine for most people at my company
Anything above that requires an Enterprise plan, which is billed at API rates.
But I wonder whether the cost shown to us is what the company actually pays? Pretty sure finance would have written a discount which is not shown to employees to keep us in check.
My hearts says that's what going on but ... does someone know?
Anecdotally, I know that quite a number of people at my company (mid-sized, ~5000 employees) have personal ChatGPT or Anthropic subscriptions they are using. Despite the fact that we have Microsoft Copilot (the web version) for everyone, and Github Copilot (the CLI thing) with low limits (500-1900 credits/month) for people who can justify it. But Copilot isn't all that great compared to Claude Code, so a lot of people continue to use their personal account.
It violates a number of policies and is probably a firing offense, but I haven't heard of anyone getting nailed for it yet. And I know that line managers are aware of it happening.
I do wish they'd just let us buy Claude Code API access. Copilot w/Opus 5.5 is noticably worse than CC using the same model. But oh well, I'm not getting fired over it.
IP and trade secret protection?
Enterprise sales are where the revenue for the $1T valuations comes from. If they were forced by competition to offer subscriptions to all those organizations, they'd blow up tomorrow.
My personal ChatGPT account is a Business account with 2 seats at $30/ea (minimum 2 seats required).
Why? Because for $60 you get ChatGPT Pro, significantly cheaper than the $100 normally required for the next level personal plan!
So most businesses at least use the Anthropic Team plan, which is $25 or $125 but isn't as generous as the personal max plans. Overage is API rates. Almost all of our devs are over the allotment most months.
I really don't understand why so many people seemingly use the bigger plans. Are people just running opus 5.5 as 4+ subagents 24/7?
In order for me to actually understand what's being done, I always keep it brief and use specific prompts (and usually use smaller models since they're perfect for that). Do people just let "claude take the wheel"?
When you have to go in to your next standup and explain what your code does to your boss, and what you've done since the last meeting, what do you say?
You say the same thing to your boss as if you were a lead or manager reporting on a project that your junior and mid-level devs are working on. "What" is the easy part to explain; "how" is the details that your manager doesn't need to hear about if you're doing your job properly.
I hand them a writeup of how incorporating agentic decision making into cleaning up some of our messy data saved us $XXX,XXX at a cost of $XX of tokens, with the receipts attached.
I use Claude mainly via Webinterface and when on Opus 4.8 or higher, I reach my weakly limit around 2 - 3 days before rest - and Im just prompting single/specific very limited & constrained classes & functions with proper description and architecture upfront.
Yes, I'd wager most people just let "claude take the wheel".
> When you have to go in to your next standup and explain what your code does to your boss, and what you've done since the last meeting, what do you say?
You say "Claude, I've got a standup in 10 min, give me a high level summary for my boss of everything you did since the last standup" and then you read that lol.
> I want you to look for UI issues related to transitions. Look for jumps, reverts, or anything that doesn't follow UI/UX best practices. You might need to figure out how best to even record and review UI transitions. Do all testing locally on a local dev server, but make sure to undo any database changes you make in the process of testing. Be exhaustive and report back with an .html report that highlights the visual issues and proposed solutions so I can review each one. Ultracode on.
Which means I have up to 10 Opus 5.5 medium agents running concurrently for long stretches of time.
I want to be clear I don't think that using Claude in this way gets you the best possible results. But when the app is fully vibecoded then audit prompts like the one above can be seen as a definite net positive. Making Claude think really hard about various improvement routines will get you better results in that one aspect than Claude's first attempt to build something from scratch did.
You can build a lot of stuff this way. You can also waste it. You need good people who will use it well and usefully.
They are frankly reaping what they sow here, enterprises have been very clear about what controls would help us align costs, but they have been very poor at shipping features on that front.
Is just the first hit your dealer gives away for free. Treating that as the actual baseline cost for what they need in order to justify current AI valuations requires some truly fraudulent mathematics. Hell, even the current API rates are unsustainable -as-long-as- they need to keep investing into training the next model they will be serving 6 months from now.
The plan has always been to develop these models using borrowed money, get everyone's business process addicted to them, moat off access to alternatives (e.g. chinese / foreign open-weight models), via technical superiority -or- more likely regulatory shenanigans, THEN jack the prices up through the roof starting with direct enterprise customers buying API access but then obviously bubbling down into literally every product / service every human being on this planet purchases. Unfortunately, it's a garbage plan based on a multi-ton house of cards that is about to collapse on everyone.
That is usage based and therefore expensive.
Putting everyone on their own plan is economical, if you can give those things up.
The problem is we now have a two tier infrastructure where some teams get Claude and some get Gemini and IT has so support both.
Sure it might be work to set up the first subcompanies, but once you have that can't you just replace the company name in all the legal texts? Also I think large companies already do have tons of subcompanies, so I guess that cost already got paid?
> And simply faking many 149-employee LLCs while not having them actually be real entities is both unlikely to succeed
You do not need to fake it, you can just rent it?
(Also, I don't know about other countries but the IRS would have some questions for you after a few years of running a corp that doesn't appear to actually do anything).
I actually believed that having a ton of subcompanies, IS already how any larger company operates.
The reason _some_ (but certainly not all, or even the majority) large companies break up into subsidiaries is usually for liability purposes (so one mistake by one part of the conglomerate can't expose other parts to the full risk).