He's saying he's getting a great deal...a token from Opus on Claude code is the same as a token from Opus on the API. I remain as confused as Simon. He's not talking about "here's the ROI I got from my $100 subscription" it's "here's how much I saved from getting the monthly subscription instead of sending things through an API".

No, value is determined by what participants in a market are willing to pay for something. The only reason you are able to say that the value of gold is determined by its weight is that gold is a commodity and no matter what you paid for it you'll find others willing to pay market price.

Simon is saying that companies are (today) willing to pay API prices for tokens which is as good as any determination of value.

> Just because API pricing would've been $2180.16 doesn't mean that's the value of those tokens.

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.

That doesn't seem to be the case. From what I've seen enterprise deals get API pricing now. Have you seen evidence that's not true?

And "large" just means that AWS will assign an account manager to talk with you. I was at a start-up who spent $300k/year on AWS and that was enough to get special attention and discounts. Enterprise pricing is confusing.

The point is that those a real prices real people are paying for real API usage. it's not made up.

your point is large players won't pay those prices at massive volume. ok

Claude is so in demand at the moment that there aren't really volume discounts. Anthropic sets the terms and you either accept them or get lost they have that much of a lead (mindshare/desirability wise).

> So how do you accurately price these tokens at all

Like anything else in the economy: at the point where enough customers can pay you, and not enough will go to the cheaper competition.

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This isn't true at the moment, though. So far there hasn't been the negotiating power. What happens is you end up capping usage for employees at a fixed amount. I think eventually, prices will come down and there will be discounts, but for enterprise accounts at least of our size (<5000), we're paying almost 100% retail, which kind of sucks, because it's expensive, and pretty easy to burn $50 to $100+ in a day, if you're not careful. In fact we got pushed off the former plan to the token-utility one at the last contract negotiation.

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.....

> API pricing drops DRAMATICALLY in enterprise agreements

Do you have any numbers or reports to back that up?

> Just as Anthropic isn’t paying AWS SES $10,000,000 to send 1 email update

How much do you think emails cost? That number is just so far off?

But besides that, running SES is also quite a bit cheaper than SOTA ai models with high demand (and comparatively) no competition. And quite a bit more pressure to make money (soon).

Claude Teams and Claude Enterprise are 2 distinct plans. Simon is right that Enterprise seats have no included usage (and so all usage is charged at API billing rates), whereas Teams seats do.