$1500/mth is token pricing.

Your other plans are fixed price with rate limits where you get more tokens than the dollar equivalent you pay monthly. These plans are economical only if majority of users spend less tokens in $ than the plan's costs. This subsidizes the gap vs. power users who spend multiple k$ monthly in API tokens.

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flyinglizard 10 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yea, I’m sure the personal plans are subsidized. I have $200 Claude Max at home and straight API pricing at work and equivalent work would easily cost me 5x if not more on the API.

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pmontra 10 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Your other plans are fixed price with rate limits where you get more tokens than the dollar equivalent you pay monthly.

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.

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fontain 9 days ago | parent [-]

No, we know from the financials of these companies that API prices are close to being at cost and the individual developer plans are heavily subsidized (because they are roughly 10% of API cost per token[1]).

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.

	▲	sothatsit 9 days ago \| parent [-]
		This completely ignores all the other huge costs the AI labs are paying in data center builds, researcher salaries, experiments, and training models. The fact that Anthropic is rumoured to have a profitable quarter indicates that their margins on API priced inference are very strong.

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kingstnap 10 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Next to no one would be using less than the subscription price given how expensive Opus API is.