The article fails to mention DeepSeek, Alibaba, Qwen, Xiaomi, MiMo, z.ai, or GLM. It's hard to take such an article seriously that doesn't do this. (Our monthly total spend is around $180 with a team of 6, about half technical; our biggest line items are for American models or subscriptions which we probably will be planning to get rid of.)

And then remarks like this:

  Anthropic, OpenAI and Microsoft have all now transitioned customers from subscriptions to token-based pricing.

Huh? I use OpenAI via a subscription, as is anyone else using GPT-5.5-Pro who isn't a multimillionaire.

▲ jwolfe 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They're referring to Enterprise customers, though should have been clear about it. Enterprise plans on Claude for example no longer include any baseline tokens. It's 100% usage based pricing.

	▲	trollbridge 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		True, but my friends in Enterprise still just purchase Claude Code subs and expense them. They basically get an allowance of $500 or so per month to buy various tools, and of course are banned from Chinese models. (Claude, Codex, Antigravity allowed, basically.)

▲ junior44660 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Our monthly total spend is around $180 with a team of 6, about half technical; our biggest line items are for American models or subscriptions which we probably will be planning to get rid of.)

Please tell more :). Do you pay per token from bedrock / openrouter / somewhere else? How many tokens you use over the month, and how many for each task? Which harnesses?

▲

trollbridge 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Pay for DeepSeek directly. One developer insists on having his own account and in theory expenses it, but he forgets to turn in $10 expense reports. (Total spend in last two months = about $45.)

Pay for OpenAI Pro directly, but I’m the only guy that uses Codex. $100 a month. My nontechnical partner likes to talk to ChatGPT 5.5 Pro for image related tasks (think generating interior decorating pics).

The nontechnical staff use a Gemini account on a Google family AI Pro sub. I use Antigravity when working on Android or Google Cloud API codebases.

Everyone gets OpenCode Go. The cost is trivial. $10 a month per person.

Pay for MiMo directly. We use it during Chinese off peak hours though. Total spend so far $25 in last month.

We run a few Qwen models locally and pretty much have them pegged all day. RTX 5090 on a PC and a Mac Studio.

There’s also Grok which is used for Imagine for artistic / graphic design related work. I also use the subscription for a vision model in my oh-my-pi harness.

We’re having discussions about how to pull in GLM-5.2 cost effectively. We compete with third world development shops so we can’t really pass on inference costs, but we can benefit from getting jobs done for customers faster. But ⅔ of our work is either internal or open source projects we can’t bill for.

▲

stavros 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not the GP, but I use Opus for planning, Deepseek for actual coding (implementing the plan) and GPT for review. GPT is inexhaustible on the $20/mo plan, Deepseek is dirt cheap (maybe $10/mo) and Claude is Claude.

▲

junior44660 5 hours ago | parent [-]

GP is talking about API / token-based prices, that's why I asked.

▲

stavros 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't know, he said "subscriptions" in the line items, but eg I use Deepseek via the API.

	▲	junior44660 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ah maybe you're right. I can manage this budget with the chinese models in AWS BedRock. However, in my experience, they aren't as good as claude today.

▲ cdata 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think the author is referring to enterprise customers. You aren't the "customer" in this case; you're the bait.

How do you know that the other models you are referring to aren't subsidized?

	▲	skeledrew 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Subsidizing makes no sense when there's no - possibility of a - moat. Although it's very possible that China in general subsidizes Chinese labs in some way so they maintain pressure on US labs. But you only have to look at proxies such as OpenRouter to see that the individuals aren't doing any subsidizing on per token costs.