Opus 5.5: $4/$20

Deepseek 4.1: $0.02/$0.60

Just to illustrate how cheap the Corolla is in your analogy. Also Opus output would be $50 without competition.

I suspect most people in this position would be using the subscriptions, though.

A $20 Anthropic subscription is $500+ equivalent of API credit. You can build quite a lot on the $20 plan and get to use the best model.

Their API pricing has healthy margins built in.