> At some point they're going to drop the real prices in your lab and you're going to have to figure out how to pay that much or pay someone else a lot less.

This only applies under the assumption that everyone tokenmaxxes their subscription.

I have visibility across a few different Claude team subscriptions. I'd say roughly 10% of people max their subscriptions.

I think I've only seen one organization where the under-used subs don't more than pay for the tokenmaxxed ones.

And that is ignoring the 90% margin that API inference runs at.

It's not obvious the subsidization will end. Loss leaders are a thing. Most enterprise at this point are paying API pricing

To better predict what they'll do with it we'd need to know the proportion of token usage via API vs subscription. Keeping an affordable, slightly unprofitable subscription to get people in isn't a bad idea. They also get marketing benefits from the word of mouth

> At some point they're going to drop the real prices in your lab

The real price for tokens at a specific level of intelligence is dropping rapidly. Between models improving and new hardware getting faster, I think prices will be going down, not up.

> Better to get a handle on it now.

I experiment with a lot of providers and models. I strongly disagree that anyone needs to start migrating now in preparation for prices maybe going up in the future.

It doesn’t make sense. Deal with a price increase when it happens, if it does.

Switching models and providers isn’t some huge lift. I can jump to a new model or even hardness and get a feel for it in a day or two. It’s not some huge undertaking that requires preparation and planning.

If prices go up, try something at that point in time. Don’t worry about it until then.

>At some point they're going to drop the real prices in your lab and you're going to have to figure out how to pay that much or pay someone else a lot less. Better to get a handle on it now.

So just wait until that happens? What's the point of scrimping and saving now? Not to mention you're paying for a premium in the meantime.

(meta commentary) really gnarly word choice: "drop" in "they're going to drop the real prices in your lab"?

I took your meaning as "they're gonna drop [a bad surprise on you by raising] the real prices"... so at least it's not quite as tortured as the ambiguous "support for version N dropped today" (where you often can't even infer the direction from context).

this isn't just a tangent, I'm having trouble understanding the point you're trying to make, which hinges entirely on deciding if you meant "drop" literally

Personally at home I use the free github copilot and then openrouter when that runs out. Last month I used $0.90 of openrouter. Zero so far this month. When my bill starts hitting double digits I'll consider options.

Different matter at work but even there we are paying for API costs and have a monthly allowance (starts at $200/month but increases fairly easy to get)

This is true for pretty much every fixed price subscription service in existence

I honestly feel a bit worried Anthropic/OpenAI are going to drop me since I consistently hit my limits

It's weird to me how often this analogy gets used because:

1. In most cases, like this one, the product isn't heroin.

2. Drug dealers don't actually do that.

Another way to look at it is they are running a business. It's not even close to gambling for example.