That's not really true. Measuring the equivalent retail cost of the usage is the only way to put it in a relatable perspective.

If Anthropic had revealed their internal cost, there comments would be complaining that they were hiding something and giving useless, unrelatable data.

The expenditure is most interesting when compared to retail rates, because that's the rate the rest of us have to compare against.

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aleqs an hour ago | parent [-]

What's is the 'retail cost'? Because nobody (except total idiots) is actually paying their published API pricing.

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simonw an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Most "enterprise" companies are paying full API costs. The subscription deals are only available to consumers. If you want enterprise levels of control over how your staff are using the models you need to pay up.

	▲	eddythompson80 28 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Not even close. "enterprise" companies are negotiating contracts. Call it pre-provisioned capacity, wholesale pricing, etc. Same is true for AWS, Azure, Salesforce, or literally any SaaS provider ever. There is a reason literally every single pricing page for any SaaS provider has an "Enterprise? call us" column.

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Anon1096 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Big companies actually are paying published API rates, Anthropic and OpenAI models are desirable enough that there is very little wiggle room to negotiate. It's their way or the high way. Same with things like "safety" filters and (for Fable) mandatory data retention.