Comment by Terretta

Comment by Terretta a day ago

As a user of Claude Code via API (the expensive way), Anthrophic's "huge mistake" is capping monthly spend (billed in advance and pay as you go some $500 - $1500 at a time, by credit card) at just $5,000 a month.

It's a supposedly professional tool with a value proposition that requires being in your work flow. Are you going to keep using a power drill on your construction site that bricks itself the last week or two of every month?

An error message says contact support. They then point you to an enterprise plan for 150 seats when you have only a couple dozen devs. Note that 5000 / 25 = 200 ... coincidence? Yeah, you are forbidden to give them more than Max-like $200/dev/month for the usage-based API that's "so expensive".

They are literally "please don't give us money any more this month, thanks".

johnpaulkiser 20 hours ago

This sounds like a stop loss? Are they losing money per token even through the api?

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Terretta 15 hours ago

Sure does.
I imagine a combination of stop loss and market share. If larger shops use up compute, you can't capture as many customers by headcount.
// There was a figure around o3, an astonishing model punching far above the weights (ahem) of models that came after, that suggested the thinkiest mode cost on the order of $3500 to do a deep research. Perhaps OpenAI can afford that, while Anthropic can't.

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bodge5000 4 hours ago

That leads to the obvious question; is the API next on the chopping block? Or would they just increase the API pricing to a point where they are A) making profit off it and B) nobody would use the API just for a different client?

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- theshrike79 3 hours ago
  
  I'm pretty sure everyone is pricing their APIs to break-even, maybe profit if people use caching properly (like GPT-5 can do if you mark the prompts properly)
  
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notahacker 20 hours ago

Sounds plausible they're not really making any. Arbitrary and inflexible pricing policies aren't unusual, but it sounds easy enough for a new rapidly-growing company to let the account managers decide which companies they might have a chance of upselling 150 seat enterprise licenses to and just bill overage for everyone else...

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