Hacker News Reader

Comment by gbear605 | Hacker News Reader

Because Claude Code is not a profitable business, it's a loss leader to get you to use the rest of their token inference business. If you were to pay for Claude Code by using the normal API, it would be at least 5x the cost, if not more.

View on HN

source: pulled out of your a**

he may not be entirely correct, but Claude Code plans are significantly better than the API plan, 100$ plan may not be as cost effective but for 18$ you can get like 5x usage of the API plan.

I've seen dozens of "experts" all over the internet claim that they're "subsidizing costs" with the coding plans despite no evidence whatsoever. Despite the fact that various sources from OpenAI, Deepseek, model inference providers have suggested the contrary, that inference is very profitable with very high margins.

How am I gonna give you exact price savings, when on $18 amount of work you can do it is variable, while $100 on API only goes a limited amount. You can exhaust $100 on API in one work day easily. On $18 plan the limit resets daily or 12hrs, so you can keep coming back. If API pricing is correct, which it looks like because all top models have similar costs, then it is to believe that monthly plans are subsidised.

And if inference is so profitable why is OpenAI losing 100B a year

Just looking at my own usage at work, we’re spending around $50/day on OpenAI API credits (with Codex). With Claude Code I get higher usage limits for $200/month, or around $8/day. Probably the equivalent from OpenAI is around $100/day of API credits.

Maybe OpenAI has a 12x markup on API credits, or Anthropic is much better at running inference, but my best guess is that Anthropic is selling at a large loss.

You can't be comparing OpenAI API with Anthropic subscription. The comparison here is OpenAI Codex subscription with Anthropic subscription. And when you do that, it turns out that the Codex limits are a lot higher for the same price. So then if Anthropic is selling at a large loss, OpenAI is selling at an even much bigger one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com