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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

I just assume that they realized that they can split the offering, and to charge for the top tier more. (Yes, even more.)

If Claude Code can replace an engineer, it should cost just a bit less than an engineer, not half as much.

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Remember there are no moats in this industry - if anything one company might have a 2 month lead, sometimes. We've also noticed that companies paying OpenAI may swiftly shift to paying Google or Anthropic in a heartbeat.

That means the pricing is going to be competitive. You may still get your wish though, but instead of the price of an engineer remaining the same, it will cut itself down by 95%.

But then you pay for the less outrageously subsidized rates of API instead of the a bit less incredibly generous prices of the subscription.

Its not subsidized, in fact, they probably have very healthy margins on Claude Code.

Yeah. If you ignore the negligible fact that some investor may want a return on all that money that is going into capex I am pretty sure you can, Enron style, get to the conclusion that any of those companies have “healthy” margins.

Why do you think that?

DeepSeek had a theoretical profit margin of 545 % [1] with much inferior GPUs at 1/60th the API price.

Anthropic's Opus 4.6 is a bit bigger, but they'd have to be insanely incompetent to not make a profit on inference.

[1] https://github.com/deepseek-ai/open-infra-index/blob/main/20...

American labs trained in a different way than the Chinese labs. They might be making profit on inference but they are burning money otherwise.

> they'd have to be insanely incompetent to not make a profit on inference.

Are you aware of how many years Amazon didn’t turn a profit?

Not agreeing with the tactic - just…are you aware of it?

Amazon was founded in 1994, went public in 1997 and became profitable in 2001. So Anthropic is two years behind with the IPO but who knows, maybe they'll be profitable by 2028? OpenAI is even more behind schedule.

How much loss did they accumulate until 2001? Pretty sure it wasn't the 44 billion OpenAI has. And Amazon didn't have many direct competitors offering the same services.

Did Amazon really not turn a profit, or apply a bunch of tricks to make it appear like they didn't in order to avoid taxes? Given their history, I'd assume the later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_tax_avoidance

Anyway, this has nothing to do with whether inference is profitable.

It has everything to do with whether they make profit on paper,

vs give away the farm via free tier accounts, free trials,

and last but not least: subsidized compute to hook entire organizations………

Deepseek lies about costs systematically. This is just another fantasy.

What do you base your accusations on? Is there a specific number from the link above that you claim is a lie?

And how are 7 other providers able to offer DeepSeek API access at roughly the same price as DeepSeek?

https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v3.2

Their price is not a signal of their costs, it is the result of competitive pressure. This shouldn't be so hard to understand. Companies have burned investor money for market share for quite some time in our world.

This is the expected, the normal, why are you so defensive?

> why are you so defensive?

Because you made stuff up, did not show any proof, and ignored my proof to the contrary.

You made the claim:

    > Deepseek lies about costs systematically.

DeepSeek broke down their cost in great detail, yet you simply called it "lies", but did not even mention which specific number of theirs you claim is a lie, so your statement is difficult to falsify. You also ignored my request for clarification.

You’re citing deepseek unaudited numbers. This is not even close to a proof. Unless proven otherwise it is propaganda. Meanwhile we have several industry experts pointing not only towards DeepSeek ridiculous claims of efficiency, but also the lies from other labs.

Again, your claims are impossible to verify or falsify, because they are too unspecific.

> Meanwhile we have several industry experts pointing not only towards DeepSeek ridiculous claims of efficiency, but also the lies from other labs.

What are those "industry experts" saying that is made up and what is their basis for that?

> You’re citing deepseek unaudited numbers.

Which specific number are you claiming to be fake?

I could just guess blindly and find alternative sources for random numbers from DeepSeek's article.

For example, the tokens-per-second efficiency can also be calculated based on the 30k tps from this NVIDIA article: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-blackwell-delivers-...

But looking for other sources is a waste of my time, when you could just be more precise.

Because if you don't then current valuations are a bublle propped inflated by burning a mountain of cash.

That's not how valuations work. A company's valuation is typically based on an NPV (net present value) calculation, which is a power series of its time-discounted future cash flows. Depending on the company's strategy, it's often rational for it to not be profitable for quite a long while, as long as it can give investors the expectation of significant profitability down the line.

Having said that, I do think that there is an investment bubble in AI, but am just arguing that you're not looking at the right signal.

And that's OpenAI's biz model? :)

I don't know about you, but I benefit so much from using Claude at work that I would gladly pay $80,000-$120,000 per year to keep using it.

Why would you gladly pay more than what it's worth? It's not an engineer you are hiring, it's AI. The whole point of it was to make intelligent workflows cheaper. If it's going to cost as much as an engineer, hire the engineer, at least you'd have an escape goat when things invariably go wrong.

> an escape goat

Autocorrect hall of famer, there.

Scapegoat, got it. Can't blame the autocorrect though... I honestly thought it was spelled like that, which is a shame since I've been studying English my entire life as a second language.

At least that misunderstanding didn’t cause a nuclear accident: https://practical.engineering/blog/2025/4/15/when-kitty-litt...

Luckily these strayed goats weren't irradiated

There's a name for this sort of phenomenon...

https://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/242/escape-goat/

> one of two goats that was chosen by lot to be sent alive into the wilderness, the sins of the people having been symbolically laid upon it, while the other was appointed to be sacrificed

Let me get this straight: in the Bible, the scapegoat does survive, while the "pure" goat that did nothing wrong gets killed? That's... messed up, even for a tribal rite.

Etymologically speaking, "scapegoat" does mean "escaped goat" so it's not a crazy mistake to make.

I agree with you, I was just joking.

Oh now I see... Joke's on me then I guess :D

It wasn't clear to me that this was a joke either. I assume the same for others since the post is grayed out.

What do you use it for, do you have example? For you to be ok with paying 80k to 120k I'm guessing its making you 375-450k a year?

I'm joking, my point is that it's already quite expensive and I don't think it's making anyone money.

Oh come on. That pays for more than 10 fte in some countries

I made this joke with "$1,500-$2000 per month" last night and everyone thought I was serious

I know people who burned several hundreds a day and still were finding it worth it.

Were they actually making money though? A lot of the people on the forefront of this AI stuff seem like cult leaders and crackheads to me.

I'd pay up to $1000 pretty easily just based off the time it saves me personally from a lot of grindy type work which frees me up for more high value stuff.

It's not 10x by any means but it doesn't need to be at most dev salaries to pay for itself. 1.5x alone is probably enough of an improvement for most >jr developers for a company to justify $1000/month.

I suppose if your area of responsibility wasn't very broad the value would decrease pretty quickly so maybe less value for people at very large companies?

I can see $200 but $1,000 per month seems crazy to me.

Using Claude Code for one year is worth the same as a used sedan (I.E., ~$12,000) to you?

You could be investing that money!

Yes, easily. Paying for Claude would be investing that money. Assuming 10% return which would be great I'd make an extra $1200 a year investing it. I'm pretty sure over the course of a year of not having to spend time doing low value or repetitive work I can increase productivity enough to more than cover the $13k difference. Developer work scales really well so removing a bunch of the low end and freeing up time for the more difficult problems is going to return a lot of value.

I would probably pay $2000 a month if I had to - it's a small fraction of my salary, and the productivity boost is worth it.

It's *worth it* when you're salaried? Compared to investing the money? Do you plan to land a very-high-paying executive role years down the line? Are you already extremely highly paid? Did Claude legitimately 10x your productivity?

edit: Fuck I'm getting trolled

I'm serious - the productivity boost I'm getting from using AI models is so significant, that it's absolutely worth paying even 2k/month. It saves me a lot of time, and enables me to deliver new features much faster (making me look better for my employer) - both of which would justify spending a small fraction of my own money. I don't have to, because my employer pays for it, but as I said, if I had to, I would pay.

I am not paying this myself, but the place I work at is definitely paying around 2k a month for my Claude Code usage. I pay 2 x 200, for my personal projects.

I think personal subs are subsidized while corporate ones definitely not. I have CC for my personal projects running 16h a day with multiple instances, but work CC still racks way higher bills with less usage. If I had to guess my work CC is using 4x as little for 5x the cost so at least 20x difference.

I am not going to say it has 10xed or whatever with my productivity, but I would have never ever in that timeframe built all those things that I have now.

I don't know why you keep insisting that no one is making any money off of this. Claude Code has made me outrageously more productive. Time = Money right?

That's true if you're working as a contractor and being able to do more translates to higher income but it doesn't work so for employees.

I'm an employee, and my boss loves me because I deliver things he wants quickly and reliably - because I use AI tools. Guess who he will keep in the next round of layoffs?

that means customers will pay minimum 2x that much I think

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