Hacker News Reader

Comment by co_king_3 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

> 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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com