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Comment by theptip | Hacker News Reader

I think this is shortsighted.

The markets value recurring subscription revenue at something like 10x “one-off” revenue, Anthropic is leaving a lot of enterprise value on the table with this approach.

In practice this approach forces AI apps to pay Anthropic for tokens, and then bill their customers a subscription. Customers could bring their own API key but it’s sketchy to put that into every app you want to try, and consumers aren’t going to use developer tools. And many categories of free app are simply excluded, which could in aggregate drive a lot more demand for subscriptions.

If Anthropic is worried about quota, seems they could set lower caps for third-party subscription usage? Still better than forcing API keys.

(Maybe this is purely about displacing other IDE products, rather than a broader market play.)

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I think they are smart making a distinction between a D2C subscription which they control the interface to and eat the losses for vs B2B use where they pay for what they use.

Allows them to optimize their clients and use private APIs for exclusive features etc. and there’s really no reason to bootstrap other wannabe AI companies who just stick a facade experience in front of Anthropic’s paying customer.

> eat the losses

Look at your token usage of the last 30 days in one of the JSON files generated by Claude Code. Compare that against API costs for Opus. Tell me if they are eating losses or not. I'm not making a point, actually do it and let me know. I was at 1 million. I'm paying 90 EUR/m. That means I'm subsidizing them (paying 3-4 times what it would cost with the API)! And I feel like I'm a pretty heavy user. Although people running it in a loop or using Gas Town will be using much more.

I just ran some numbers and it works out if you're a prolific user.

Over 9 days I would have spent roughly $63 dollars on Codex with 11.5M input tokens plus 141M cached input tokens and 1.3M output tokens.

That roughly mirrors the $100-200/wk in API spending that drove me to the subscription.

  | Category | Tokens | Rate (/1M) | Estimated Cost |
  |---|---:|---:|---:|
  | Input (uncached) | 11,568,331 | $1.75 | $20.24 |
  | Cached input | 141,566,720 | $0.175 | $24.77 |
  | Output | 1,301,078 | $14.00 | $18.22 |
  | Total | 154,436,129 | — | $63.23 |

BUT... like a typical gym user. This is a 30/d window and I only used it for 9 days, $63 worth. OpenAI kept the other $137.

It makes sense though for heavy use.

My hopes are on harness engineering allowing cheaper (but still large) models to shine. I'm evaluating DeepSeek because it would allow insane agent armies. Although DeepSeek charges for thinking tokens, something easy to overlook.

DeepSeek has the tendency to think... a lot!. Without a good harness I can't evaluate it well; time will tell.

OpenAI doesn't; it's embedded into the price, I think.

Cheap = we can run 10x the workloads, bigger imagination = innovation. Maybe 10 dumb agents in a loop can beat 1 Opus? Haha.

There's no decision to be made here, it's just way too expensive to have 3rd parties soak up the excess tokens, that's not the product being sold.

Especially as they are subsidized.

That’s not true, the market loves pay per use, see ”cloud”. It outperforms subscriptions by a lot, it’s not ”one-off”. And your example is not how companies building on top tend to charge, you either have your own infrastructure (key) or get charged at-cost + fees and service costs.

I don’t think Anthropic has any desire to be some B2C platform, they want high paying reliable customers (B2B, Enterprise).

> the market loves pay per use, see ”cloud”.

Cloud goes on the books as recurring revenue, not one-off; even though it's in principle elastic, in practice if I pay for a VM today I'll usually pay for one tomorrow.

(I don't have the numbers but the vast majority of cloud revenue is also going to be pre-committed long-term contracts from enterprises.)

> I don’t think Anthropic has any desire to be some B2C platform

This is the best line of argument I can see. But still not clear to me why my OP doesn't apply for enterprise, too.

Maybe the play is just to force other companies to become MCPs, instead of enabling them to have a direct customer relationship.

Sure, but even if a subscription and per per use are both recurring revenue, pay per use is not a subscription. The point I was trying to make is that there’s a lot of money to be made in the model Anthropic seems to be going for, more than a monthly subscription fee would allow for.

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