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.
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.
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 |
It makes sense though for heavy use.
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.