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Comment by anonzzzies | Hacker News Reader

I calculated only last weekend that my team would cost, if we would run Claude Code on retail API costs, around $200k/mo. We pay $1400/month in Max subscriptions. So that's $50k/user... But what tokens CC is reporting in their json -> a lot of this must be cached etc, so doubt it's anywhere near $50k cost, but not sure how to figure out what it would cost and I'm sure as hell not going to try.

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I'm fascinated to know the kind of work that allows you to intelligently allocate so much resources. I use Claude extensively and feel that I great value out of it but I reach a limit in terms of what I can do that makes sense relatively quickly it seems.

Same for me, but I suppose it is letting agents more loose and less checking of the code and rather throw away lots of generated output.

Gemini CLI shows how much was saved through caching each session, and it's usually somewhere around 90%

You can use `npx ccusage` to check your local logs and see how much it would have cost through the API.

yeah the json token counts are super misleading. i run a bunch of claude agents for automation and like 85% of input tokens end up being cached reads -which cost 1/10th of the sticker price. so your $200k number is probably closer to $25-30k in real cost, and thats before you factor in that anthropics own infra is way cheaper than retail API pricing. the $5k forbes number was always nonsense but even the "corrected" estimates in TFA are probably still too high IMO

I proxy all of my llm completion subscriptions. In a typical 7d span-

model completions read write cached_read cache_write

claude-opus-4-6 11000 16900000 5840000 1312000000 66120000

17M uncached reads (input) and 6M of uncached writes (output) is

  $5x17+$25x6=$235 for Opus 4.6

  $2x17+$12x6=$106 for Gemini 3 Pro

  $0.60x17+$3.6x6=$31.80 for Qwen3.5 397B-A17B via Huggingface API

You did not add up cache writes, which are $6.25 / MTok, which is another ~$400

> but not sure how to figure out what it would cost and I'm sure as hell not going to try.

Ask Opus to figure out how much it would cost. Lol.

I'm surprised, isn't it forbidden to use the Max plan as part of a company? Just curious, as I thought it was forbidden by the ToS but I'm not sure if I have a good understanding of it

If that were true, then everyone I know is violating that tos

If they believe a sufficient number is locked in then they may consider doing this later.

There is nothing in the TOS last time I checked forbidding it's use with Claude code. It's only forbidden to utilize it in the running of the business.

So getting Claude code subscriptions for developers should be permissable and not be against anything... However, if you created a rest endpoint to eg run a preconfigured prompt as part of your platform, that'd be against it

But I'm neither a lawyer nor work for anthropic

Ah, that makes sense. I hope they mean that then. We are just devs using it to write code; not selling it on.

> It's only forbidden to utilize it in the running of the business.

Sorry, but could you clarify what this means?

The following paragraph had my clarification to that...

Expressed differently: are you an individual using a official anthropic application interactively? You're fine.

You're using it unattendedly, without an individual holding the reigns? You should probably talk with an lawyer wherever that's permissable.

Again, IANAL nor do I work for anthropic

Surely that can't be true? The expectation would be that people pay $200 a month for building open source and personal hobby software with Claude?

Yeah, that would end that really quickly. I use Pro for personal stuff. If $200 is not allowed for companies I don't think anyone would use it, at all.

Most companies forbid it though, since you're not covered by any legal protection - for example, Anthropic can use your data or code to train new models and more.

This maybe was the case year+ ago but this is no longer the case, used to be most; now it is some/few

Any references on this? I hear this argument a lot. In fact, in a talk on AI last week I heard someone say:

"If you click the thumbs up button to rate a chat, the AI provider will use the contents for training, so our company's policy is never to click the thumbs up button"

That seemed so farcical I had a hard time taking this person seriously. Enterprise plans must give some strong guarantees around data usage, right?

Obviously I can speak only from my personal experience but just me I have 5 examples of companies that were “no AI, IP and all that” that are now full-on “every developer must use CC, Cursor…”

How many conpanes today don’t have “AI strategy” and are fearing will be left behind etc? In my small circle we went from “most are not using AI” to “none are not using AI” in somewhat short period of time

This is why most businesses only have ChatGPT subscriptions. Plus their integration into existing Microsoft products and billing.

Trusting Microsoft seems like a right move /s

Microsoft already has all their business data in the form of handing document storage and emails. Trusting another of their services to also not use that data for Microsoft's own purposes is reasonable.

Claude Code has a Teams plan which includes Max tiers. Why would it be forbidden?

> Just curious, as I thought it was forbidden by the ToS but I'm not sure if I have a good understanding of it

Could you quote the relevant part that you think forbids it for us?

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