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Comment by wg0 | Hacker News Reader

No matter how low and reasonably Anthropic is valued, don't think $200 Max plans are going to recoup the investment + some return on top because size of the software industry is not that huge and profit margins for AI inference aren't very high either.

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> because size of the software industry is not that huge

I onboarded marketing on a premium team Claude seat yesterday. And one of our sales vibecoded an internal tool in the last three weeks using Claude Code that they now use every day. I wouldn’t have imagined it a month ago. We still had to take care of deployment for him, but things are moving fast.

And nor are they trying to. If you are spending $200 a month, you are a mere tolerated nuisance. The company I work for gives every developer a $5000 a month allowance to Claude and I think there are around 500-600 people eligible for it.

comments like these is probably while significant contingent of HN talks heavily about AI bubble. burning that kind of cash always ends up like the right move, godspeed :)

I work for a consulting company, we know exactly how much each billable person makes the company and whether the ROI is worth it.

We don’t have to measure “productivity gains”.

I personally don’t come close to that and neither do I suspect most of us. Between using my $20 a month ChatGPT subscription with Codex and the amount of time I spend on Zoom calls “adding on to what Becky said” and “looking at things from the 1000 foot view”

On another note, the grunt work I use to delegate to a junior consultant, I now can get Claude to do in a fraction of the the time. They were making a lot more than the worse case of $72K a year fully allocated. But honestly most of that work is done with my $240 a year ChatGPT subscription + maybe $600 in Claude at the current prices/limits

Pro and Max plans are probably a drop in the bucket for them.

Seems like everybody an their mothers are using max plans these days. I wouldn't be surprised if LTV of each customer was big enough to justify spending.

Assuming there are 10 million developers and everyone is at $200 max plan, that would be $2 billion/month or $24 billion/year maximum.

Note - this is just the revenue not the profit. No salaries, no compute paid for. Just plain revenue. Profit would be way less.

But even that - if we take it to $24 billion/year and we take a 10x multiple, the company is barely valued at $240 billon dollar, lets be generous and make it double at $480 billion and then round it up to $500 billion for a nice round number.

Far far from the $800 billion valuation Anthropic is looking at.

Only a matter of time.

EDIT: Fixed math

While I agree with you that AI companies are overvalued, I think 10 million developers at $200 per month makes 2 billion.

    >>> f"{10_000_000 * 200:_}"
    '2_000_000_000'

Thanks for pointing out. I updated the comment.

Companies are spending far more than $200/month/developer. The $200 Max plan is a great value but you hit limits far too soon, and it also doesn't cover any of the other styles of integrations and tools that you can build and use to help your developers, like code review suggestions, which at the very least would come from additional Max plans, and not from the individual developers' plans.

Pro and Max plans are a tiny fraction of their revenue. Many businesses are spending thousands of dollars per head per month.

Really? Not challenging you, genuinely asking for more details.

If that is true, I think AI is counterproductive from the bean counter's standpoint.

Not counterproductive because people aren't just sitting back in the rest of the time while AI does work. They do more work. $3k per head on Claude is nothing if your devs get 2x more work done.

Do they review the code? Because in my experience using Claude Opus 4.6 generates code that would be buggy and the tests would be written agains that buggy code with wrong assumptions that certainly would pass with flying colors.

It is only when you look closed you get to know what the hell has happened!

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