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Comment by ratakh | Hacker News Reader

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It’s becoming like the iPhone, once the software has access to “Claude”, everyone in the org wants it. Finance wants it for excel, marketing and design for image generation, compliance for working with documents. Sure it’s not software engineering rates, but it increases the user base beyond software developers.

Rings true in my org -- finance is a big consumer because all the software shops who do integration work with CRMs and ERPs are garbage and take forever to implement changes and via some clever prompting, you can obviate most of that work.

I'm curious, do you have an example?

One regular workflow is a reconciliation we do for events that we put on — a number of costs that are expensed, a number of costs that are prepaid until the event happens, individual registration revenue that is recognized immediately and then the corporate sponsorships that are often paid in advance but their recognition is deferred until the event happens. Previously since that involved both balance sheet, income statement and CRM reporting, we relied on an integration vendor to write custom scripts to bring all the info (poorly) into our ERP. Since then, we’ve found a tool leveraging LLMs to ‘join’ those various sources and our events people generally described the report they wanted with a template in excel and it readily created that report with “export to sheets or excel” functionality.

A report that previously took ~4 hours per month for a very expensive resource now takes 30s to validate and can be run completely ad hoc by the events managers.

Tangential, but I'm partially surprised Anthropic hasn't released an image model, even something basic to complement their offering.

It doesn't really feel like an image model fits with the "theme" of Anthropic's products.

I see Claude as much more of a productivity tool than say, ChatGPT, so if they were to release an image model, I would expect it to be useful for presentations etc. But, then the images need to be more like infographics, which are difficult for an image model to get right. On the other hand, they are much easier for a strong coding model to implement, while also allowing users to make controlled edits.

It's interesting. Until quite recently image models felt like toys, and Anthropic opting out seemed like a good decision to me. I feel like the "trained on stolen data" thing feels a lot more real with image models, since they so clearly compete with the artists whose work was used - so it felt aligned with Anthropic's image as the "more ethical" of the labs.

But then Nano Banana happened, and ChatGPT Images 2.0, and now image models aren't a toy any more - you can get real, useful work done with them.

Which is a problem for Anthropic, because companies that are buying a suite of AI tools for their employees may well value the ability to create usable posters, leaflets, and most importantly presentation slides.

Anthropic don't have anything to offer there, where Google and OpenAI have two of the best models anywhere.

I've seen plenty of people at my job that have tried to spice up their research seminar slides with some chatGPT-generated images, the only time they don't suck is when someone uses the images as a joke. There's always something blatantly off, such that the output is only usable for informal seminars. On the other hand, the approach of having an LLM produce a python script, or write out a PPTX directly with placeholders and "vector" flowcharts etc, is now a very common approach for us.

Focusing on improving the inline visualization feature and Claude design, which were both recently introduced, will likely make more money and be more helpful than building an image model and competing with the very good ones Google and OpenAI have.

400/mo is about what we are seeing a full time dev use on average, coincidentally.

Indeed if I look at the usage of my cohorts the power users typically spend almost exactly this much

Using API or subscription?

Ent so effectively API

I spent $200/month on subscriptions last month ($100 each to Anthropic and OpenAI) and the API cost version of my token spend was $2,100 - and if I'd been on the "Enterprise" plans my company would have had to pay the full price, not the subscription discount: https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/27/product-market-fit/#en...

I agree that $400/month is a HUGE amount, but there might be a path to that.

I spend $0/month.

I spend $200 for Claude, $100 for ChatGPT, and I still hit hourly and weekly limits mostly working on a couple projects with no "claude -p" style automation.

Seems like a lot of money until I consider how much time it would have cost me to get this far in any of them a few years ago. So long as the thing you're doing is worth doing (business, pleasure, curiosity, utility) then it's a bargain.

I do hope they improve in time. Weekly limits are criminal.

It's mutually beneficial: the load is smoothed for them, and it ensures I won't blow through a monthly limit.

There's about 20 million software engineers in the west and almost 50 million globally. Now add to the equation non technical paying subscribers who migrated from ChatGPT and enterprise API spend from internal AI applications and the figure seems pretty reasonable.

Why is the number of software engineers a limiting factor? I think what matters is the number of people who want custom software. Or cheap customer service. Or cheap financial analysis. Or cheap...

> Then everyone of these would need to spend $400 per month on tokens.

That's not that much money in the grand scheme of things, especially for software engineers - and you also have to include folks who pay for Claude or other AI tools on their own or for their own mundane purposes. More startups, &c. I don't use these tools much for work but I pay for a subscription and find it very valuable for my own personal uses.

> I don't know how much killing girls in Minab pays, but it looks like there is a lot of fake revenue reported here.

Well, the Iranians have us beat on that. They just use assault rifles to mow down 30,000+ of their own people: little girls, medium girls, and big girls too and we use a fancy bomb on accident to blow up a school they are launching missiles from to kill even more little girls.

> Then everyone of these would need to spend $400 per month on tokens.

(not sarcastic)

that;s basically nothing, companies are spending upwards of $4,000 to $30,000 PER employee. Is it worth that much? probably not.

Is that truly a recurring expense though or just the cost of doing things now? It remains to be seen whether any of this is sustainable.

afaik it's "hey, see how far you can push it if we don't limit you and how much you can achieve and we will compare against baseline"

that seems pretty reasonable. If it makes software engineers 10% more productive that's a bargain.

If these are fake revenues, I would think that the sophisticated investors would see through that? Or everyone is just in some ponzi scheme raising valuation and letting the last investors hold the bag or eventually pass it on to retail investors buying at the peak?

Anthropic is private. They talk all The time about their numbers being non-gaap run-rate revenues mean extrapolating a month out to a year. All they have to do is book a big deal in May and multiply by 12.

It’s probably still impressive growth, but probably not as impressive as it looks.

According to https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-...

> An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees

Times that by 12 to annualize it and you get to add an extra $6 billion to the number!

Yes

Everyone is in the same bag, get it IPO’d and then let the retail investors and tracker funds worry long term

You're not factoring in enterprise contracts which will probably be more per dev per month

That is more than offset by the fact that most software devs have no accounts, half have maybe OpenAI or Deepseek or Gemini accounts.

where is your data sourced from?

$400 a month is a lot to you?

For something of the equivalent of surprise Pokemon cards, anything above $0 is too much.

I mean, Pokemon cards aren’t cheap either.

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