Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

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The headline claim assumes that Anthropic is operating the API at cost, and losing massive amounts of money on subscriptions

My own impression based on inference prices for deepseek or other "open" models in the 1T range (including providers like DeepInfra with no obvious reason to subsidize their API costs) is that Anthropic is offering subscriptions at cost (on average, power users are a bit more expensive, casual users more profitable) and making good profit on API pricing. Profit that then is spent on model training, marketing and development, for an overall negative bottom line

Edit: in case it gets changed: current headine is "Anthropic/OpenAI may be spending more than $1000 for every $100 you pay them"

The assumptions are so much worse than that:

> Methodology & assumptions: No caching

This is absolutely absurd. Claude code is of course using the cache (and this can be verified by looking at the traffic). It would be an incredibly stupid design to resend the whole input without a cache for every input, every tool use, etc..

By the way, there is caching (cache TTL is hort but during sessions it is active). E.g. Settings Status Config Usage Stats

  Session
  
  Total cost:            $15.59
  Total duration (API):  18m 3s
  Total duration (wall): 2h 13m 16s
  Total code changes:    232 lines added, 80 lines removed
  Usage by model:
       claude-opus-4-6:  1.5k input, 41.8k output, 26.4m cache read, 212.6k cache write ($15.59)

The no-caching is explained in the linked conversation. The numbers are from actual use.

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