Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

Complaining about external providers not supporting the subsidized prices Claude charge to its subscribers makes no sense. Of course, Claude Code subscription is a loss leader, it is an offering built to create a market for a new product in a very competitive environment in the hopes of capturing a dominant market position with a fully validated product with a healthy demand from business.

Of course they won't give you thousands of dollars of inference for a couple hundred bucks without making sure you're properly tied to their walled garden.

Yeah, of course Dario and any other Anthropic spoke person will vastly exaggerate the capabilities of their product and promote vibe coding and now "loop engineering", just like Coca-Cola would love for you to drink gallons of Diet Coke everyday, just like Oracle some twenty ago promoted for Enterprises that they could just use Oracle Databases to serve web applications right from the DB, as this would force you to use more CPUs and Oracle DB is licensed by core.

The business model for inference is metered usage, more usage => mode money. Again, the subscription model is just a bump in the road to acquire customers, once you're metered, the more you use, the better for anthropic.

Why people get surprised with that stuff?

I agree with you on substance, but this "thousands of dollars in inference" figure is overstated. The margins on inference in the API pricing by Anthropic are absurd. We know from the pricing of third-party inference providers of similarly-capable open models that inference is cheap. The "thousands of dollars" is an exaggeration using the API pricing markup and assuming all subscribers would be using 100% of their limits all the time.

Surely, they're not making up for the costs of training and R&D and may be losing money on the hardcore users, but rest assured they are not losing thousands of dollars for each customer on average.

> Of course, Claude Code subscription is a loss leader, it is an offering built to create a market for a new product in a very competitive environment in the hopes of capturing a dominant market position with a fully validated product with a healthy demand from business.

I agree that this is their goal. The reason that people don't understand why Anthropic wont let the subscription be used with other harnesses is because they believe that this hope of Anthropic is just that: a hope.

I personally don't believe that a harness is a moat.

> The reason that people don't understand why Anthropic wont let the subscription be used with other harnesses

Even more specifically, the very fact that people would prefer, if they had the option, to use other harnesses with roughly equivalent feature sets strongly implies that the harness is not bringing them any value they couldn't get from a bunch of other places, including open-source equivalents.

Anthropic might want you to use their harness for their own reasons (control over caching, logging your interactions for training data, et cetera), but the idea that the Claude Code harness itself is bringing significant value which would help to lock users into the Anthropic ecosystem more than the Claude models alone do is kind of laughable. So _of course_ it seems like a baffling and arbitrary restriction to many users.

> Why people get surprised with that stuff?

Whenever you don't understand how people can think things on the internet, consider that they might be younger than you. They may not be, but it makes the world far less rage inducing. None of us are born knowing everything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com