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Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

I pay $200/mo because my opus usage alone is >$10k/mo at api rates. Do you think I’m making a mistake?

I read posts like these all the time and I keep wondering when they'll begin to tighten the screws on the prosumers. I think most, if not all, $200/mo individual accounts are blasting high multiples of that amount in tokens. I mean we know that doesn't work with current inference costs, not by a longshot, so I guess this is just a way to pad their numbers like "look, we're growing our user base!" while they can still somewhat hide the "actually, we're hemorrhaging money on inference" in their accounting.

how do we know they aren't making 9800$ profit on inference from 10k$ tokens at api pricing?

You can't drive prosumers anywhere near API prices. I would guess that the maximum you can extract from vast majority of prosumers is maybe $500/mo, and even that is a big stretch.

Once you cross that threshold, prosumers will simply fall back to using Chinese models and/or self-hosting smaller models, with more efficient and tight workflows.

You'd be killing your consumer line completely.

Sure, but that’s all fine. Maybe McDonalds is just waiting for the day when enough people rely on them that they can charge $1000 for a burger. But if so, the economics aren’t going to work they way they expect.

I’ve always assumed that Anthropic sees the highest token consumers as leading indicators of how developers will use coding agents, so they’re looking at it as training data + market research, and they know that price elasticity is low so trying to charge those developers significantly more would just drive them elsewhere.

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