Hacker News Reader

Comment by repeekad | Hacker News Reader

Aren’t the subscriptions extremely subsidized and burning cash for Anthropic and OpenAI? A reasonable explanation is they’re simply abstaining from the war of attrition, especially given cheaper comparable models are breaking the illusion that the “frontier of intelligence” has any kind of per token margin.

View on HN

This is hotly debated and completely unclear. Let's say Anthropics Opus models cost the same to serve as GLM 5.2. GLM 5.2 is 4.4$/MTok while Opus is 5.6 times more expensive. Assume that GLM 5.2 is served at essentially zero margin. Then Anthropic has >80% margin on API pricing. So even if an average person with a subscription pays only 20% of the API price of their usage, Anthropic makes money on subscriptions.

And the real numbers could be better for Anthropic. It's feasible Opus models are actually cheaper to serve than GLM 5.2 because Anthropic have optimized the hell out of inference.

Sure, but then why wouldn’t I use GLM 5.2 at cost or K3?

I guess that’s the big question, will people pay a big margin long term to use their end products / models or will AI tokens be commoditized by many competing players. For coding if I had to pay API costs I’d switch in a heartbeat, enterprise maybe more reluctant?

Enterprise contracts with American companies over foreign ones. Enterprise is where OpenAI and Anthropic make most of the money.

I know many, many engineers who are paying something like 2-5% (via subscription) of what their usage would cost if billed by API tokens.

I know some down to about 1% ($200 Max plan vs $20k in tokens per month)

And I know many people that don't. That have a 20 or 100 dollar subscription for very bursty workflows with months where they barely use tokens.

Not every subscriber is a full time SWE. In fact most professional SWEs will be on enterprise plans and thus not get subscriptions at all.

I think it's very plausible that subscriptions are overall losing money. But we simply don't know.

Claude Code has enterprise subscriptions. No $200 max plan but you can buy $100 premium seats.

(and if you are using per-token billing as an enterprise user without first maxing out a premium seat you are very silly)

Not true. These seats are being phased out. Enterprise is now token only.

Makes sense, subsidizing tokens doesn’t seem like a great strategy for a public company.

And Google alway has a target on its back for antitrust (regardless of claim validity)

I think the subscriptions pay them back in spades because the same dev who maxes out their subscription on their personal account transfers that exact behaviour over to their enterprise work and - guess what - it's all billed per token there. This is a large reason why corporates are reeling from the cost right now, I think.

Possibly, but aren't the tech giants positioned to win a war of attrition? Then again, they're more likely to sit on that cash and wait for the opportune time to buy a frontier lab.

The subsidizing thing is repeated over and over without proof. Personally, I doubt they're actually subsidized.

they're subsidized if you max them out, i'd imagine most users are paying $20 for maybe $2-5 of tokens.

anthropic probably has more customers that use more of their sub, but for open ai where a lot of their subs are consumers through chatgpt.com, they have a lot of free money to work with there

Reply on news.ycombinator.com