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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

It’s crazy how different the credit cost and subscription cost are.

With the $200 subscription, I can have Fable on ultracode working for hours and not dent the usage limits.

yeah, i tried out GLM-5.2 when the news was all full of hype for that, and it's fine... definitely better value that API rates for claude. but comparing the value i got from that to the value i get from a claude max subscription... claude is way cheaper.

VCs are footing the bill for that $200 subscription.

They have something like 80% gross margins, are at a $100B/yr ARR, and are growing at 10x per year... If that keeps up, they're going to be doing more revenue than Google in a year ($400B ARR, 20% per year growth)

How can you sanely project the last 12 months forward? We have seen a huge uptick in usage. Last summer AI was a toy to most devs, now every enterprise developer I talked to uses it every day. Coding agent providers are surely going to hit market saturation in the near future.

Maybe, maybe not. Personally, I hope local AI eats their lunch so that the benefits are more decentralized and accrue more to society generally.

I don't think you're right about that last prediction, at all. And new use cases are opening up as these get smarter. I think things are going to get pretty weird.

But the point was that it really doesn't look like they're losing money on users, on average.

Where did that $100B figure come from? I thought they were at ~10B at the end of 2025, so they're either not at 100B yet, or they're growing way faster than 10x / year.

Good question, I heard it on a podcast, but going back to the transcript, looks like that's their forecast, not that they've hit it, they estimated a current $70B, but they've been revising their forecasts up, so yeah, it's probably >10x. Latest solid number they reported was $47B in May.

Wild.

At last, a valid usecase for VCs.

i'll take it, just hope they dont rugpull us soon. im sure its coming

The $200 sub is customer acquisition cost to hook devs that then become the marketing team trying to get their company to bring in Claude (at the highly profitable API price).

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