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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

VCs are footing the bill for that $200 subscription.

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).

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

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