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Comment by YetAnotherNick | Hacker News Reader

I don't think Anthropic wants a stable experience on their consumer subscription plans. It is just used for customer acquisition who will then ask their employer to pay for enterprise plan(assuming most employer care about data control) which is based on tokens.

Most coders don't pay for tokens themselves. It's just on reddit and HN you would think that everybody does.

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Dario said in an interview that they originally wanted to be an enterprise only company.

What changed their mind?

I would guess that it's hard to compete with Google without a consumer component. Most enterprises already have contracts and policies with Google, so anything driven from the top-down is likely to prefer Google.

(And failing that, there was a real risk for OpenAI to be the default for enterprises.)

To defeat that, you need to frontline employees the chance to experience better tooling and models which is where the subsidized subscriptions come in.

I pay for my tokens for my own projects, at least when the ones Google seems willing to keep throwing at me for free don't cut it. I'd think that's not too uncommon, especially here where there's likely a high ratio of hobby coders (whether also professionals or otherwise).

Free tier Gemini is good enough for my personal projects and hopefully a local model can replace it before i ever personally pay for a single token from anyone.

Work can pay a Claude sub. At home i see no need

local models are getting pretty close. they still require some serious hardware to run at a reasonable rate but they're about smart enough to be useful.

Yeah i just don't have the hardware to run them at a reasonable rate and am not ready to invest that much at today's prices. My tinkering with DeepSeek last year was promising but the minutes-per-response made it unusable.

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