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Comment by perrygeo | Hacker News Reader

> So it's not $120k/month of real money, but it's still crazy spend. I would guess I'm one of a handful of top individuals on Earth outside the frontier labs, in terms of my experience with top-end models.

We get it bro, you buy lots of tokens. My son buys lots of pokemon cards. Still haven't seen shit for return on that investment either, but as long as its all in good fun, "you do you".

> That's how I'm able to tell the future. I'm living in a world that will not become cost-effective for most people for another year.

That's pretty easy to verify. #remindme August 24, 2027 - are $120k worth of tokens in 2026 generally "affordable" by 2027? By what mechanism have the economics shifted?

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I don't disagree with you, but I would clarify that it's not $120k of tokens, it's $5k of Claude subscriptions. And also I suspect he would consider "affordable" to be "as a well paid software engineer". So I guess his benchmark is really more like: does $5k of subscriptions reduce to ~$500 next year.

I don't think it will. I also don't think this is really that affordable, but I'd imagine he'd call it accurate.

That $5k subscription is already deeply discounted by debt funding. Anthropic is losing money on that account. So the bet is this free lunch will continue indefinitely and prices are gonna drop 10x on top of that? We'll see!

Put another way, someone else is paying that 115k difference, and it's not out of the goodness of their hearts. Once they capture market share, capitalists gonna capitalize. For now, investors seem happy to pump money into the bubble without seeing returns, but that will not last forever.

Well that $120k is also likely at a huge profit margin, at least accounting for COGS. That's already most of the $115k difference gone.

Again, I don't really disagree with your general point here, but I think it's just a bit more complicated than you're making out.

I think we're in total agreement here. The $120k gets a profit for Anthropic. The $5k subscription loses money hand over fist. Somewhere in between is the real market price. And the OP is betting on a 10x reduction, from his already bargain-basement subsidized fee? Right at the moment when the market is demanding returns? Bold strategy Cotton, let's see how it plays out.

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