> I noted that my own token usage comes to about $1,000/month against each of Anthropic and OpenAI - which currently costs me just $100 per provider thanks to their generous subsidized plans for individual subscribers. Do we know that AI providers are going to keep these per-token prices, or eventually lower them because of competition from China? Many lower-budget individuals are now moving to China open weight models like DeepSeek. I wonder if China's really subsidising the providers, or if inferencing costs are actually much lower, and Anthropic/OpenAI are just making sure no money's left on the table for their eventual IPOs.

> organizations are willing to tolerate paying $1500/month/engineer One organization, that is a software company > which seems to be roughly inline with "normal" consumption for most full-time engineers My peers are using $20/mo plans, only a handful are using more than $100/mo in tokens. We haven’t had any limits imposed yet.

Many harnesses do this, I've recently dropped all my big subscriptions for using deepseek. Codewhale (formerly deepseek-tui) will use pro for large tasks and route smaller ones to flash. It's pretty good, but I just use pro and everything as the cost is quite low. This one does not have routing, but reasonix is insane, absolutely insane for saving money. I've used 1.3billion tokens at the cost of 4$. (99-100% cache hit)

No disagreement on computing 2.0, but companies spending 3-5k per employee for hardware isn't generally a monthly cost. It's a at the time of hire, and then once every 3 to 5 years after that, for a monthly amortized cost of about $50/employee. I have my concerns with current inference pricing in that there's a non-zero possibility for a rug pull in the future for the subscription plans for organizations and individuals that can still use them. For now, its only companies larger than ~150 users that need to pay per token, but what if that wasn't the case? Not every company can afford over $1k/month/employee to give them access to AI tooling, further making it harder to compete against the behemoths. If we get to a point where an individual can no longer pay $100/month for nearly unlimited usage and instead must pay per token, that's going to be a problem. Personal computing eventually became an equalizer (until we started centralizing on mainframes again, aka the cloud) because it got cheap. My hope is that inference also gets just as, if not cheaper. I have high hopes for local AI and open weight models and we will continue the ethos of local, personal computing and not needing to offload everything to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google, etc. to get work done once the hardware and hardware availability catch up.

Hardware's not generally a subscription, monthly cost though. You update it for them every 3/4 years (if they're lucky). It probably makes a bit more sense to compare it to existing software subscriptions like Office, or the old-school 'per-seat' licenses per user for software.

There's some software that can cost $1k or more per seat/month, but it's pretty rare. Big tier ERPs usually fall in the ~$600/seat/moth range, specialty engineering stuff can hit over $1k, Bloomberg terminal, etc. I wonder if what Uber's building with that $1.5k/month/employee is actually delivering the same value that something like an ERP would to the entire org...

> So there's a huge number of HN posters claiming that the price of tokens will go UP over time rather than down (that's how Moore's Law works, right???) I mean, Github Copilot's pricing just went up considerably, so I guess they were right?

Only people who do pay-per-use optimize this. Most heavy users have their use covered by an employer.

How are people using so many tokens? I'm on the $200/month enterprise plan for Claude Code (because it's a better deal than the API pricing) and I don't come close to the limits. If you use stuff like opusplan and /advisor so you use Sonnet for most of the work and only Opus for the really complex stuff then it's quite easy to keep costs low without affecting performance.

All new/renewing enterprise contracts with Claude Enterprise and ChatGPT Enterprise no longer offer usage-based subscriptions, but instead will charge API pricing for all tokens consumed, and as you've said, the subs are better deals than raw API pricing.

BigCo's are not using the plans we are using, they can't.

is this with a subscription or pure API billing?

> A $1,500 monthly limit per tool strikes me as a rational policy response to over-spending,... > I noted that my own token usage comes to about $1,000/month against each of Anthropic and OpenAI - which currently costs me just $100 per provider thanks to their generous subsidized plans for individual subscribers. This whole article seems to me like Multi level marketing "businesses" where 'Diamonds' have made their money by promoting MLM in seminars and telling hopefuls at bottom that "Buying AI subscription now is their one shot to be a winner in life" Perhaps there is something to MLM vs LLM to create a FOMO effect.

I wonder what they are doing with $1500 per month. I'm on Claude Pro $20 plan and I'm doing well. That's 3 days per week. On the other 2 days I'm using a customer's Claude Max, I don't know if it's the $100 or the $200 plan, but I'm sharing it with some of its other developers.

$1500/mth is token pricing. Your other plans are fixed price with rate limits where you get more tokens than the dollar equivalent you pay monthly. These plans are economical only if majority of users spend less tokens in $ than the plan's costs. This subsidizes the gap vs. power users who spend multiple k$ monthly in API tokens.

> Your other plans are fixed price with rate limits where you get more tokens than the dollar equivalent you pay monthly. Or the fixed cost plans reflect the real cost and the people paying API prices give them the profit. Anyway, none of my customers will let me bill them $1500 more (about $75 per day) because I'm using AI. And what for? I'm not working to move money from the pockets of my customers to the pockets of AI companies.

No, we know from the financials of these companies that API prices are close to being at cost and the individual developer plans are heavily subsidized (because they are roughly 10% of API cost per token[1]). If plans were at cost and API pricing was marked up that would mean there’s a 90%+ profit margin on tokens and instead of raising money and talking about revenue, Anthropic and OpenAI would be talking about their obscene profits. [1] the caveat is that the average plan user probably doesn’t use all of their quota, I guess maybe 30% is the average across all users.

Next to no one would be using less than the subscription price given how expensive Opus API is.

Yea, I’m sure the personal plans are subsidized. I have $200 Claude Max at home and straight API pricing at work and equivalent work would easily cost me 5x if not more on the API.

I'm on a $100 Claude Max plan, my usage is only about 50% of the plan limits, but in the last 30 days my usage was equivalent to API token spend of $1850. If you save all your Claude Code conversations, the saved files include API costs and you can calculate this yourself. One of my most expensive sessions cost me over $100 in token spend in a single evening. I'd just found out that the time tracking & invoicing SaaS I use is increasing their monthly pricing by 2.4x - so I assigned Claude Opus 4.8 to recreate the entire SaaS for myself, and load in 13 years of my historical data. I've only completed a full read-only implementation so far, with adding & editing of records still to come, but I do expect Claude will have fully recreated the entire SaaS for me at an API cost less than a single 1 year seat of continued subscription to their service. And since I'm actually on a Max plan, it didn't actually cost me $200 of tokens at all. coff i would not buy the Bending Spoons IPO coff saaspocalypse I could ramble on about where the other $1750 of usage goes, but I imagine it's similar for most heavy Claude / AI users. Interactive coding sessions, a daily personalized podcast, some automated overnight agentic "proactive" sessions, a daemon that wakes up if I send Claude an email or voicetext to check something when I'm out. I've also noticed that if Claude's tool-use goes haywire & Claude gets confused or lost, sometimes a single email reply session that would normally be just $1 of API might spiral to $12 of API while it bangs its head against trying to run a program that's in a different folder to the one it's currently in. Sometimes a simple 'pwd' would save you a lot of headache, Claude....

Uber is likely on an enterprise plan - these charge tokens at API cost, which can be much more expensive than the $20 flat rate.

Yes; they ban various uses of their subscriptions but say you can do whatever if you’re paying for the API without limits

That's just market segmentation and them trying to maximize revenue it doesen't really say anything about their costs.

This story isn't about those subscriptions - enterprise customers like Uber are paying the full API prices.

afaik, enterprise plans are not subsidized. its 20$/seat+api pricing. Unless you are saying api pricing itself is subsidized.

Assuming this were accurate, then presumably the AI companies would be betting that inference costs come down before the bill is due - I don't see enterprises being willing to absorb another ~10x price increase for tokens (as they've just done going from subscription prices to per-token pricing)

I understand current Codex $20 sub is worth about $480 GPT5 api credits.

Way more. Track with https://github.com/junhoyeo/tokscale

It's not. They recently forced enterprise customers onto API billing instead of the cheap consumer pricing. Now the pricing is brutal.

Due to recent Copilot price increase my friend was capped to $70 per month of usage. Not on a subscription… My $100 subscription is not cheap. At the same time our product burns orders of magnitude more tokens.

ccusage for codex tells me the medium feature I prompted in codex, with a $200 subscription, running for 72 hours and still not delivering full result would have cost ~ $2200 at API rates. I also misconfigured something in my agent's configuration and a simple web tool request (maybe 4 turns) through OR went to GPT-5.5 accidentally and that cost me ~$0.4. I have no idea how any business can afford API rates without having a mindset of casually setting money on fire.

If I were paying API rates this year, I would have already burned through $20k in tokens. Looking forward to the costs of this level of capability coming down.

They are also beholden to enterprise pricing and can't use the subsidized consumer max plans.

Why are people getting these high spending numbers? A 200 USD subscription for either Codex or Claude should give you plenty of usage. What am I missing? Are they just being dumb?

The subscriptions are not available to enterprise users. Enterprise users must pay per-token. A $200 subscription gives you roughly the equivalent of $1500 in per-token billing.

You are paying account pricing. Uber is paying API pricing. You're $100/m plan is likely equivalent to thousands of dollars of API pricing. You are being subsidized by the companies using AI.

And this is why as the freeloader (includes me) volume goes up, they add more and more rules to constrain us.

I wasn't aware the Max $100/user plan wasn't available to Enterprise; it used to be IIRC

Why aren't they using Claude code 20x for 200/month?

if you have more than x seats, you have to use Enterprise pricing as far as I know which is pay as you go with a pool.