[vicchenai]

The economic tension here is pretty clear: flat-rate subscriptions are loss leaders designed to hook developers into the ecosystem. Once third parties can piggyback on that flat rate, you get arbitrage - someone builds a wrapper that burns through $200/month worth of inference for $20/month of subscription cost, and Anthropic eats the difference.

What is interesting is that OpenAI and GitHub seem to be taking the opposite approach with Copilot/OpenCode, essentially treating third-party tool access as a feature that increases subscription stickiness. Different bets on whether the LTV of a retained subscriber outweighs the marginal inference cost.

Would not be surprised if this converges eventually. Either Anthropic opens up once their margins improve, or OpenAI tightens once they realize the arbitrage is too expensive at scale.

[sambull]

these subscriptions have limits.. how could someone use $200 worth on $20/month.. is that not the issue with the limits they set on a $20 plan, and couldn't a claude code user use that same $200 worth on $20/month? (and how do i do this?)

[tappio]

The limits in the max subscriptions are more generous and power users are generating loss.

I'm rather certain, though cannot prove it, that buying the same tokens would cost at least 10x more if bought from API. Anecdotally, my cursor team usage was getting to around 700$ / month. After switching to claude code max, I have so far only once hit the 3h limit window on the 100$ sub.

What Im thinking is that Anthropic is making loss with users who use it a lot, but there are a lot of users who pay for max, but don't actually use it.

With the recent improvements and increase of popularity in projects like OpenClaw, the number of users that are generating loss has probably massively increased.

[somenameforme]

I'd agree on this. I ended up picking up a Claude Pro sub and am very less than impressed at the volume allowance. I generally get about a dozen queries (including simple follow up/refinements/corrections) across a relatively small codebase, with prompts structured to minimize the parts of the code touched - and moving onto fresh contexts fairly rapidly, before getting cut off for their ~5 hour window. Doing that ~twice a day ends up getting cut off on the weekly limit with about a day or two left on it.

I don't entirely mind, and am just considering it an even better work:life balance, but if this is $200 worth of queries, then all I can say is LOL.

[ac29]

The usage limit on your $20/month subscription is not $20 of API tokens (if it was, why subscribe?). Its much much higher, and you can hit the equivalent of $20 of API usage in a few days.

[energy123]

The median subscriber generates about 50% gross margin, but some subscribers use 10x the amount of inference compute as other subscribers (due to using it more...), and it's a positive skewness distribution.