Early stage founder here. You have no idea how worth it $200/month is as a multiple on what compensation is required to fund good engineers. Absolutely the highest ROI thing I have done in the life of the company so far.
At this point, question is when does Amazon tell Anthropic to stop because it’s gotta be running up a huge bill. I don’t think they can continue offering the $200 plan for too long even with Amazon’s deep pocket.
Interesting. Though it seems they are themselves building Agentic AI tooling. It's vibe coding all the way down - when's something real going to pop out the bottom?
Is $200/month a lot of money when you can multiply your productivity? It depends but the most valuable currency in life is time. For some, spending thousands a month would be worth it.
As I said elsewhere... $200/month etc is potentially not a lot for an employer to pay (though I've worked for some recently who balk at just stocking a snacks tray or drink fridge...).
But $200/month is unbearable for open source / free software developers.
It's wild when a company has another department and will shell out $200/month per-head for some amalgamation of Salesforce and other SaaS tools for customer service agents.
At a previous job, my department was getting slashed because marketing was moving over to using Salesforce instead of custom software written in-house. Everything was going swimmingly, until the integration vendor for Salesforce just kept billing, and billing and billing.
Last I checked no one is still there who was there originally, except the vendor. And the vendor was charging around $90k/mo for integration services and custom development in 2017 when my team was let go. My team was around $10k/mo including rent for our cubicles.
That was another weird practice I've never seen elsewhere, to pay rent, we had to charge the other departments for our services. They turned IT and infrastructure into a business, and expected it to turn a profit, which pissed off all the departments who had to start paying for their projects, so they started outsourcing all development work to vendors, killing our income stream, which required multiple rounds of layoffs until only management was left.
I suspect there's some accounting magic where salaries and software licenses are in one box and "Diet Coke in the fridge" is in another, and the latter is an unbearable cost but the former "OK"
But yeah, doesn't explain non-payment for AI tools.
Current job "permits" Claude usage, but does not pay for it.
That's your problem, or your company or your country.
Here in EU, if not stated in your work agreement, it's pretty common people work full time job and also as a self-employed contractor for other companies.
Honestly, I wouldn't sign a full time contract banning me from other work.
And if you have enough customers, you just drop full time job. And just pay social security and health insurance, which you must pay by law anyway.
Communism is an ideal but never a reality. What you see in reality is at best an attempt at communism which is quickly derailed by corruption and greed. I mean, it's great to have ideals, but you should also recognize when those ideals are completely impractical given the human condition.
By the way, this also applies to the "Free market" ideal...
Importantly, problems with the ideal shouldn't preclude good actions that take us in a direction.
There being problems with absolute libertarian free markets doesn't mean all policies that evoke the free market ideal must be disregarded, nor does the problems with communism mean that all communist actions must be ignored.
We can see a problem with an ideal, but still wish to replicate the good parts.
Sure. The issue for me is when people intentionally mislabel something to make it look worse.
For example, mislabelling socialism as communism. The police department, fire department, and roads are all socialist programs. Only a moron would call this communism and yet for some reason universal healthcare...
There's also this nonsense when someone says "That's the free market at work", and I'm like, if we really lived in a free market then you'd be drinking DuPont's poison right now.
Using the words "Communism" and "Free market" just show a (often intentional) misunderstanding of the nuance of how things actually work in our society.
The communism label must be the most cited straw man in all of history at this point.
Equity is a lottery ticket. Is sacrificing my happiness or life balance in the near term worth the gamble that A) my company will be successful, and B) that my equity won’t have been diluted to worthlessness by the time that happens? At higher levels of seniority/importamce/influence this might make sense, but for most people I seriously doubt it does, especially early in their careers.
I can see how pricing at 100 to 200$ per month per employee could make sense for companies, it’s a clear value proposition at that scale. But for personal projects and open source work, it feels out of reach. I’d really like to see more accessible pricing tiers for individuals and hobbyists. Pay per token models don’t work for me either; earlier this year, I racked up almost $1,000 in a month just experimenting with personal projects, and that experience has made me wary of using these tools since.
> Pay per token models don’t work for me either; earlier this year, I racked up almost $1,000 in a month just experimenting with personal projects, and that experience has made me wary of using these tools since.
Can't have your cake and eat it too.
Behold the holy trifecta of: Number of Projects - Code Quality - Coding Agent Cost
I get a lot of value out of Claude Max at $100 USD/month. I use it almost exclusively for my personal open source projects. For work, I'm more cautious.
I worry, with an article like this floating around, and with this as the competition, and with the economics of all this stuff generally... major price increases are on the horizon.
Businesses (some) can afford this, after all it's still just a portion of the costs of a SWE salary (tho $1000/m is getting up there). But open source developers cannot.
I worry about this trend, and when the other shoe will drop on Anthropic's products, at least.
Where do you see the major price increases coming from?
The underlying inference is not super expensive. All the tricks they're pulling to make it smarter certainly multiply the price, but the price being charged almost certainly covers the cost. Basic inference on tuned base models is extremely cheap. But certainly it looks like Anthropic > OpenAI > Google in terms of inference cost structure.
Prices will only come up if there's a profit opportunity; if one of the vendors has a clear edge and gains substantial pricing power. I don't think that's clear at this point. This article is already equivocating between o3 and Opus.
I have not invested time on locally-run, I'm curious if they could even get close to approaching the value of Sonnet4 or Opus.
That said, I suspect a lot of the value in Claude Code is hand-rolled fined-tuned heuristics built into the tool itself, not coming from the LLM. It does a lot of management of TODO lists, backtracking through failed paths, etc which look more like old-school symbolic AI than something the LLM is doing on its own.
I love how paying for prompts stuck. Like, if someone's going to do your homework for you, they should get compensated.
Early stage founder here. You have no idea how worth it $200/month is as a multiple on what compensation is required to fund good engineers. Absolutely the highest ROI thing I have done in the life of the company so far.
At this point, question is when does Amazon tell Anthropic to stop because it’s gotta be running up a huge bill. I don’t think they can continue offering the $200 plan for too long even with Amazon’s deep pocket.
Interesting. Though it seems they are themselves building Agentic AI tooling. It's vibe coding all the way down - when's something real going to pop out the bottom?
Is $200/month a lot of money when you can multiply your productivity? It depends but the most valuable currency in life is time. For some, spending thousands a month would be worth it.
> Is $200/month a lot of money when you can multiply your productivity?
My read was the article takes it as a given that $200/m is worth it.
The question in the article seems more: is an extra $800/m to move from Claude Code to an agent using o3 worth it?
As I said elsewhere... $200/month etc is potentially not a lot for an employer to pay (though I've worked for some recently who balk at just stocking a snacks tray or drink fridge...).
But $200/month is unbearable for open source / free software developers.
It's wild when a company has another department and will shell out $200/month per-head for some amalgamation of Salesforce and other SaaS tools for customer service agents.
At a previous job, my department was getting slashed because marketing was moving over to using Salesforce instead of custom software written in-house. Everything was going swimmingly, until the integration vendor for Salesforce just kept billing, and billing and billing.
Last I checked no one is still there who was there originally, except the vendor. And the vendor was charging around $90k/mo for integration services and custom development in 2017 when my team was let go. My team was around $10k/mo including rent for our cubicles.
That was another weird practice I've never seen elsewhere, to pay rent, we had to charge the other departments for our services. They turned IT and infrastructure into a business, and expected it to turn a profit, which pissed off all the departments who had to start paying for their projects, so they started outsourcing all development work to vendors, killing our income stream, which required multiple rounds of layoffs until only management was left.
I suspect there's some accounting magic where salaries and software licenses are in one box and "Diet Coke in the fridge" is in another, and the latter is an unbearable cost but the former "OK"
But yeah, doesn't explain non-payment for AI tools.
Current job "permits" Claude usage, but does not pay for it.
My butt needs to be in this chair 8 hours a day. Whether it takes me 20 hours to do a task or 2 doesn't really matter.
That's your problem, or your company or your country.
Here in EU, if not stated in your work agreement, it's pretty common people work full time job and also as a self-employed contractor for other companies.
Honestly, I wouldn't sign a full time contract banning me from other work.
And if you have enough customers, you just drop full time job. And just pay social security and health insurance, which you must pay by law anyway.
This is why communism doesnt work lmao
Communism is an ideal but never a reality. What you see in reality is at best an attempt at communism which is quickly derailed by corruption and greed. I mean, it's great to have ideals, but you should also recognize when those ideals are completely impractical given the human condition.
By the way, this also applies to the "Free market" ideal...
Importantly, problems with the ideal shouldn't preclude good actions that take us in a direction.
There being problems with absolute libertarian free markets doesn't mean all policies that evoke the free market ideal must be disregarded, nor does the problems with communism mean that all communist actions must be ignored.
We can see a problem with an ideal, but still wish to replicate the good parts.
Sure. The issue for me is when people intentionally mislabel something to make it look worse.
For example, mislabelling socialism as communism. The police department, fire department, and roads are all socialist programs. Only a moron would call this communism and yet for some reason universal healthcare...
There's also this nonsense when someone says "That's the free market at work", and I'm like, if we really lived in a free market then you'd be drinking DuPont's poison right now.
Using the words "Communism" and "Free market" just show a (often intentional) misunderstanding of the nuance of how things actually work in our society.
The communism label must be the most cited straw man in all of history at this point.
maybe the issue is capitalism where even if your productivity multiplies x100
your salary stays x1
and your work hours stay x1
But aren't you supposed to be incentivized to work harder by having equity?
That doesn’t happen anywhere outside of Silicon Valley.
Equity is a lottery ticket. Is sacrificing my happiness or life balance in the near term worth the gamble that A) my company will be successful, and B) that my equity won’t have been diluted to worthlessness by the time that happens? At higher levels of seniority/importamce/influence this might make sense, but for most people I seriously doubt it does, especially early in their careers.
Quite literally not.
Capitalism encourages you to put your butt in your own seat and reap the rewards of your efforts.
Of course it also provides you the decision making to keep your butt in someone else’s seat if the risk vs. reward of going your own isn’t worth it.
And then it allows your employer to put another butt in your seat if you don’t adopt efficiency patterns.
So: capitalism is compatible with communism as an option, but it’s generally a suboptimal option for one or both parties.
I am literally describing my life in a capitalist society....
I can see how pricing at 100 to 200$ per month per employee could make sense for companies, it’s a clear value proposition at that scale. But for personal projects and open source work, it feels out of reach. I’d really like to see more accessible pricing tiers for individuals and hobbyists. Pay per token models don’t work for me either; earlier this year, I racked up almost $1,000 in a month just experimenting with personal projects, and that experience has made me wary of using these tools since.
Sources
I’ve seen some people describe getting pretty good value out of the Claude $20 plan with Claude Code?
Pro is fine for medium sized projects, stick to 1 terminal.
> Pay per token models don’t work for me either; earlier this year, I racked up almost $1,000 in a month just experimenting with personal projects, and that experience has made me wary of using these tools since.
Can't have your cake and eat it too.
Behold the holy trifecta of: Number of Projects - Code Quality - Coding Agent Cost
I get a lot of value out of Claude Max at $100 USD/month. I use it almost exclusively for my personal open source projects. For work, I'm more cautious.
I worry, with an article like this floating around, and with this as the competition, and with the economics of all this stuff generally... major price increases are on the horizon.
Businesses (some) can afford this, after all it's still just a portion of the costs of a SWE salary (tho $1000/m is getting up there). But open source developers cannot.
I worry about this trend, and when the other shoe will drop on Anthropic's products, at least.
Where do you see the major price increases coming from?
The underlying inference is not super expensive. All the tricks they're pulling to make it smarter certainly multiply the price, but the price being charged almost certainly covers the cost. Basic inference on tuned base models is extremely cheap. But certainly it looks like Anthropic > OpenAI > Google in terms of inference cost structure.
Prices will only come up if there's a profit opportunity; if one of the vendors has a clear edge and gains substantial pricing power. I don't think that's clear at this point. This article is already equivocating between o3 and Opus.
Those market forces will push the thriftier devs to find better ways to use the lesser models. And they will probably share their improvements!
I'm very bullish on the future of smaller, locally-run models, myself.
I have not invested time on locally-run, I'm curious if they could even get close to approaching the value of Sonnet4 or Opus.
That said, I suspect a lot of the value in Claude Code is hand-rolled fined-tuned heuristics built into the tool itself, not coming from the LLM. It does a lot of management of TODO lists, backtracking through failed paths, etc which look more like old-school symbolic AI than something the LLM is doing on its own.
Replicating that will also be required.
Just a matter of time before AI coding becomes commodity and prices drop. 2027
If it weren't for the Chinese, the prices would have been x10.