dan@dan@upvote.au
edited

Replying to @⁨eicker@lemmy.world⁩

Anthropic made a smart business decision to mostly focus on enterprise customers rather than regular consumers. Only around 10% of their revenue comes from their heavily subsidized subscription plans. The remaining 90%ish comes from API and enterprise usage billed at per-token rates, which is something that’s actually profitable for them. They have a decent margin on token rates. It’s R&D, hardware, and subscriptions that are putting them in the red at the moment.

I suspect they’ll discontinue subscriptions some time after their IPO. Even though subscriptions are only responsible for 10% of revenue, they consume 42% of their inference compute power (www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/10/…/5301470)

In comparison, around 70% of OpenAI’s revenue comes from subscriptions. Without subsidized subscriptions, they’d lose most of their customers.

theregisterAnthropic Claude subscription plan provides more value than OpenAI's, study saysResearch firm not exactly thrilled by House of Altman's subscription changes
elgordino@elgordino@fedia.io

Replying to @⁨dan@upvote.au⁩

Yeah I have the $200/m sub for work and I’m using about $200/day volume of tokens at API rate. Obviously this isn’t a sustainable business model.

Am I prepared to pay full rate? Not yet, but if models keep improving at the rate they are then probably at some point. Opus 5.5 has been a huge increase in quality at a cheaper cost to deliver a task.

With next gen gpus and better models reducing the ‘cost per task’ I think they’ll get there.

en