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
melfie@melfie@lemmy.zip

Replying to @⁨dan@upvote.au⁩

I’m surprised how easy it is to blow through hundreds of dollars in Claude tokens at work. They certainly aren’t subsidizing anything. If the Qwen 3.8 27B model I run on my gaming PC at home were priced like Claude, I’d probably have a $1000 a month bill.

Edit:

I bought a 7900 XTX a couple months ago for less than 2 months worth of Claude bills at work that runs 3.8 27B quite well at 200k context that is pretty on par with Sonnet 5.

Maybe Anthropic isn’t bleeding money as fast as they would otherwise be, but their premium pricing is pretty hard to justify. If Qwen 4 27B keeps pace with Sonnet 5.5, then we’ll basically have a Fable 5.1 class model that runs on a gaming PC.

Edited ⁨⁨Oct⁩ ⁨15⁩, ⁨2026⁩, ⁨12:28⁩⁩en
turmacar@turmacar@lemmy.world

Replying to @⁨melfie@lemmy.zip⁩

Don’t know if it was you but someone pointed out a few months ago that the 7900 was the last 24GB card to be found for less than $1k and I grabbed one as an upgrade from a 3070. Running local models it’s less reliable than Claude at work, but not by much, and it was a good upgrade for gaming.

Before the return period was up it had gone from ~$900 to past $1.2k and I wasn’t eligible for a repair/replacement just a refund, the market is completely sideways.