Comment by solenoid0937
13 hours ago
Anthropic is absolutely taken seriously in workplaces, what are you even talking about?
No serious business uses Pro or Max, they are all on Anthropic API billing.
In fact with this move it is plainly obvious that Anthropic is moving compute from prosumers towards enterprise.
My startup just rolled out MAX plans for our engineers. we literally jumped into AI last week. Been in operation for 6 years and are profitable.
I know of a very serious business that deployed Max to all of their developers. API pricing, from what I see, can become more expensive than just hiring another dev.
We're also not seeing much difference in real throughput at an agency. Everyone is getting decent results, output wise but it just doesn't seem to change the outcomes that much. There is also a mixed incentive at an agency, because a reduction in hours spent is a reduction in revenue.
It will be interesting to see how it all plays out, but I suspect if cost continues to increase and output only improves incrementally from here, that the cost will be the final decider rather than the competence.
I could see it being a thing we use only sometimes, for some things, but ultimately remain reliant on developers to get the work through the pipeline.
API usage is on-demand, employees are a constant cost, guess what management loves most.
Well yes it is expensive, but companies are paying for that. It is far more expensive than the Max and it does go up to or more in some cases compared to the employee salary.
Larger companies are using Claude through AWS Bedrock and are willing to easily pay $5k+ per engineer per month for it.
The thinking appears to be that a model that can do the work of a developer must be worth a significant share of a developer salary. I think this idea is flawed.
Developer salaries are driven up by scarcity - scarcity of developer skills overall and scarcity of developer skills in specific places like California. If AI models destroy the scarcity then the price worth paying for a coding agent will drop dramatically.
Maybe Anthropic can get away with it for a couple of months. But this will not last.
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But the API is incredibly expensive. I calculated that I would have spent 3000 EUR the last month, a lot more than the 100 I pay now.
Nothing for large companies though.
I am pretty sure that a hole in the pocket in the order of 50 000 000 USD/month (assuming around 20 000 people using AI in not the smartest or most optimized way possible, therefore burning A LOT of tokens) will be noticeable by even the largest companies.
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Per employee?
This not nothing.
I work for a "very serious" company with many billions of dollars of revenue. All our SWEs have max subscriptions.