Comment by SimianSci
19 hours ago
The spend at my organization has reached beyond the $200,000 per month level on Anthropic's enterprise tier. The amount of outages we have had over these past few months are astounding and coupled with their horrendous support it has our executive team furious.
its alot of money to be spending for a single 9 of reliablility.
If you are paying API rates (not using Max subscriptions) there's no reason to use Anthropic's API directly, the same models are hosted by both AWS and Google with better uptime than Anthropic.
How do things like prompt caching etc play into that? Would I theoretically have a more stable harness backing my usage?
Im seriously over the current claude experience. After seemingly fixing my 4.6 usage by disabling adaptive thinking and moving to max effort, it seems that the release of 4.7 has broken that workflow and Im 99% certain that disabling adaptive thinking does nothing even on 4.6 now. Just egregious errors in 2 days this week after coming back from vacation.
AWS Bedrock supports prompt caching, just note that if you use the Converse API you need to set the cache points manually.
> Would I theoretically have a more stable harness backing my usage?
If you don’t mind an opinionated harness that asks for a pretty specific workflow, but one that works well, use OpenCode.
If you want to spread your wings and feel the sweet kiss of freedom, use Pi.
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you can use claude code with these other providers
The enterprise tier is API pricing only.
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/9797531-what-is-the-e...
Enterprise adds IAM, logging, and analytics, all of which AWS provides for free or for metered usage without needing an enterprise plan.
They'll cut you a private offer for bedrock tokens but bedrock has a 32k output limit
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Obviously there is only so much you can say; but is that $200K due to the raw number of seats you have, or are you burning through a lot on raw API usage? I guess I'm trying to understand, large business, or large usage.
we are in the SMB space, the spend is almost entirely usage for us at this point, rather than seat cost. For context, we are a software firm focused on difficult engineering problems, but I cant divulge much else.
Have you guys considered running your own local models? 200k a month is a ton of money and puts all your eggs in one basket. Or is it easier to just be able to run away from it all if you are done with it or something changes?
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A single nine so far. If github is any guide thing will get worse.
Why would Github be a guide? It's also terrible, but it's a radically different stack from an unrelated company
That, and even before AI, MS was having trouble with GH reliability
GitHub, along with MSFT in general, have massive copilot mandates where workers are being shamed into using slop tools to fix serious on-going issues. GitHub seems wholly incapable of resolving their issues: money isn't a problem, talent isn't a problem, but business leadership is definitely a major problem.
Look at how other companies are suffering massive outages due to LLMs too like AWS and Cloudflare. Two companies that use to be the best in the industry at uptime but have suddenly faltered quite quickly.
Companies that have even worse standards will quickly realize how problematic these tools are. Hopefully before a recession because this industry seems to be allergic to profitable businesses and leaders that have been around since ZIRP have shown zero intelligence in navigating these times.
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Speaking of developer tooling spend - IDEs are far harder to build such as JetBrain etc and don't think any IDE would be charging this amount to any customer per month.
Not sure how much of a productivity gain a 2.5 million per year it is?
Supply and demand - if you think it’s not worth the price, take your dollars elsewhere.
This is the brutal reality; even with the crazy reliability issues, demand is still far outstripping supply at the current price.
Run Facebook on a single Proxmox box and demand would still outstrip the supply.
What yet needs to be seen is if that demand sustains in the long run at that price point or flattens out proving to be super elastic given that there are many other providers that are catching up pretty fast.
IDEs don't need expensive GPUs to create and serve.
> single 9 of reliability
Out of curiosity, do you actually use it 24/7? The world doesn't collapse every time o365 goes down... (which is also pretty often)
In my experience the downtime tends to coincide with peak PT timezones. If you're in PT, it's very inconvienent.
Yeah, I feel like all of the bad downtimes happen during American business hours. We use GitHub at work in Europe and I don't remember it ever being down or broken between 0700 and 1700 local time.
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if it's judged only by the time it is expected to be in use (work hours), reliability is likely even worse than the 24/7 measure.
We are spending the equivalent of 32 monthly software engineer salaries on Claude per month.
Info like this is useless without context like, how much revenue does the company earn? How many engineers do they employ? etc.
Our expense is roughly around 12.3 software developers when you break it down across all people related expenses. But we've spent alot of time and energy prior to this focusing on our ability to measure our software development output across multiple teams. The delivery improvements are not evenly applied across all teams, but the increases that we have seen suggest a better ROI than if we had hired 12 developers.
I guess if you think about your teammates as purely inputs and outputs and not people that can improve and contribute in the workplace in other ways.
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Is it worth it?
He was fired before answering.
[but as his manager I can tell you:] YES !!!!
No, we can literally buy our own hardware for what we spend in a month and host our own local LLMs for company usage.
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Five nines? No, nine fives
> has our executive team furious
And yet they will continue to spend wheelbarrows full of money with Anthropic because they want so badly to reach the point where they can fire you.
I think there is alot of baseless fury behind your words, but my regular interactions with my leadership dont lead me to think they have the end goal of replacing labor. We're blessed to have leadership with technical backgrounds, so the tools are regarded more as significant intelligence enhancers of already exceptionally smart engineers, rather than replacements.
Doesnt seem to us to be wheelbarrows of money, when you consider the average AWS/Azure bill.
Not ever hiring juniors and eventually mids is just replacing labor with extra steps.
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Huh? Your other comment explicitly said you were replacing labor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47939146
> the increases that we have seen suggest a better ROI than if we had hired 12 developers.
You can’t argue “we were able to get away with not hiring more developers” and also say you aren’t replacing labor.
Morally I trend towards your side of things, but it’s also important to be realistic about what you’re actually doing. Money is going towards Anthropic and not towards new hires. That’s a replacement of labor. It doesn’t matter what the end goal was.
> I think there is alot of baseless fury behind your words,
Hardly baseless when people have been gloating about how programming as a job is ending any day now for the last year at least.
> Doesnt seem to us to be wheelbarrows of money, when you consider the average AWS/Azure bill.
You didn’t mention the size of the company so yeah.
“Baseless fury”
I’m glad your leadership isn’t trying to fire everyone. But in case you live under a rock, tech layoffs are at all time highs. Companies are rewarded by the public markets for laying off workers.
Simultaneously we have AI industry leaders warning of an employment apocalypse once AGI is achieved.
And you think it’s baseless. Have some class bro.
Seems to be back now (claude code at least)
Is the $200k just development or are the products being developed require AI?
I wonder if self-hosted models would be a sensible step for your organization.
They must have hired absolutely incompetent leaders on the core software and infrastructure side. Sure their AI research is great but it’s amateur hour. Or just vibe coded slop top to bottom. It seems like every single day people are talking about outages or billing issues or secret changes to how Claude works.
theyre getting high on their own supply, and instead really need to hire some senior engineers
Imagine how much money they would save if they switched to Codex.
Not everyone can (due to the corporate compliance requirements, eg the ease of making the LLM not to train on anything).
Besides, codex wasn't always the answer.
Just give them more money, surely it'll get better.
/s