Comment by ageitgey
2 days ago
Anthropic has a very "interesting" business model where you get subscription pricing as long as you are under 150 employees. When you hit 151, you have to start paying API prices overnight for everyone, and your total bill instantly multiplies.
They are getting you hooked on cheaper tokens, then raking you in when you get scale. I'm sure Uber gets a break on list price, but I doubt they are anywhere near <150 employee subscription pricing.
Yeah, it's basically the opposite of how "product-led growth" SaaS works. Generally pay-as-you-go pricing is expensive at scale, but attractive initially. So you start on a pay-as-you-go plan, but as you scale you end up transitioning off pay-as-you-go to a negotiated commit. I.e. you call sales and sign a contract. Anthropic basically flips that around backwards.
You have to remember that enterprise pricing is covered by NDAs
But things to note:
1) the per user license fee is almost certainly waived.
2) if you look in teams, when you buy extra credit, you get a 30% discount if you buy in bulk.
Unless you default into enterprise from teams, you're almost certiantly not going to pay the list price for per token price
Is that known to be true? Enterprise pricing is opaque. I am aware of at least one 151+ organization using a flat-cost $150-200/mo per seat Claude Premium contract. Reportedly most employees don't need to top up with additional API usage to cope with token limits.
Strange pricing model for a company selling the idea of having fewer employees.
Don't the incentives align? If you have fewer employees, then you pay less...
For customers, but not for Anthropic. If they truly expect their tools can turn a 160 person company into a 60 person company, this is not how they’d price.