Comment by prepend
1 day ago
> $2,180.16 worth of tokens for $200
“Tokens” don’t have an intrisic cost or value. Saying that I used $2,180.16 worth of tokens is like relying on the salesperson to convince me I’m getting a billion dollars worth of pots and pans for $19.99.
I think it’s funny how we are throwing critical thinking out the window when it comes to evaluating biased sources of info.
I'm not sure what you're pushing back against here.
I spent $200. If I had been paying API pricing it would have been $2,180.16. The article is about how enterprise customers get charged API pricing, which means if I had been employed by one of those companies I would have cost them $2,180.16.
What am I missing?
Just because API pricing would've been $2180.16 doesn't mean that's the value of those tokens. For starters, you personally probably wouldn't have paid that. But also, sales price isn't value. This is like saying, oh, I saw this bar of gold somewhere for $10000 but got it here for $1000! So I got $10000 worth of gold for $1000! - no, the value of that gold is determined by its weight, which wasn't even mentioned.
We have no market convergence on tokens yet (and it'll differ between LLMs), so it's impossible to say what value you got for your $200.
He's saying he's getting a great deal...a token from Opus on Claude code is the same as a token from Opus on the API. I remain as confused as Simon. He's not talking about "here's the ROI I got from my $100 subscription" it's "here's how much I saved from getting the monthly subscription instead of sending things through an API".
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No, value is determined by what participants in a market are willing to pay for something. The only reason you are able to say that the value of gold is determined by its weight is that gold is a commodity and no matter what you paid for it you'll find others willing to pay market price.
Simon is saying that companies are (today) willing to pay API prices for tokens which is as good as any determination of value.
Is this some anti-FIAT take? The value the author got is not value as in intrinsic value, it simply means value as in better deal than the alternative. This is often called "value" and you will see this used when products are sold in "value packs" etc.
> Just because API pricing would've been $2180.16 doesn't mean that's the value of those tokens.
You seem to be suggesting the price of tokens is entirely disconnected to the cost of providing the service? I don't see much basis for that assumption.
I'm willing to charge you $100k for those same tokens.
Does that mean you'll be saving $99k?
It sounds an awful lot like the mark-up to mark-down scheme where the price stays the same.
Large enterprises make deals and won’t be paying 2,180.16$ either. Just like with AWS
That doesn't seem to be the case. From what I've seen enterprise deals get API pricing now. Have you seen evidence that's not true?
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And "large" just means that AWS will assign an account manager to talk with you. I was at a start-up who spent $300k/year on AWS and that was enough to get special attention and discounts. Enterprise pricing is confusing.
The point is that those a real prices real people are paying for real API usage. it's not made up.
your point is large players won't pay those prices at massive volume. ok
They pay sticker price. There may be exceptions for very very large companies like Amazon or Microsoft which have their own deals where they rent out compute in return for usage.
Claude is so in demand at the moment that there aren't really volume discounts. Anthropic sets the terms and you either accept them or get lost they have that much of a lead (mindshare/desirability wise).
> If I had been paying API pricing it would have been $2,180.16
The point being made above is that API pricing is calculated... somehow... seemingly arbitrarily. Possibly untethered to the infrastructure costs entirely: which would be the basis of any 'value', however that holds the labor theory of value, which isn't accurate either. So how do you accurately price these tokens at all (other than through price-discovery: which is slow, messy and fuzzy)?
> So how do you accurately price these tokens at all
Like anything else in the economy: at the point where enough customers can pay you, and not enough will go to the cheaper competition.
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I don't really understand the holdup about that specific line? Anthropic publishes the cost per million of tokens, what's arbitrary about looking at your consumption, and doing the math?
Or are you saying that Anthropic is determining that cost per million arbitrarily?
If so, it'd be like asking to explain why things fall on the ground other than through gravity. Companies pick the price they think the market will bear, and adjust based on new information.
Lets say McDonalds charges $2000 for a BigMac. If they offer a deal and sell it to you for $200, did you save $1800?
Maybe if you spend $2000 on a BigMac. But it’s unlikely you would buy such a burger.
What is a hamburger worth? Don’t look to McDonalds to set the value.
API pricing drops DRAMATICALLY in enterprise agreements.
As with pretty much anything priced on volume/usage.
Enterprise deals are negotiated ad-hoc, the listed pricing is simply a jumping off point for the final negotiated discount.
If you’re going to give 20,000 employees Claude code you are not going to be spending $1B per year on Anthropic tokens as if you gave everyone an individual API key. Just as Anthropic isn’t paying AWS SES $10,000,000 to send 1 email update to their massive user base when the next Claude version drops.
This isn't true at the moment, though. So far there hasn't been the negotiating power. What happens is you end up capping usage for employees at a fixed amount. I think eventually, prices will come down and there will be discounts, but for enterprise accounts at least of our size (<5000), we're paying almost 100% retail, which kind of sucks, because it's expensive, and pretty easy to burn $50 to $100+ in a day, if you're not careful. In fact we got pushed off the former plan to the token-utility one at the last contract negotiation.
Going to be interesting to determing the metrics we give to engineers for determining whether the spend on this is worth it. Measuring PRs, lines of code committed, commits fully generated by agentic workflows, etc.....
As someone who has seen the enterprise deals, they are not subsidised in any way shape or form. Anthropic may wave the seat fee, maybe get lower "expected" consumption. This changes what the company pays up front. but token prizing is fixed.
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> API pricing drops DRAMATICALLY in enterprise agreements
Do you have any numbers or reports to back that up?
> Just as Anthropic isn’t paying AWS SES $10,000,000 to send 1 email update
How much do you think emails cost? That number is just so far off?
But besides that, running SES is also quite a bit cheaper than SOTA ai models with high demand (and comparatively) no competition. And quite a bit more pressure to make money (soon).
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Have you or I misunderstood the "teams" plan?
edit: I missed the "enterprise" feature matrix with the usual audit/compliance stuff to force the biggest enterprise customers onto enterprise plans. Otherwise the "teams" plan is much better value for any business.
orig-continued:
https://claude.com/pricing/team
Teams premium is "Everything in standard, plus more usage*"
And from my experience, it's a very generous usage, I've only hit the limits once or twice, and both times required multi-boxing agents.
I could single-window agentic development all day on opus-4.7 auto-mode without hitting limits.
If you're a business using claude, then that seems like the right plan, the enteprise/API plan seems more suited to where your product is built on top of the agent themselves, so seats/limits aren't really meaningful?
Claude Teams and Claude Enterprise are 2 distinct plans. Simon is right that Enterprise seats have no included usage (and so all usage is charged at API billing rates), whereas Teams seats do.
Tokens do have a clearly calculable intrinsic cost. There's the marginal cost of production (i.e. the inference cost) and the amortized R&D cost that goes into the model producing them.
Yes, value is hard to calculate, but luckily market pricing mechanisms exist exactly for this purpose. There isn't a better number to use than what people are willing to pay for them.
So he's saying that on an enterprise plan, he'd be spending $2,180.16. He's not paying that much, but enterprises are.
There’s a cost, certainly. I expect Anthropic knows. But we don’t know what that is.
Enterprises also use 200$ plans, they are not that stupid. They add a spill over API key for over usage.
OpenAI and Anthropic won't let them any more. Once you get above a certain size (I believe 150 seats) they push you onto the enterprise plans.
I don't believe you have the option to keep with the $200/month flat rate subscriptions any more. I'd be happy to be convinced otherwise.
(I dug into this a bit more and couldn't find anything in their consumer terms that say "you cannot use this personal account if your company has more than X people", so I imagine the pressure is more that your big company's purchasing department really doesn't like managing hundreds of individual subscriptions as opposed to a single, stable, predictable negotiated contract.)
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> “Tokens” don’t have an intrisic cost or value.
i am pretty sure these services know what it truly costs them to serve you tokens, maybe not in realtime but at least periodically.
however, what they charge us is a constant exercise in price discovery. i agree with this sentiment in the sense that we don't have a stable sense of the cost. all of these comparisons are good for the moment, or at most the near future.
i believe that even the "all you can eat" approach with the max plans, regardless of their crazy pricing, is not sustainable only with the power users. if most of us gets this kind of value through our plans, surely it does not incentivise the service providers to continue pushing it. maybe they can regardless just to gain market share, but not forever.
From my back of the envelope analysis for my own projects, paying per token on OpenRouter is competitive if not cheaper than running the same open weight model on a rented GPU. Per-token pricing is in the same ballpark (although more expensive) for closed frontier models and open weight models (cents to dollars per million). To me this says that the pricing is somewhat grounded in reality.
Are you comparing single-user requests or multiple concurrent requests when you say comparable to rented GPU? Most of the cost efficiencies kick in with concurrent/batch requests. A single H100 node can provide like 5k input + 2k output tok/s on a model like Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B with 30+ concurrent requests.
a little critical thinking led me to read that sentence as $2180 worth of tokens [at current api pricing]
Reminds me of a car dealership talking about how good of a deal their extended maintenance plan and warranties are.
His point is more he was surprised enterprises weren't getting the discount. And so indeed maybe it is not a giant ponzi after all! (Could be a bubble)
I think it's funnier that you can believe some things have an intrinsic cost and others don't
Lol. They obviously have intrinsic cost, the floor being the cost of electricity. It’s hilarious how we are throwing critical thinking out the window when it comes to evaluating biased sources of info.
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