alt Hacker NewsI think it might be that they've hit product-market fit.
Developers find Claude Code extremely useful (once they figure out how to use it). Many developers subscribe to their $200/month plan. Assuming that's profitable (and I expect it is, since even for that much money it cuts off at a certain point to avoid over-use) Anthropic would be wise to spend a lot of money on marketing to try and grow their paying subscriber base for it.
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What makes it better than VSCode Co-pilot with Claude 4.5? I barely program these days since I switched to PM but I recently started using that and it seems pretty effective… why should I use a fork instead?
> since even for that much money it cuts off at a certain point to avoid over-use
if anything this just confirms that the unit economics are still bad
I just don’t see how they can build a moat.
I don’t feel like paying for a max level subscription, but am trying out MCP servers across OpenAI, Anthropic etc so I pay for the access to test them.
When my X hour token allotment runs out on one model I jump to the next closing Codex and opening Claude code or whatever together with altering my prompting a tiny bit to fit the current model.
Being so extremely fungible should by definition be a race to zero margins and about zero profit being made in the long run.
I suppose they can hope to make bank the next 6-12 months but that doesn’t create a longterm sustainable company.
I guess they can try building context to lock me in by increasing the cost to switch - but this is today broken by me every 3-4 prompts clearing the context because I know the output will be worse if I keep going.
> Many developers subscribe to their $200/month plan.
There's no way "many developers" are paying $2,400 annually for the benefit of their employers.
There's no way companies are paying when they won't even fork out $700 a year for IntelliJ instead pushing us all onto VSCode.