I don't think the assumption that Anthropic is losing money on subscriptions holds up. I think each additional customer provides more revenue than the cost to run their inference, on average.

For people doing work with LLMs as an assistant for codebase searching, reviews, double checks, and things like that the $20/month plan is more than fine. The closer you get to vibecoding and trying to get the LLM to do all the work, the more you need the $100 and $200 plans.

On the ChatGPT side, the $20/month subscription plan for GPT Codex feels extremely generous right now. I tried getting to the end of my window usage limit one day and could not.

> so the "just another $20 SaaS" argument doesn't sound too good

Having seen several company's SaaS bills, even $100/month or $200/month for developers would barely change anything.