alt Hacker NewsI think this is shortsighted.
The markets value recurring subscription revenue at something like 10x “one-off” revenue, Anthropic is leaving a lot of enterprise value on the table with this approach.
In practice this approach forces AI apps to pay Anthropic for tokens, and then bill their customers a subscription. Customers could bring their own API key but it’s sketchy to put that into every app you want to try, and consumers aren’t going to use developer tools. And many categories of free app are simply excluded, which could in aggregate drive a lot more demand for subscriptions.
If Anthropic is worried about quota, seems they could set lower caps for third-party subscription usage? Still better than forcing API keys.
(Maybe this is purely about displacing other IDE products, rather than a broader market play.)
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There's no decision to be made here, it's just way too expensive to have 3rd parties soak up the excess tokens, that's not the product being sold.
Especially as they are subsidized.
That’s not true, the market loves pay per use, see ”cloud”. It outperforms subscriptions by a lot, it’s not ”one-off”. And your example is not how companies building on top tend to charge, you either have your own infrastructure (key) or get charged at-cost + fees and service costs.
I don’t think Anthropic has any desire to be some B2C platform, they want high paying reliable customers (B2B, Enterprise).
I think they are smart making a distinction between a D2C subscription which they control the interface to and eat the losses for vs B2B use where they pay for what they use.
Allows them to optimize their clients and use private APIs for exclusive features etc. and there’s really no reason to bootstrap other wannabe AI companies who just stick a facade experience in front of Anthropic’s paying customer.