The limits in the max subscriptions are more generous and power users are generating loss.

I'm rather certain, though cannot prove it, that buying the same tokens would cost at least 10x more if bought from API. Anecdotally, my cursor team usage was getting to around 700$ / month. After switching to claude code max, I have so far only once hit the 3h limit window on the 100$ sub.

What Im thinking is that Anthropic is making loss with users who use it a lot, but there are a lot of users who pay for max, but don't actually use it.

With the recent improvements and increase of popularity in projects like OpenClaw, the number of users that are generating loss has probably massively increased.