alt Hacker News> the market loves pay per use, see ”cloud”.
Cloud goes on the books as recurring revenue, not one-off; even though it's in principle elastic, in practice if I pay for a VM today I'll usually pay for one tomorrow.
(I don't have the numbers but the vast majority of cloud revenue is also going to be pre-committed long-term contracts from enterprises.)
> I don’t think Anthropic has any desire to be some B2C platform
This is the best line of argument I can see. But still not clear to me why my OP doesn't apply for enterprise, too.
Maybe the play is just to force other companies to become MCPs, instead of enabling them to have a direct customer relationship.
Sure, but even if a subscription and per per use are both recurring revenue, pay per use is not a subscription. The point I was trying to make is that there’s a lot of money to be made in the model Anthropic seems to be going for, more than a monthly subscription fee would allow for.