alt Hacker NewsI'm not sure what you mean, if you max out your subscription perhaps? If you pay $100 and don't use it, you don't get refunded $100 because it's 'capped to API rates' which would've been 0.
I'm not sure what you mean, if you max out your subscription perhaps? If you pay $100 and don't use it, you don't get refunded $100 because it's 'capped to API rates' which would've been 0.
He means that anthropic cannot increase the price of the sub because the users can just switch to the regular API pricing which consequently puts a ceiling on the cost of the sub.
Nobody would use a $1k sub if using the API pricing would only cost $500 for comparative service.
For the record, I'm only explaining what he put forward.
I don't agree with the opinion, mainly for two reasons:
The API cost can be increased in conjunction, hence the ceiling is just as variable
The harness is even more important then the model ime, and Claude Code is getting better every month. Even though the alternatives are getting better too, they're at least currently significantly worse IME - I'd say at least 3-6 months behind (compounded by the model, ofc).
And as a third point, unrelated to the original argument: there is no way anthropic is actually treating the sub as a loss leader. It is not cheap. It's only cheap compared to their API pricing, which they can freely set however they want. Compare their pricing to free models like Kimi k2.5 etc. I sincerely doubt anthropics model costs more to run then theirs, and they're profitable at 30% of the price anthropic charges.