I don't live in USA. I'm getting paid around $2500/month and that's good salary for developers here, plenty of folks are getting below that number.

So this pricing is just completely outside of our economics and nobody I know would pay that, no company will justify spending $20k/month when they can hire 10 more developers instead.

It is very interesting unfolding of events. Can't wrap my head around it completely.

I work at a smaller tech company (<300 people), and my friend showed me everyone's spending.

Our top user is at 10k a month, but the next highest is $2,000.

I would say the average is around $1,000-$1,500 for a developer.

We have completely unrestricted access to Claude, Codex, and Cursor.

Funny enough, the guy spending 10k is not even a dev by trade but an SME in what we work on that just vibe codes apps and somehow has not been cut off yet lol.

I have a single thread of GPT 5.5 medium running basically all work hours and I am around $1,500 a month in spend on Enterprise pricing.

I think you are broadly correct, but just to pushback on a few points: (1) Ability to solve hard problems in days vs weeks as immense value (2) Back-end improvements (if done right), should improve platform speed, stability, scalability etc. which should have revenue implication (3) Ability to on-board a SWE equivalent entity in minutes, have them work on a specific hard problem and then off-board them in minutes can have value

All of the above, of course, depends upon Fable consistently being a 2x-3x SWE at minimum.

> Is 20x the token cost worth it there?

No it doesn’t and will not be. Companies have not realised the cost yet, wait till the end of the financial year and you’ll see a different direction.

DeepSeek v4 is pretty decent, and probably on par with sonnet. I see a future of hybrid models where opus or fable might be used only for complicated features or bugs, but general day to day would be DeepSeek or whatever good models that will be released later.

> So Fable would cost me 20k/mo at Enterprise rates

That's enough to buy a house in my country...

Eventually solving for cost is a much easier problem than solving coding.

I recently switched off Max flat rate to Enterprise API pricing and I went from 200/mo to 10k/mo with the same usage pattern on Opus. They don’t offer flat rate to enterprises.

So what keeps your management from just buying everyone individual flat-rate Max subscriptions, or at least buying them for the users responsible for the sky-high token invoices?

I see a lot of comments like this but I don't understand why some people willingly pay so much more than others for the exact same service. What are you getting that I don't get as a $100/mo Max subscriber?

>I switched to DeepSeek v4 Pro with OpenCode and am on track for a few hundred dollars of spend this month.

I was about to say that. Deepseek is just magnitudes cheaper and absolutely good enough for most things. Anthropic and co just try to milk the cow while its possible. If they cant compete with Deepseek pricing I do not see a bright future for them.

With GPT 5.5 on the $100 plan, it's hard to hit any 5h/7d limits - while allegedly being better than DeepSeek 4 pro. Not sure why, or how you spend "a few hundred dollars of spend".

With that said, I still had the Pro plan on Claude, I didn't expect much, but it blew up my 5h allowance on Fable with one simple single prompt, and it didn't even complete lmao

Do you understand that, for 10-20k a month, you can hire 1-2 senior engineers AND give them Claude subscriptions?