alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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> 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'm guessing he's producing pretty valuable work. We have a few SMEs that vibe code tons of stuff with Claude. The only thing they really need tech for anymore is deployment and helping get their wheels unstuck on occasion.
Interesting! Would it be fair to say your company spend $100k to $150k per month on this?
Multiply this times many, many companies, and you can see how providing AI could theoretically be a good business to be in. Margins may be tight, though.
Also -- I'm convinced someone will figure out more use cases beyond software programming, which will result in many more companies spending $1k+ per employee per month.
It remains to be seen how much of this is a bubble.
At my company, most devs are under $1500 a month as well.
I’ve heard of a few cases of devs racking up bills fast, but it has typically been due to inefficient context usage. Like they just have one super long session with Opus 1M and are getting killed with input token costs and cache misses.
With careful context management and some thought into good approaches to problems, I have personally only rarely even hit $1k in regular use.