alt Hacker NewsSubscriptions are heavily subsidized. 80% of their revenue comes from consumption-based pricing, which is not heavily subsidized (and probably not subsidized at all). The trouble is that this revenue is not especially reliable. If and when OpenAI gets the upper hand again, the consumption-based revenue could crater.
This may also be why OpenAI punted on their IPO: Anthropic has had the lead for most of 2026, so their consumption-based revenue is probably not looking pretty.
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> Subscriptions are heavily subsidized
Revenue less compute & infrastructure less sales, marketing & partnerships is positive!
I've heard this a lot that the consumption-based pricing would be easy to switch, but I don't feel like that's how it works in B2B subscriptions. At the company I'm at, we have Anthropic subscriptions for employees. Switching to OpenAI would be a ton of work involving legal, IT, and every employee. I actually think there's a lot of stickiness even if OpenAI has some better frontier models.
subscriptions use already paid for compute in the holes left by high paying api customers, its hardly subsidised, if you look at it objectively, subscriptions are 100% margin
> Subscriptions are heavily subsidized.
The only subsidization that matters is if they are selling the tokens for a loss.
Yes the $200 plan provides more than $200 of tokens, but that doesn't mean that it's losing money, either on average or on a case by case basis. The realistic alternative isn't that every $200-plan-user pays the full Api price, it's that they pay Anthropic $0.