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I’ve always dwelled over $5 a month subscriptions for iPhone apps due to subscription fatigue. I find myself signing up for $200 AI subscriptions without a mom

I’ve always dwelled over $5 a month subscriptions for iPhone apps due to subscription fatigue. I find myself signing up for $200 AI subscriptions without a moments hesitation.

smith7018 1y ago
I hope both of you know that you're in the extreme minority, right?
- jarredkenny 1y ago
  A very productive minority.
  - Forgeties79 1y ago
    Have we seen any examples of any of these companies turning a profit yet even at $200+/mo? My understanding is that most, if not all, are still deeply in the red. Please feel free to correct me (not sarcastic - being genuine). If that is the case at some point the music is going to stop and they will either perish or they will have to crank up their subscription costs.
    - jarredkenny 1y ago
      I am absolutely benefitting from them subsidizing my usage to give me Claude Code at $200/month. However, even if they 10x the price its still going to be worth it for me personally.
      - Forgeties79 1y ago
        I totally get that but that’s not really what I asked/am driving at. Though I certainly question how many people are willing to spend $2k/mo on this. I think it’s pretty hard for most folks to justify basically a mortgage for an AI tool.
        jarredkenny 1y ago
        My napkin math is that I can now accomplish 10x more in a day than I could even one year ago, which means I don't need to hire nearly as many engineers, and I still come out ahead. I use claude code exclusively for the initial version of all new features, then I review and iterate. With the Max plan I can have many of these loops going concurrently in git worktrees. I even built a little script to make the workflow better: http://github.com/jarredkenny/cf http://github.com/jarredkenny/cf
        Forgeties79 1y ago
        Again I understand and I don’t doubt you’re getting insane value out of it but if they believed people would spend $2000 a month for it they would be charging $2000 a month, not 1/10th of that, which is undoubtedly not generating a profit. As I said above, I don’t think a single AI company is remotely in the black yet. They are driven by speculation and investment and they need to figure out real quick how they’re going to survive when that money dries up. People are not going to fork out 24k a year for these tools. I don’t think they’ll spend even $10k. People scoff at paying $70+ for internet, a thing we all use basically all the time. I have found it rather odd that they have targeted individual consumers for the most part. These all seem like enterprise solutions that need to charge large sums and target large companies tbh. My guess is a lot of them think it will get cheaper and easier to provide the same level of service and that they won’t have to make such dramatic increases in their pricing. Time will tell, but I’m skeptical
        nl 1y ago
        > As I said above, I don’t think a single AI company is remotely in the black yet. As I note above, Anthropic probably is in the black. $4B ARR, and spending less than $100M on training models.
        Forgeties79 1y ago
        It looks like their revenue has indeed increased dramatically this year but I can’t find anything saying they’re profitable, which I assume they’d be loudly proclaiming if it had happened. That being said looking at the charts in some of these articles it looks like they might pull it off! I need to look more closely at their pricing model, I wonder what they’re doing differently
      - tomjakubowski 1y ago
        I'm curious, how are you accounting this? Does the productivity improvement from Claude's product let you get your work done faster, which buys you more free time? Does it earn you additional income, presumably to the tune of somewhere north of $2k/month?
      - WJW 1y ago
        You would honestly pay 2k a month to an AI tool? Do you not have other costs like a mortgage or rent?
    - nl 1y ago
      It's possible Anthropic is cash-flow positive now. Claude 3.7 Sonnet supposedly cost "a few tens of millions of dollars"[1], and they recently hit $4B ARR[2]. Those numbers seem to give a fair bit of room for salaries, and it would be surprising if there wasn't a sustainable business in there. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/25/anthropics-latest-flagship-ai-might-not-have-been-incredibly-costly-to-train/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/25/anthropics-latest-flagship... [2] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-revenue-hits-4-billion-annual-pace-competition-cursor-intensifies https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-revenue-hi...
      - joks 1y ago
        Cost to train and cost to operate are two very different things
  - acmj 1y ago
    Are there studies to show those paying $200/month to openai/claude are more productive?
    - jfim 1y ago
      Anecdotally, I can take on and complete the side projects I've always wanted to do but didn't due to the large amounts of yak shaving or unfamiliarity with parts of the stack. It's the difference between "hey wouldn't it be cool to have a Monte Carlo simulator for retirement planning with multidimensional search for the safe withdrawal rate depending on savings rate, age of retirement, and other assumptions" and doing it in an afternoon with some prompts.
      - OccamsMirror 1y ago
        For curiosity, how complex are these side projects? My experience is that Claude Code can absolutely nail simple apps. But as the complexity increases it seems to lose its ability to work through things without having to burn tokens on constantly reminding it of the patterns it needs to follow. At the very least it diminishes the enjoyment of it.
        ido 1y ago
        Simple apps are the majority of use-cases though - to me this feels like what programming/using a computer should have been all along: if I want to do something I’m curious about I just try with Claude whereas in the past I’d mostly be too lazy/tired to program after hours in my free time (even though my programming ability exceed Claude’s).
        OccamsMirror 1y ago
        Well that's why I'm curious. I've been reading a lot of people talking about how the Max plan has 100x their productivity and they're getting a ton of value out of Claude Code. I too have had moments where Claude Code did amazing things for me. But I find myself in a bit of a valley of despair at the moment as I'm trying to force it to do things I'm finding out that it's not good at. I'm just worried that I'm doing it wrong.
- christina97 1y ago
  The point is that if a minority is prepared to pay $200 per month, then what is the majority prepared to pay? I also don’t think this is such an extreme priority, I also know multiple people in real life with these kinds of selections.
  - jrflowers 1y ago
    >if a minority is prepared to pay $200 per month, then what is the majority prepared to pay? Nothing. Most people will not pay for a chat bot unless forced to by cramming it into software that they already have to use
    - bicx 1y ago
      It's a generic chat LLM product, but ChatGPT now has over 20 million paid subscribers. https://www.theverge.com/openai/640894/chatgpt-has-hit-20-million-paid-subscribers https://www.theverge.com/openai/640894/chatgpt-has-hit-20-mi...
      - sgt 1y ago
        So $415m revenue per month, annualized $5 billion / yr. Let's say we use a revenue multiple of 4x, that means OpenAI should be valued at $20 billion USD just based on this. Then one obviously has several other factors, given the nature of OpenAI and future potential. Maybe 10x more. Which puts the current valuations I've heard pretty much in the right ballpark. Crazy, but it could make sense.
    - swat535 1y ago
      Forget chat bots, most people will not pay for Software, period. This is _especially_ true for developers in general, which is very ironic considering how our livelihood is dependent on Software.
      - oytis 1y ago
        Yeah, cause we want to be in control of software, understandably. It's hard to charge for software users have full control of - except for donations. That's #1 reason for me to not use any gen AI at the moment - I'm keeping an eye on when (if) open-weight models become useful on consumer hardware though.
- wrsh07 1y ago
  Yes, but that doesn't mean they aren't finding real value The challenge with the bubble/not bubble framing is the question of long term value. If the labs stopped spending money today, they would recoup their costs. Quickly. There are possible risks (could prices go to zero because of a loss leader?), but I think anthropic and OpenAI are both sufficiently differentiated that they would be profitable/extremely successful companies by all accounts if they stopped spending today. So the question is: at what point does any of this stop being true?
  - Graphon1 1y ago
    > I think anthropic and OpenAI are both sufficiently differentiated that they would be profitable/extremely successful companies by all accounts if they stopped spending today. Maybe. But that would probably be temporary. The market is sufficiently dynamic that any advantages they have right now, probably isn't stable defensible longer term. Hence the need to keep spending. But what do I know? I'm not a VC.
- bicx 1y ago
  Are there available numbers to support this? Software engineering in the U.S. is well-compensated. $200/mo is a small amount to pay if it makes a big difference in productivity.
  - benburleson 1y ago
    Which raises the question: If the productivity gains are realized by the employer, is the employer not paying this subscription?
    - unshavedyak 1y ago
      My day job in talks to do that. I'm partly responsible for that decision, and i'm using my personal $200/m plan to test the idea. My assessment so far is that it is well worth it, but only if you're invested in using the tool correctly. It can cause as much harm as it can increase productivity and i'm quite fearful of how we'll handle this at day-job. I also think it's worth saying that imo, this is a very different fear than what drives "butts in seats" arguments. Ie i'm not worried that $Company will not get their value out of the Engineer and instead the bot will do the work for them. I'm concerned that Engineer will use the tool poorly and cause more work for reviewers having to deal with high LOC. Reviews are difficult and "AI" provides a quick path to slop. I've found my $200 well worth it, but the #1 difficulty i've had is not getting features to work, but in getting the output to be scalable and maintainable code. Sidenote, one of the things i've found most productive is deterministic tooling wrapping the LLM. Eg robust linters like Rust Clippy set to automatically run after Claude Code (via hooks) helps bend the LLM away from many bad patterns. It's far from perfect of course, but it's the thing i think we need most atm. Determinism around the spaghetti-chaos-monkeys.
  - joks 1y ago
    Perceived productivity or actual productivity?
bakugo 1y ago
A fool and his money are soon parted.
OtherShrezzing 1y ago
What do you do with $200/mo subscription to Anthropic? I’d consider myself a power user and I’ve never come close to a rate limit on the $20 subscription.
- Implicated 1y ago
  If you're using Claude Code with any regularity then the $200/m plan is better than a Costco membership in value.
- lumost 1y ago
  Anecdotally, usage rises precipitously when you are building a system from scratch with unlimited ai access.
- crazylogger 1y ago
  Depends a lot on the way people use them. If you discusses a plan with CC well upfront, covering all integration points where things might go off rail, perhaps checkpoint the plan in a file then start a fresh CC session for coding, then CC is usually going to one shot a 2k-LoC feature uninterrupted, which is very token efficient. If the plan is not crystal clear, people end up arguing with CC over this and that. Token usage will be bad.
vonnik 1y ago
I personally find gemini 2.5 pro and o4.1 mini to handle complexity better than claude code. i was a power user of claude code for a couple months but its bias to action repeatedly led me down the wrong path. what am i missing?
- OccamsMirror 1y ago
  I'm finding myself agreeing with you... After also being a Max plan power user. Now I just find myself exasperated at its choices and constant forgetfulness.
- rtcoms 1y ago
  how do you integrate that with a code editor ?

I’ve always dwelled over $5 a month subscriptions for iPhone apps due to subscription fatigue. I find myself signing up for $200 AI subscriptions without a moments hesitation.

smith7018 1y ago

I hope both of you know that you're in the extreme minority, right?

jarredkenny 1y ago
A very productive minority.
- Forgeties79 1y ago
  Have we seen any examples of any of these companies turning a profit yet even at $200+/mo? My understanding is that most, if not all, are still deeply in the red. Please feel free to correct me (not sarcastic - being genuine). If that is the case at some point the music is going to stop and they will either perish or they will have to crank up their subscription costs.
  - jarredkenny 1y ago
    I am absolutely benefitting from them subsidizing my usage to give me Claude Code at $200/month. However, even if they 10x the price its still going to be worth it for me personally.
    - Forgeties79 1y ago
      I totally get that but that’s not really what I asked/am driving at. Though I certainly question how many people are willing to spend $2k/mo on this. I think it’s pretty hard for most folks to justify basically a mortgage for an AI tool.
      - jarredkenny 1y ago
        My napkin math is that I can now accomplish 10x more in a day than I could even one year ago, which means I don't need to hire nearly as many engineers, and I still come out ahead. I use claude code exclusively for the initial version of all new features, then I review and iterate. With the Max plan I can have many of these loops going concurrently in git worktrees. I even built a little script to make the workflow better: http://github.com/jarredkenny/cf http://github.com/jarredkenny/cf
        Forgeties79 1y ago
        Again I understand and I don’t doubt you’re getting insane value out of it but if they believed people would spend $2000 a month for it they would be charging $2000 a month, not 1/10th of that, which is undoubtedly not generating a profit. As I said above, I don’t think a single AI company is remotely in the black yet. They are driven by speculation and investment and they need to figure out real quick how they’re going to survive when that money dries up. People are not going to fork out 24k a year for these tools. I don’t think they’ll spend even $10k. People scoff at paying $70+ for internet, a thing we all use basically all the time. I have found it rather odd that they have targeted individual consumers for the most part. These all seem like enterprise solutions that need to charge large sums and target large companies tbh. My guess is a lot of them think it will get cheaper and easier to provide the same level of service and that they won’t have to make such dramatic increases in their pricing. Time will tell, but I’m skeptical
        nl 1y ago
        > As I said above, I don’t think a single AI company is remotely in the black yet. As I note above, Anthropic probably is in the black. $4B ARR, and spending less than $100M on training models.
        Forgeties79 1y ago
        It looks like their revenue has indeed increased dramatically this year but I can’t find anything saying they’re profitable, which I assume they’d be loudly proclaiming if it had happened. That being said looking at the charts in some of these articles it looks like they might pull it off! I need to look more closely at their pricing model, I wonder what they’re doing differently
    - tomjakubowski 1y ago
      I'm curious, how are you accounting this? Does the productivity improvement from Claude's product let you get your work done faster, which buys you more free time? Does it earn you additional income, presumably to the tune of somewhere north of $2k/month?
    - WJW 1y ago
      You would honestly pay 2k a month to an AI tool? Do you not have other costs like a mortgage or rent?
  - nl 1y ago
    It's possible Anthropic is cash-flow positive now. Claude 3.7 Sonnet supposedly cost "a few tens of millions of dollars"[1], and they recently hit $4B ARR[2]. Those numbers seem to give a fair bit of room for salaries, and it would be surprising if there wasn't a sustainable business in there. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/25/anthropics-latest-flagship-ai-might-not-have-been-incredibly-costly-to-train/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/25/anthropics-latest-flagship... [2] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-revenue-hits-4-billion-annual-pace-competition-cursor-intensifies https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-revenue-hi...
    - joks 1y ago
      Cost to train and cost to operate are two very different things
- acmj 1y ago
  Are there studies to show those paying $200/month to openai/claude are more productive?
  - jfim 1y ago
    Anecdotally, I can take on and complete the side projects I've always wanted to do but didn't due to the large amounts of yak shaving or unfamiliarity with parts of the stack. It's the difference between "hey wouldn't it be cool to have a Monte Carlo simulator for retirement planning with multidimensional search for the safe withdrawal rate depending on savings rate, age of retirement, and other assumptions" and doing it in an afternoon with some prompts.
    - OccamsMirror 1y ago
      For curiosity, how complex are these side projects? My experience is that Claude Code can absolutely nail simple apps. But as the complexity increases it seems to lose its ability to work through things without having to burn tokens on constantly reminding it of the patterns it needs to follow. At the very least it diminishes the enjoyment of it.
      - ido 1y ago
        Simple apps are the majority of use-cases though - to me this feels like what programming/using a computer should have been all along: if I want to do something I’m curious about I just try with Claude whereas in the past I’d mostly be too lazy/tired to program after hours in my free time (even though my programming ability exceed Claude’s).
        OccamsMirror 1y ago
        Well that's why I'm curious. I've been reading a lot of people talking about how the Max plan has 100x their productivity and they're getting a ton of value out of Claude Code. I too have had moments where Claude Code did amazing things for me. But I find myself in a bit of a valley of despair at the moment as I'm trying to force it to do things I'm finding out that it's not good at. I'm just worried that I'm doing it wrong.
christina97 1y ago
The point is that if a minority is prepared to pay $200 per month, then what is the majority prepared to pay? I also don’t think this is such an extreme priority, I also know multiple people in real life with these kinds of selections.
- jrflowers 1y ago
  >if a minority is prepared to pay $200 per month, then what is the majority prepared to pay? Nothing. Most people will not pay for a chat bot unless forced to by cramming it into software that they already have to use
  - bicx 1y ago
    It's a generic chat LLM product, but ChatGPT now has over 20 million paid subscribers. https://www.theverge.com/openai/640894/chatgpt-has-hit-20-million-paid-subscribers https://www.theverge.com/openai/640894/chatgpt-has-hit-20-mi...
    - sgt 1y ago
      So $415m revenue per month, annualized $5 billion / yr. Let's say we use a revenue multiple of 4x, that means OpenAI should be valued at $20 billion USD just based on this. Then one obviously has several other factors, given the nature of OpenAI and future potential. Maybe 10x more. Which puts the current valuations I've heard pretty much in the right ballpark. Crazy, but it could make sense.
  - swat535 1y ago
    Forget chat bots, most people will not pay for Software, period. This is _especially_ true for developers in general, which is very ironic considering how our livelihood is dependent on Software.
    - oytis 1y ago
      Yeah, cause we want to be in control of software, understandably. It's hard to charge for software users have full control of - except for donations. That's #1 reason for me to not use any gen AI at the moment - I'm keeping an eye on when (if) open-weight models become useful on consumer hardware though.
wrsh07 1y ago
Yes, but that doesn't mean they aren't finding real value The challenge with the bubble/not bubble framing is the question of long term value. If the labs stopped spending money today, they would recoup their costs. Quickly. There are possible risks (could prices go to zero because of a loss leader?), but I think anthropic and OpenAI are both sufficiently differentiated that they would be profitable/extremely successful companies by all accounts if they stopped spending today. So the question is: at what point does any of this stop being true?
- Graphon1 1y ago
  > I think anthropic and OpenAI are both sufficiently differentiated that they would be profitable/extremely successful companies by all accounts if they stopped spending today. Maybe. But that would probably be temporary. The market is sufficiently dynamic that any advantages they have right now, probably isn't stable defensible longer term. Hence the need to keep spending. But what do I know? I'm not a VC.
bicx 1y ago
Are there available numbers to support this? Software engineering in the U.S. is well-compensated. $200/mo is a small amount to pay if it makes a big difference in productivity.
- benburleson 1y ago
  Which raises the question: If the productivity gains are realized by the employer, is the employer not paying this subscription?
  - unshavedyak 1y ago
    My day job in talks to do that. I'm partly responsible for that decision, and i'm using my personal $200/m plan to test the idea. My assessment so far is that it is well worth it, but only if you're invested in using the tool correctly. It can cause as much harm as it can increase productivity and i'm quite fearful of how we'll handle this at day-job. I also think it's worth saying that imo, this is a very different fear than what drives "butts in seats" arguments. Ie i'm not worried that $Company will not get their value out of the Engineer and instead the bot will do the work for them. I'm concerned that Engineer will use the tool poorly and cause more work for reviewers having to deal with high LOC. Reviews are difficult and "AI" provides a quick path to slop. I've found my $200 well worth it, but the #1 difficulty i've had is not getting features to work, but in getting the output to be scalable and maintainable code. Sidenote, one of the things i've found most productive is deterministic tooling wrapping the LLM. Eg robust linters like Rust Clippy set to automatically run after Claude Code (via hooks) helps bend the LLM away from many bad patterns. It's far from perfect of course, but it's the thing i think we need most atm. Determinism around the spaghetti-chaos-monkeys.
- joks 1y ago
  Perceived productivity or actual productivity?

bakugo 1y ago

A fool and his money are soon parted.

OtherShrezzing 1y ago

What do you do with $200/mo subscription to Anthropic? I’d consider myself a power user and I’ve never come close to a rate limit on the $20 subscription.

Implicated 1y ago
If you're using Claude Code with any regularity then the $200/m plan is better than a Costco membership in value.
lumost 1y ago
Anecdotally, usage rises precipitously when you are building a system from scratch with unlimited ai access.
crazylogger 1y ago
Depends a lot on the way people use them. If you discusses a plan with CC well upfront, covering all integration points where things might go off rail, perhaps checkpoint the plan in a file then start a fresh CC session for coding, then CC is usually going to one shot a 2k-LoC feature uninterrupted, which is very token efficient. If the plan is not crystal clear, people end up arguing with CC over this and that. Token usage will be bad.

vonnik 1y ago

I personally find gemini 2.5 pro and o4.1 mini to handle complexity better than claude code. i was a power user of claude code for a couple months but its bias to action repeatedly led me down the wrong path. what am i missing?

OccamsMirror 1y ago
I'm finding myself agreeing with you... After also being a Max plan power user. Now I just find myself exasperated at its choices and constant forgetfulness.
rtcoms 1y ago
how do you integrate that with a code editor ?