8 ms·

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
        nl 1y ago
        Why would they want to be profitable? Genuine question. Profit is for companies that don't have anything else to spend money on, not ones trying to grow.
        1y ago
      - lelanthran 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. The only answer that matters is the one to the question "how much more are you making per month from your $200/m spend?"
        jarredkenny 1y ago
        In terms of revenue for my startup, plenty more.
  - 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.

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
        nl 1y ago
        Why would they want to be profitable? Genuine question. Profit is for companies that don't have anything else to spend money on, not ones trying to grow.
        1y ago
    - lelanthran 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. The only answer that matters is the one to the question "how much more are you making per month from your $200/m spend?"
      - jarredkenny 1y ago
        In terms of revenue for my startup, plenty more.
- 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.