8 ms·

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 rat

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 Fable would cost me 20k/mo at Enterprise rates. That’s around the average cost of a loaded SWE in the USA. “But I’m >2x more productive” doesn’t justify doubling the opex of the Software/IT department for most companies when revenue isn’t even up 10%. I switched to DeepSeek v4 Pro with OpenCode and am on track for a few hundred dollars of spend this month. Rewriting your stack from Ruby to Go in 2 days where it would’ve taken 6 months is impressive and fun. But that isn’t upping revenue. Iterating on net new business features and ideas that are niche that the LLM isn’t trained for are much harder. Is 20x the token cost worth it there?

lionkor 3mo ago
Do you understand that, for 10-20k a month, you can hire 1-2 senior engineers AND give them Claude subscriptions?
- baq 3mo ago
  will they be a better investment than your current staff engineer with fable token allowance?
  - sph 3mo ago
    Are you seriously asking if employing people, for the same cost, is a better ‘investment’ than relying on LLMs? Jesus Christ.
    - baq 3mo ago
      I am because CEOs are. Look where the puck is going. Sorry to update your p(doom) priors in this way, it was obvious to anyone paying attention years ago conditioned on uplift trend persisting. Trend persisted and here we are.
    - sevenzero 3mo ago
      Welcome to the new world. People start to repeat what tech founders preach. They do not require humans in the mix. Peter Thiel gave a good example of that mindset in a (mostly) recent interview where he didn't have an answer on "Should humanity survive?" https://youtu.be/ngtp3v1_nCI https://youtu.be/ngtp3v1_nCI
    - mrits 3mo ago
      I’m asking this question right now.
    - braebo 3mo ago
      If I was offered another dev on my team or their salary in Claude credits, and told to meet a deadline with a gun to my head, I’m taking the credits.
  - lionkor 3mo ago
    Yes. Hiring people has various benefits, I will lay them out for you: - They learn the domain of your product, which means long term ownership and knowledge establishes itself. If you've only ever shipped SaaS slop, you might not know, but lots of companies are solving real world problems that have no better solution. Owning and understanding the code and the domain is key. - They will learn from their mistakes (no LLM does this). - Human skill is a REAL moat. Once you build a team that fully understands and is skilled in the domain you work in, these people are going to be the thing that sets you apart. If some of them are particularly social or charming, let them sit in with you for meetings and watch them provide loads of value, for no added cost. - If Claude or OpenAI is down, they will continue thinking. In fact, they will continue thinking even when off the clock! This is a neat little hack called "consciousness" where you get a lot of work for free! - You can hire people who punch above their weight; not everyone you hire needs to be a 500k/year staff software prime engineer of doom, you can just spend some time and effort to hire good juniors/competent mediors who will think for themselves (gasp!) and get work done. - You still get ALL THE BENEFITS OF AI!!!! They can use AI just like you can, or better! - You get people who you can brainstorm with, which is distinctly different from LLMs because your employees are less likely to want to suck you dry in every sentence just to make sure you spend more tokens. Employees don't care if you love them, they care about the quality of their work if you manage them correctly and reward that. - They are quite loyal if you treat them right; spend a little more on their well-being, and they will stick around, come in to work every day and deliver cool things with you. - Humans can only manage, review and give tasks to so many agents. If you add more humans, you can handle more agents. An expensive LLM and a lot of extra tooling gets you some of this, yes, but not all of it. With humans you can still do the expensive LLM and extra tooling if you end up making enough money anyway.
    - N_Lens 3mo ago
      I’m sorry sir this is HN, your post is too sensible.
    - itsdavesanders 3mo ago
      - AI works 24 hours a day - AI isn't bound by need for rest, vacations, sick days, or labor laws - AI doesn't bounce from company to company, taking your business knowledge with it (actually this isn't technically true based on the practices of AI companies, but that's not a technical requirement) - AI doesn't join a union and stop work in demand for higher pay or workers rights This is what CEOS and capitalists are thinking. For capital, the best outcome is to not have any labor at all. And if you can do that when your competitors can't, then you have a huge market advantage. (Slop notwithstanding) I'm not saying this is a "good thing" but this is what drives the market. Less labor revenue in the long term and money printing machines.
- lofaszvanitt 3mo ago
  why would you expose to a company what are you working on, in what way and on what research?
Oras 3mo ago
> 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.
sevenzero 3mo ago
>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.
- Saline9515 3mo ago
  Not only Deepseek, other providers such as Xiaomi MiMo are excellent as well and offer fast token modes and other perks.
  - sevenzero 3mo ago
    Its too bad my boss views China as the big evil country so he wont ever make the switch to Deepseek but then proceeds to throw all our data to US companies like OpenAI or Anthropic...
    - MaKey 3mo ago
      There are US providers for DeepSeek v4, MiMo 2.5 and GLM 5.1.
      - alkonaut 3mo ago
        Does the location help though, if the company isn't trusted? I can't even visit the webpages of these companies from my enterprise network
        sevenzero 3mo ago
        And even if so, I'll try to get rid of any US affiliations within my workplace, so US providers are not an option either.
        MaKey 3mo ago
zulgin 3mo ago
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.
- system2 3mo ago
  >pushback on a few points Claude keeps telling me this when I argue with it. LMAO.
  - UqWBcuFx6NV4r 3mo ago
    “gently push back”
- ahtihn 3mo ago
  > Back-end improvements (if done right), should improve platform speed, stability, scalability etc. which should have revenue implication Depends entirely on the domain. If you're selling entreprise software, this kind of stuff barely matters for sales. It can reduce operational costs which is good but there's a limit to how much that's worth.
  - UqWBcuFx6NV4r 3mo ago
    Yep, there are many, many, non-niche domains in which this doesn’t mean much at all.
- henry2023 3mo ago
  “Ability to solve hard problems in days vs weeks as immense value”. Citation needed. LlMs are incredible don’t get me wrong, but they are good on tiny contexts (writing a script). Not on software engineering (adding features to Chrome).
WinstonSmith84 3mo ago
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
- vbezhenar 3mo ago
  I'm on $200 plan which is supposedly 20x usage of $20 plan. With few Fable prompts (I'm working on u-boot port) I got 10% of my 5h usage, so that's already 2x of $20 plan usage and that would be 40% of $100 plan. So Fable is just not usable for $20 plan and barely usable for $100 plan.
- adrianvi 3mo ago
  Important to note that both OpenAI and Anthropic do not allow the subsidized monthly subscriptions for enterprises. Companies have to pay monthly for the harness app (codex, claude code) and the tokens are priced separately based on standard API pricing.
- matheusmoreira 3mo ago
  It's not just Pro! I have Max 5x and Fable absolutely blew up my 5h window. Didn't complete the code review either, and got downgraded back to Opus 4.8 on the really important memory safety parts I actually needed it for. It's an excellent model but Anthropic's not providing a good experience.
vbezhenar 3mo ago
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.
- jve 3mo ago
  Not justifying AI expenses, but $2500/mo could easily cost employer close to 5000$/mo depending on country.
  - cronin101 3mo ago
    Not doubting this at all but could you (or someone else) break this down for the sake of my curiosity? I understand pension contributions, but what are the other "hidden" costs that could equal the net salary?
    - Sammi 3mo ago
      A quick google tells me that software devs usually count for 20% to 40% of the total workforce in a software company. The rest is overhead that increases with every added dev.
      - tomasGiden 3mo ago
        And if one were to compare cost of a dev vs cost of an LLM, the dev comes with the cost of workspace, computers, sick pay, summer party, conferences and etc etc.
    - m_gloeckl 3mo ago
      Example from Germany: Employer also pays a share of health insurance, unemployment insurance, public pension and elder care insurance. This is not visible on your payslip, i.e. if you earn 5k€ brutto, the employer has to pay these shares on top of that.
busch_j 3mo ago
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.
- brokencode 3mo ago
  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.
- boplicity 3mo ago
  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.
- mywittyname 3mo ago
  > 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.
haolez 3mo ago
Eventually solving for cost is a much easier problem than solving coding.
matheusmoreira 3mo ago
> So Fable would cost me 20k/mo at Enterprise rates That's enough to buy a house in my country...
CamperBob2 3mo ago
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?
- lukax 3mo ago
  Zero data retention policies.
  - CamperBob2 3mo ago
    I get that with Max. (And nobody gets it with Mythos/Fable.)

lionkor 3mo ago

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

baq 3mo ago
will they be a better investment than your current staff engineer with fable token allowance?
- sph 3mo ago
  Are you seriously asking if employing people, for the same cost, is a better ‘investment’ than relying on LLMs? Jesus Christ.
  - baq 3mo ago
    I am because CEOs are. Look where the puck is going. Sorry to update your p(doom) priors in this way, it was obvious to anyone paying attention years ago conditioned on uplift trend persisting. Trend persisted and here we are.
  - sevenzero 3mo ago
    Welcome to the new world. People start to repeat what tech founders preach. They do not require humans in the mix. Peter Thiel gave a good example of that mindset in a (mostly) recent interview where he didn't have an answer on "Should humanity survive?" https://youtu.be/ngtp3v1_nCI https://youtu.be/ngtp3v1_nCI
  - mrits 3mo ago
    I’m asking this question right now.
  - braebo 3mo ago
    If I was offered another dev on my team or their salary in Claude credits, and told to meet a deadline with a gun to my head, I’m taking the credits.
- lionkor 3mo ago
  Yes. Hiring people has various benefits, I will lay them out for you: - They learn the domain of your product, which means long term ownership and knowledge establishes itself. If you've only ever shipped SaaS slop, you might not know, but lots of companies are solving real world problems that have no better solution. Owning and understanding the code and the domain is key. - They will learn from their mistakes (no LLM does this). - Human skill is a REAL moat. Once you build a team that fully understands and is skilled in the domain you work in, these people are going to be the thing that sets you apart. If some of them are particularly social or charming, let them sit in with you for meetings and watch them provide loads of value, for no added cost. - If Claude or OpenAI is down, they will continue thinking. In fact, they will continue thinking even when off the clock! This is a neat little hack called "consciousness" where you get a lot of work for free! - You can hire people who punch above their weight; not everyone you hire needs to be a 500k/year staff software prime engineer of doom, you can just spend some time and effort to hire good juniors/competent mediors who will think for themselves (gasp!) and get work done. - You still get ALL THE BENEFITS OF AI!!!! They can use AI just like you can, or better! - You get people who you can brainstorm with, which is distinctly different from LLMs because your employees are less likely to want to suck you dry in every sentence just to make sure you spend more tokens. Employees don't care if you love them, they care about the quality of their work if you manage them correctly and reward that. - They are quite loyal if you treat them right; spend a little more on their well-being, and they will stick around, come in to work every day and deliver cool things with you. - Humans can only manage, review and give tasks to so many agents. If you add more humans, you can handle more agents. An expensive LLM and a lot of extra tooling gets you some of this, yes, but not all of it. With humans you can still do the expensive LLM and extra tooling if you end up making enough money anyway.
  - N_Lens 3mo ago
    I’m sorry sir this is HN, your post is too sensible.
  - itsdavesanders 3mo ago
    - AI works 24 hours a day - AI isn't bound by need for rest, vacations, sick days, or labor laws - AI doesn't bounce from company to company, taking your business knowledge with it (actually this isn't technically true based on the practices of AI companies, but that's not a technical requirement) - AI doesn't join a union and stop work in demand for higher pay or workers rights This is what CEOS and capitalists are thinking. For capital, the best outcome is to not have any labor at all. And if you can do that when your competitors can't, then you have a huge market advantage. (Slop notwithstanding) I'm not saying this is a "good thing" but this is what drives the market. Less labor revenue in the long term and money printing machines.
lofaszvanitt 3mo ago
why would you expose to a company what are you working on, in what way and on what research?

Oras 3mo ago

> 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.

sevenzero 3mo ago

>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.

Saline9515 3mo ago
Not only Deepseek, other providers such as Xiaomi MiMo are excellent as well and offer fast token modes and other perks.
- sevenzero 3mo ago
  Its too bad my boss views China as the big evil country so he wont ever make the switch to Deepseek but then proceeds to throw all our data to US companies like OpenAI or Anthropic...
  - MaKey 3mo ago
    There are US providers for DeepSeek v4, MiMo 2.5 and GLM 5.1.
    - alkonaut 3mo ago
      Does the location help though, if the company isn't trusted? I can't even visit the webpages of these companies from my enterprise network
      - sevenzero 3mo ago
        And even if so, I'll try to get rid of any US affiliations within my workplace, so US providers are not an option either.
        MaKey 3mo ago

zulgin 3mo ago

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.

system2 3mo ago
>pushback on a few points Claude keeps telling me this when I argue with it. LMAO.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 3mo ago
  “gently push back”
ahtihn 3mo ago
> Back-end improvements (if done right), should improve platform speed, stability, scalability etc. which should have revenue implication Depends entirely on the domain. If you're selling entreprise software, this kind of stuff barely matters for sales. It can reduce operational costs which is good but there's a limit to how much that's worth.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 3mo ago
  Yep, there are many, many, non-niche domains in which this doesn’t mean much at all.
henry2023 3mo ago
“Ability to solve hard problems in days vs weeks as immense value”. Citation needed. LlMs are incredible don’t get me wrong, but they are good on tiny contexts (writing a script). Not on software engineering (adding features to Chrome).

WinstonSmith84 3mo ago

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

vbezhenar 3mo ago
I'm on $200 plan which is supposedly 20x usage of $20 plan. With few Fable prompts (I'm working on u-boot port) I got 10% of my 5h usage, so that's already 2x of $20 plan usage and that would be 40% of $100 plan. So Fable is just not usable for $20 plan and barely usable for $100 plan.
adrianvi 3mo ago
Important to note that both OpenAI and Anthropic do not allow the subsidized monthly subscriptions for enterprises. Companies have to pay monthly for the harness app (codex, claude code) and the tokens are priced separately based on standard API pricing.
matheusmoreira 3mo ago
It's not just Pro! I have Max 5x and Fable absolutely blew up my 5h window. Didn't complete the code review either, and got downgraded back to Opus 4.8 on the really important memory safety parts I actually needed it for. It's an excellent model but Anthropic's not providing a good experience.

vbezhenar 3mo ago

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.

jve 3mo ago
Not justifying AI expenses, but $2500/mo could easily cost employer close to 5000$/mo depending on country.
- cronin101 3mo ago
  Not doubting this at all but could you (or someone else) break this down for the sake of my curiosity? I understand pension contributions, but what are the other "hidden" costs that could equal the net salary?
  - Sammi 3mo ago
    A quick google tells me that software devs usually count for 20% to 40% of the total workforce in a software company. The rest is overhead that increases with every added dev.
    - tomasGiden 3mo ago
      And if one were to compare cost of a dev vs cost of an LLM, the dev comes with the cost of workspace, computers, sick pay, summer party, conferences and etc etc.
  - m_gloeckl 3mo ago
    Example from Germany: Employer also pays a share of health insurance, unemployment insurance, public pension and elder care insurance. This is not visible on your payslip, i.e. if you earn 5k€ brutto, the employer has to pay these shares on top of that.

busch_j 3mo ago

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.

brokencode 3mo ago
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.
boplicity 3mo ago
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.
mywittyname 3mo ago
> 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.

haolez 3mo ago

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

matheusmoreira 3mo ago

> So Fable would cost me 20k/mo at Enterprise rates That's enough to buy a house in my country...

CamperBob2 3mo ago

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?

lukax 3mo ago
Zero data retention policies.
- CamperBob2 3mo ago
  I get that with Max. (And nobody gets it with Mythos/Fable.)