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Anthropic is a bit nuts, I had $260 of credits on my max account for the extra usage the other night. It was expiring, so I figured I'll fire up an agentic swar

Anthropic is a bit nuts, I had $260 of credits on my max account for the extra usage the other night. It was expiring, so I figured I'll fire up an agentic swarm to deep dive and make some deep changes to some old cold bases.. literally 25 minutes or less, $260 burnt, it didn't get get into the implementation, just wrote a ton of useless plans for the most part. It really opened my eyes to what they expect to charge people.. wayyyy overpriced.

polishdude20 1mo ago
You should just spend those towards a cursor subscription.
cortesoft 1mo ago
It’s crazy how different the credit cost and subscription cost are. With the $200 subscription, I can have Fable on ultracode working for hours and not dent the usage limits.
- AlexandrB 1mo ago
  VCs are footing the bill for that $200 subscription.
  - ericd 1mo ago
    They have something like 80% gross margins, are at a $100B/yr ARR, and are growing at 10x per year... If that keeps up, they're going to be doing more revenue than Google in a year ($400B ARR, 20% per year growth)
    - dexwiz 1mo ago
      How can you sanely project the last 12 months forward? We have seen a huge uptick in usage. Last summer AI was a toy to most devs, now every enterprise developer I talked to uses it every day. Coding agent providers are surely going to hit market saturation in the near future.
      - ericd 1mo ago
        Maybe, maybe not. Personally, I hope local AI eats their lunch so that the benefits are more decentralized and accrue more to society generally. I don't think you're right about that last prediction, at all. And new use cases are opening up as these get smarter. I think things are going to get pretty weird. But the point was that it really doesn't look like they're losing money on users, on average.
    - deleted 1mo ago
      [deleted]
    - senordevnyc 1mo ago
      Where did that $100B figure come from? I thought they were at ~10B at the end of 2025, so they're either not at 100B yet, or they're growing way faster than 10x / year.
      - ericd 1mo ago
        Good question, I heard it on a podcast, but going back to the transcript, looks like that's their forecast, not that they've hit it, they estimated a current $70B, but they've been revising their forecasts up, so yeah, it's probably >10x. Latest solid number they reported was $47B in May.
        senordevnyc 1mo ago
        Wild.
  - ux266478 1mo ago
    At last, a valid usecase for VCs.
    - dionian 1mo ago
      i'll take it, just hope they dont rugpull us soon. im sure its coming
  - riknos314 1mo ago
    The $200 sub is customer acquisition cost to hook devs that then become the marketing team trying to get their company to bring in Claude (at the highly profitable API price).
- notatoad 1mo ago
  yeah, i tried out GLM-5.2 when the news was all full of hype for that, and it's fine... definitely better value that API rates for claude. but comparing the value i got from that to the value i get from a claude max subscription... claude is way cheaper.
aenis 1mo ago
I managed to lose around $300 in credits I had saved for some emergency /fast sessions the following way: switch to Fable. Work on the design. Downgrade to Opus for the build. If any of other parallel Opus session has /fast enabled it seems to enable it for the newly spawned session by default. Before I knew it, the $300 was gone. I think the bug is now solved, but it was rather unpleasant. I dont ever remember bugs that would drain my wallet - with claude code its just another Tuesday. Still love it.
- tempest_ 1mo ago
  I dont love it. Opus 5 is just a token burner. I use fable plan and spawn opus 4.8 workflows which seems to work alright.
  - robbru 1mo ago
    Opus 5 loves to stop working "for safety reasons" and shuts down the session! I avoid it at all costs now. Opus 4.8 has been my default as well.
  - aenis 1mo ago
    I suspect it must depend on how one manages their codebase - wrt to docs, ADRs, and general guardrails. For me it is not great for design work - Fable is way better, and 4.8 was conservative and thus better (Opus 5 seems to jump to conclusions far more eagerly). But for overnight builds, where I give it 8hrs worth of work on LLDs created by Fable - its great. Where Opus 4.8 would often lose the plot and stop for questions clearly answered in the LLD - Opus 5 does manage to complete. Since it launched, I don't remember it ever disappointing me with builds. But designs? Boy, is this thing explosively stupid sometimes.
    - tempest_ 1mo ago
      Designs, docs, the claims it makes, ignores instructions, "defers" things constantly leaving incomplete work. Maybe I am "holding it wrong"(tm) but I find it frustrating to work with.
  - 1mo ago
mikae1 1mo ago
And at that cost they're still not profitable. It's going to be a bumpy road ahead...
- arrowleaf 1mo ago
  I thought they are making a profit on API pricing? A quick Google shows somewhere between 50-70% margins on API inference.
  - bakugo 1mo ago
    API pricing is almost definitely profitable, but at this point I assume it's a small minority of their inference traffic compared to subscription usage, and unlikely to make up for the rest of their expenses on its own.
    - enedil 1mo ago
      Why would you assume so when companies 150+ people can only use API pricing? My assumption is that more people use Claude at work than personally.
- arikrahman 1mo ago
  Meanwhile I can do all that and more with reasonix harness for Deepseek with a cache hit rate of 99%. And that's with unsubsidized American providers like cloudflare or Digital Ocean
- tyre 1mo ago
  People keep saying this but from what we’ve seen, Anthropic models are marginally profitable and earn back their costs over their lifetime. The company is burning money building the next versions and other ventures (e.g. verticals), but the models themselves have been profitable.
  - gamblor956 1mo ago
    They're EBITDA profitable, not GAAP profitable.
criddell 1mo ago
> wayyy overpriced Maybe they consider that hiring a person to do it would have cost at least as much and taken much more time, so paying them is a bargain.
- echelon 1mo ago
  Yeah, but now we can hire the Chinese instead for 1/100th the cost. It's an even better deal. Plus we get to own, keep, run, do whatever with the model. We don't feel trapped. Moreover, it's something we can truly build on top of and own our own destiny. Anthropic and OpenAI are the new Oracle (Oracle pre-AI; Oracle is even worse now). Expensive, feels like dealing with a lawyer, and not at all open. They just became infinitely less cool than they were a month ago. The whole of our industry is going to migrate to open weights. We're smart enough to know this is the better deal and technical enough to be able to pull it off. The only thing that might save these OpenAI and Anthropic in the near-term is an abundance of enterprise contracts negotiated with non-tech companies. They'll soak consulting firms and F500 companies for "AI" integrations.
  - criddell 1mo ago
    > the new Oracle I think that's exactly what they are going for - enterprise and government customers.
pvtmert 1mo ago
Anthropic is the new AWS. Amazon's first principle is the Customer Obsession. Making customers happy. Fun bit is that the human psychology rates personal looking fixes better than having no issues at all. For example, AWS overcharges you, you contact support, and more or less hassle free they refund or issue credits. The customer feels appreciated, or at least got something "extra" or "special treatment". Meanwhile, any other (small) cloud. Simple, no weird charges. Even _most_ of network egress is free. But, no reason to call support or feel "extraordinary". Comes out as "meh" against Amazon's "top tier" support model...
- john01dav 1mo ago
  Anthropic's constant changing of its mind leads to instability which leads to unhappy customers
- axpy906 1mo ago
  I’ve never gotten a refund from Athropic.
  - pvtmert 1mo ago
    Meanwhile they keep making _mistakes_ and announcing global token resets for everyone. (Like ones for Pro and Max users). Making them happy although Claude Code made them consume tokens faster or more than necessary in the first place.
- riknos314 1mo ago
  Aws is an infrastructure company that builds services on top of that infra to sell more of it at a higher margin. Anthropic trains models on AWS's (and GCPs, and Microslop's) infrastructure, then skims margin off of selling inference also on the infrastructure owned by the other companies. These are extremely different businesses.
swalsh 1mo ago
Its tough to go from max account at home and pay per usage enterprise account at work with heavy usage limits... but the limits are there because pricing is insane. Feel like I'm in the $5 Uber rides phase at home.
- hahahaa 1mo ago
  The Chinese models are the public transport in the uber analogy. Once the price the goes up catch the bus!
  - swalsh 1mo ago
    Lol perfect analogy. I'm still paying for claude because the quality is unmatched.
hahahaa 1mo ago
You plugged in a space heater on a roofless house. There is some element of responsibility on the user to guide and monitor the model/harness and not let it rip to burn tokens.
tarnith 1mo ago
Hint: The new models are really good at burning tokens. I've had to use it a bit for work, and it's been remarkable watching the degradation in performance with the default suggested current models (Opus 5 as a prime example) vs the models that got them huge attention a year ago (Opus 4.6) If you give 4.6 a spec, or existing code to implement a feature in, it will ask some pointed questions if there's something unclear in the spec, and then produce a plan and move to implement it. 5 will freak out at even a basic task, ask itself if it's own assumptions or your instructions are correct, proceed to re-assess it's own plan, and it's instructions 3-4 times, and then maybe produce code after burning several hundred thousand tokens (and quite a bit of time) analyzing existing code and thoroughly sweeping it for irrelevant problems both to the task it was given and the spec it came up with. It's quite bizarre to me how well advertised the benchmarks and anecdotes from people one shotting MVP browser games are, compared to the experience of everyone I know that's had to actually use it to accomplish even a relatively basic task.
- km144 1mo ago
  The entire ecosystem of CC is designed to facilitate burning tokens. You have to ask the LLM to write a script for the app to tell you which folder you're working in and which branch you're on. There are commands that just diagnose your Claude Code setup and try to "optimize" it. Adding skills or plugins bloats the context window. Developing plans means that you work through questions before you get to it in the code, but that matters way more for human programmers than LLMs, so it's probably just a waste of tokens.
brynnbee 1mo ago
I had same experience with OpenAI. I have the $200/month plan and use 5.6 Sol all the time. What would normally use about 2% of my weekly allowance burned through $100 of credits in 40 minutes.

polishdude20 1mo ago

You should just spend those towards a cursor subscription.

cortesoft 1mo ago

It’s crazy how different the credit cost and subscription cost are. With the $200 subscription, I can have Fable on ultracode working for hours and not dent the usage limits.

AlexandrB 1mo ago
VCs are footing the bill for that $200 subscription.
- ericd 1mo ago
  They have something like 80% gross margins, are at a $100B/yr ARR, and are growing at 10x per year... If that keeps up, they're going to be doing more revenue than Google in a year ($400B ARR, 20% per year growth)
  - dexwiz 1mo ago
    How can you sanely project the last 12 months forward? We have seen a huge uptick in usage. Last summer AI was a toy to most devs, now every enterprise developer I talked to uses it every day. Coding agent providers are surely going to hit market saturation in the near future.
    - ericd 1mo ago
      Maybe, maybe not. Personally, I hope local AI eats their lunch so that the benefits are more decentralized and accrue more to society generally. I don't think you're right about that last prediction, at all. And new use cases are opening up as these get smarter. I think things are going to get pretty weird. But the point was that it really doesn't look like they're losing money on users, on average.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - senordevnyc 1mo ago
    Where did that $100B figure come from? I thought they were at ~10B at the end of 2025, so they're either not at 100B yet, or they're growing way faster than 10x / year.
    - ericd 1mo ago
      Good question, I heard it on a podcast, but going back to the transcript, looks like that's their forecast, not that they've hit it, they estimated a current $70B, but they've been revising their forecasts up, so yeah, it's probably >10x. Latest solid number they reported was $47B in May.
      - senordevnyc 1mo ago
        Wild.
- ux266478 1mo ago
  At last, a valid usecase for VCs.
  - dionian 1mo ago
    i'll take it, just hope they dont rugpull us soon. im sure its coming
- riknos314 1mo ago
  The $200 sub is customer acquisition cost to hook devs that then become the marketing team trying to get their company to bring in Claude (at the highly profitable API price).
notatoad 1mo ago
yeah, i tried out GLM-5.2 when the news was all full of hype for that, and it's fine... definitely better value that API rates for claude. but comparing the value i got from that to the value i get from a claude max subscription... claude is way cheaper.

aenis 1mo ago

I managed to lose around $300 in credits I had saved for some emergency /fast sessions the following way: switch to Fable. Work on the design. Downgrade to Opus for the build. If any of other parallel Opus session has /fast enabled it seems to enable it for the newly spawned session by default. Before I knew it, the $300 was gone. I think the bug is now solved, but it was rather unpleasant. I dont ever remember bugs that would drain my wallet - with claude code its just another Tuesday. Still love it.

tempest_ 1mo ago
I dont love it. Opus 5 is just a token burner. I use fable plan and spawn opus 4.8 workflows which seems to work alright.
- robbru 1mo ago
  Opus 5 loves to stop working "for safety reasons" and shuts down the session! I avoid it at all costs now. Opus 4.8 has been my default as well.
- aenis 1mo ago
  I suspect it must depend on how one manages their codebase - wrt to docs, ADRs, and general guardrails. For me it is not great for design work - Fable is way better, and 4.8 was conservative and thus better (Opus 5 seems to jump to conclusions far more eagerly). But for overnight builds, where I give it 8hrs worth of work on LLDs created by Fable - its great. Where Opus 4.8 would often lose the plot and stop for questions clearly answered in the LLD - Opus 5 does manage to complete. Since it launched, I don't remember it ever disappointing me with builds. But designs? Boy, is this thing explosively stupid sometimes.
  - tempest_ 1mo ago
    Designs, docs, the claims it makes, ignores instructions, "defers" things constantly leaving incomplete work. Maybe I am "holding it wrong"(tm) but I find it frustrating to work with.
- 1mo ago

mikae1 1mo ago

And at that cost they're still not profitable. It's going to be a bumpy road ahead...

arrowleaf 1mo ago
I thought they are making a profit on API pricing? A quick Google shows somewhere between 50-70% margins on API inference.
- bakugo 1mo ago
  API pricing is almost definitely profitable, but at this point I assume it's a small minority of their inference traffic compared to subscription usage, and unlikely to make up for the rest of their expenses on its own.
  - enedil 1mo ago
    Why would you assume so when companies 150+ people can only use API pricing? My assumption is that more people use Claude at work than personally.
arikrahman 1mo ago
Meanwhile I can do all that and more with reasonix harness for Deepseek with a cache hit rate of 99%. And that's with unsubsidized American providers like cloudflare or Digital Ocean
tyre 1mo ago
People keep saying this but from what we’ve seen, Anthropic models are marginally profitable and earn back their costs over their lifetime. The company is burning money building the next versions and other ventures (e.g. verticals), but the models themselves have been profitable.
- gamblor956 1mo ago
  They're EBITDA profitable, not GAAP profitable.

criddell 1mo ago

> wayyy overpriced Maybe they consider that hiring a person to do it would have cost at least as much and taken much more time, so paying them is a bargain.

echelon 1mo ago
Yeah, but now we can hire the Chinese instead for 1/100th the cost. It's an even better deal. Plus we get to own, keep, run, do whatever with the model. We don't feel trapped. Moreover, it's something we can truly build on top of and own our own destiny. Anthropic and OpenAI are the new Oracle (Oracle pre-AI; Oracle is even worse now). Expensive, feels like dealing with a lawyer, and not at all open. They just became infinitely less cool than they were a month ago. The whole of our industry is going to migrate to open weights. We're smart enough to know this is the better deal and technical enough to be able to pull it off. The only thing that might save these OpenAI and Anthropic in the near-term is an abundance of enterprise contracts negotiated with non-tech companies. They'll soak consulting firms and F500 companies for "AI" integrations.
- criddell 1mo ago
  > the new Oracle I think that's exactly what they are going for - enterprise and government customers.

pvtmert 1mo ago

Anthropic is the new AWS. Amazon's first principle is the Customer Obsession. Making customers happy. Fun bit is that the human psychology rates personal looking fixes better than having no issues at all. For example, AWS overcharges you, you contact support, and more or less hassle free they refund or issue credits. The customer feels appreciated, or at least got something "extra" or "special treatment". Meanwhile, any other (small) cloud. Simple, no weird charges. Even _most_ of network egress is free. But, no reason to call support or feel "extraordinary". Comes out as "meh" against Amazon's "top tier" support model...

john01dav 1mo ago
Anthropic's constant changing of its mind leads to instability which leads to unhappy customers
axpy906 1mo ago
I’ve never gotten a refund from Athropic.
- pvtmert 1mo ago
  Meanwhile they keep making _mistakes_ and announcing global token resets for everyone. (Like ones for Pro and Max users). Making them happy although Claude Code made them consume tokens faster or more than necessary in the first place.
riknos314 1mo ago
Aws is an infrastructure company that builds services on top of that infra to sell more of it at a higher margin. Anthropic trains models on AWS's (and GCPs, and Microslop's) infrastructure, then skims margin off of selling inference also on the infrastructure owned by the other companies. These are extremely different businesses.

swalsh 1mo ago

Its tough to go from max account at home and pay per usage enterprise account at work with heavy usage limits... but the limits are there because pricing is insane. Feel like I'm in the $5 Uber rides phase at home.

hahahaa 1mo ago
The Chinese models are the public transport in the uber analogy. Once the price the goes up catch the bus!
- swalsh 1mo ago
  Lol perfect analogy. I'm still paying for claude because the quality is unmatched.

hahahaa 1mo ago

You plugged in a space heater on a roofless house. There is some element of responsibility on the user to guide and monitor the model/harness and not let it rip to burn tokens.

tarnith 1mo ago

Hint: The new models are really good at burning tokens. I've had to use it a bit for work, and it's been remarkable watching the degradation in performance with the default suggested current models (Opus 5 as a prime example) vs the models that got them huge attention a year ago (Opus 4.6) If you give 4.6 a spec, or existing code to implement a feature in, it will ask some pointed questions if there's something unclear in the spec, and then produce a plan and move to implement it. 5 will freak out at even a basic task, ask itself if it's own assumptions or your instructions are correct, proceed to re-assess it's own plan, and it's instructions 3-4 times, and then maybe produce code after burning several hundred thousand tokens (and quite a bit of time) analyzing existing code and thoroughly sweeping it for irrelevant problems both to the task it was given and the spec it came up with. It's quite bizarre to me how well advertised the benchmarks and anecdotes from people one shotting MVP browser games are, compared to the experience of everyone I know that's had to actually use it to accomplish even a relatively basic task.

km144 1mo ago
The entire ecosystem of CC is designed to facilitate burning tokens. You have to ask the LLM to write a script for the app to tell you which folder you're working in and which branch you're on. There are commands that just diagnose your Claude Code setup and try to "optimize" it. Adding skills or plugins bloats the context window. Developing plans means that you work through questions before you get to it in the code, but that matters way more for human programmers than LLMs, so it's probably just a waste of tokens.

brynnbee 1mo ago

I had same experience with OpenAI. I have the $200/month plan and use 5.6 Sol all the time. What would normally use about 2% of my weekly allowance burned through $100 of credits in 40 minutes.