💸 A $200 Subscription, but $14,000 in Tokens: How Developers Bankrupt AI Labs
SemiAnalysis compared OpenAI and Anthropic subscriptions with API pricing: intensive coding tasks revealed huge losses for the labs.
Analysts at SemiAnalysis bought the top-tier OpenAI and Anthropic plans and ran heavy programming tasks on them until they hit the limits. The goal was to find out which is better value: a subscription or the API.
The results break the economics:
- The conventional assumption is that a $200/month subscription gives you roughly $2,000 worth of tokens at API prices.
- In reality, Claude Max manages to burn through almost $8,000 worth of tokens for that money, resulting in up to a 900% loss for the company.
- And ChatGPT Pro pushed to its limits reaches a whopping $14,000, with a negative margin of 1650%.
The bottom line: AI giants live off “lazy” subscribers. Once a user starts squeezing everything out of a subscription, the companies plunge deep into the red. The API business is clearly healthier.
Have you run into limits on the pro plans, or do you go straight to the API for work?