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Comment by deadbabe | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s pretty clear what the purpose of this stuff is: get people so invested into the Claude ecosystem with certs and “modernization kits”, so that when the subsidies end and subscription costs shoot up they feel they’re in too deep now to switch to something cheaper.

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> so that when the subsidies end and subscription costs shoot up

Subscription costs are capped to API rates as their ceiling (and, realistically, way lower than that - why would you even subscribe if you could just go pay-what-you-use instead), and those are already at a big margin for Anthropic. What still costs them a fuckton of money comparatively is training, but that is only going to get more efficient with more purpose-built hardware on the way.

Basicallly, I don’t see much of a reason to hike subscription prices dramatically. I don’t think they’ll stay at $100/$200 but anyone who’s paying that already knows how much value they’re getting out of that and probably wouldn’t mind paying more.

I'm not sure what you mean, if you max out your subscription perhaps? If you pay $100 and don't use it, you don't get refunded $100 because it's 'capped to API rates' which would've been 0.

He means that anthropic cannot increase the price of the sub because the users can just switch to the regular API pricing which consequently puts a ceiling on the cost of the sub.

Nobody would use a $1k sub if using the API pricing would only cost $500 for comparative service.

For the record, I'm only explaining what he put forward.

I don't agree with the opinion, mainly for two reasons:

The API cost can be increased in conjunction, hence the ceiling is just as variable

The harness is even more important then the model ime, and Claude Code is getting better every month. Even though the alternatives are getting better too, they're at least currently significantly worse IME - I'd say at least 3-6 months behind (compounded by the model, ofc).

And as a third point, unrelated to the original argument: there is no way anthropic is actually treating the sub as a loss leader. It is not cheap. It's only cheap compared to their API pricing, which they can freely set however they want. Compare their pricing to free models like Kimi k2.5 etc. I sincerely doubt anthropics model costs more to run then theirs, and they're profitable at 30% of the price anthropic charges.

> He means that anthropic cannot increase the price of the sub because the users can just switch to the regular API pricing

Not that they cannot increase the price, just that there's a cap on how high they realistically can go. Sure, they can always hike API prices to compensate, but I think people are seriously sleeping on open models these days, because…

> *The harness is even more important then the model ime*, and Claude Code is getting better every month.

…I fully agree with this, and that’s actually the other reason why I don’t think we’ll approach predatory pricing. Right now, the moat is still mostly the model, but as open models improve and become more capable, this is quickly going to shift.

And the truth is that Claude Code just isn’t that great of a harness. Anyone who uses an open-source harness and optimizes it for their personal, individual workflow will quickly realize this. And I’m not even blaming Anthropic or the CC team or calling them incompetent; they are in the unenviable position to have been trailblazers. There weren’t any comparable tools before CC that they could’ve learned from.

The future lies in harnesses that are multi-model, extensible, and have full access to and control over the model’s API, context, and system prompt. Claude Code has none of those things. You can only ever bend it into a shape that approximates your workflow; you can never use it as a tool that natively supports it.

Oh, on that we can agree on! I was using opencode for the last few months, the main reason I went back to cc was for opus, and me preferring the sub over regular API pricing as I'm not using it professionally, only as a hobby. (At work I'm constrained to Copilot. Which is fine at this point, not great but definitely improving - esp. when run as CLI)

I am still hoping for a local first model approach with voice command to generate the main prompt which starts of the plan mode.

Like interactively going through the project while pointing at files or in the UI and possibly browser via the mouse and explaining while "talking" with a dumber but super quick model that acts as a questioner, to wrap things up with higher latency over the wire with the highly capable models.

I suspect that approach is still a few months to years away from viability for latency reasons, but I'm definitely looking forward to that UX

Now huge amount of investment pays for training. This investment expects some returns, to be able to both turn profit and continue the training, rates must be much, much higher.

> I think it’s pretty clear what the purpose of this stuff is: get people so invested into the Claude ecosystem with certs and “modernization kits”, so that when the subsidies end and subscription costs shoot up they feel they’re in too deep now to switch to something cheaper.

It worked for cloud services :-)

Did it? AWS seems to be getting cheaper over time, not more expensive.

> Did it? AWS seems to be getting cheaper over time, not more expensive.

It was cheaper prior to them issuing certificates, then it got expensive.

Do you have a source for that? Certainly things like compute and other services that I'm aware of are objectively cheaper, so I'm curious what has gone up.

Or what if local models get good enough to threaten the server based product?

That is the biggest threat - and likely where things will end up eventually… it’s when that “eventually” is and what the server based providers can pivot to in that time.

This will probably happen unless the industry conspires to roll back the availability of general computation so common people can only own computers with enough power to be glorified thin clients. The way this might look is good hardware never officially being banned, just priced too high for anybody to afford, and produced in small quantities to keep it that way while all production shifts to making massively expensive powerful hardware for corporate buyers.

Seems unlikely. We're already seeing specialized hardware optimized for LLM performance (taalas, groq, cerebras), and simple economies of scale result in these sorts of products being a better value when rented from a server vs purchased/managed/upgraded for the typical the user.

Frontier models will continue to be either exclusively available from servers or significantly more affordable from servers vs local alternatives for the foreseeable future.

They're good enough already.

The moat is only

a) post-training magic for the elusive UX "vibes"

b) stickiness of the Claude UI's.

The first part will be eventually (give it a couple years) solved by a LoRA marketplace.

The second is not relevant because existing UI's are very sticky already and Claude won't be able to overcome decades of inertia anyways.

That and the price of hardware

Enshittifocation x rent seeking is the future of aithoritarian capitalism.

I recommend everyone explore local models.

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