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Yeah — I just created an anthropic API key to experiment with pi, and managed to spend $1 in about 30 minutes doing some basic work with Sonnet.

Extrapolating that out, the subscription pricing is HEAVILY subsidized. For similar work in Claude Code, I use a Pro plan for $20/month, and rarely bang up against the limits.

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And it scales up - the $200 plan gets you something like 20x what the Pro plan gets you. I've never come close to hitting that limit.

It's obviously capital-subsidized and so I have zero expectation of that lasting, but it's pretty anti-competitive to Cursor and others that rely on API keys.

Ignoring the training costs, the marginal cost for inference is pretty low for providers. They are estimated to break even or better with their $20/month subscriptions.

That being said, they can't stop launching new models, so training is not a one time task. Therefore one might argue that it is part of the marginal cost.

I ran ccusage on my work Max account and I spend what would cost $300 a week if it was billed at API rates.

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