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timcobb | on: Claude Fable 5
Ooof so are we thinking that in the next 6-12 months subscriptions will be replaced with paying retail like enterprise currently?
CuriouslyC | parent | next
I don't think they'll phase out subscriptions ever, their whole play has been to drive demand from the bottom up. Get engineers hooked on building with claude at home, then get them to demand the ability to use it at work, and bend over their employer with no lube.

They'll probably tighten the quotas to reign in whales though.

aseipp | parent | next
They almost certainly already make a fuckload more money off API pricing than they do subscriptions, even if there might be more total subscription users. So offering subscriptions even at some loss is probably going to continue. Honestly, I'd be surprised if they even lost money on most subs; there are definitely Token Whales out there who mess up all the accounting up, though.

Realistically I think Anthropic just has insane demand but finite capacity to run models, and Fable will just make them more money if they dedicate it to API pricing. I suspect the goal here is something like: get individual engineers/PMs on their personal plans to taste Fable and then go to their meetings and say "Yes doubling the price of every single input/output token is a good idea, boss".

timcobb | root | parent | next
But I don't want to be the developer who goes and says we must pay all this money for these tokens. I don't know who wants to be that developer.
gck1 | root | parent
But how is this sustainable? It's not like paying $5000 per feature means you'll be refunded if prompting "make no mistakes" didn't work.

The only reason why I pay $200 is because LLM's errors costs me that much, at worst. If "make no error" starts working - sure. But surely, unless you have millions of dollars of cash to burn, a coin flip that costs $5000 is an insane idea?

thewebguyd | parent | next
I certainly hope not. PAYG is not predictable enough for smaller companies or individuals. Where I work (non-tech company), PAYG would never fly. We aren't big enough for that. Of course, you can set usage budgets, but there's a pretty big difference between $200/user/month vs. the equivalent PAYG usage being closer to $1,000/user/month, if you currently use the subscription plan to its limits each week.

Going PAYG only will effectively take these tools away from a huge amount of people and accelerate the push for local LLMs.

OTOH, accelerating the push for local LLMs would also be fine with me.

ygjb | parent
I doubt it, given the importance of those subscriptions for building and maintaining market awareness.

The AI landscape is changing rapidly, and with Apple announcing the option to change the AI backend, and potential requirements enable AI choices as well, similar to EU browser choice requirements (this is more reading tea leaves than any actual requirements I am aware of). The new OS changes coming to support Googlebook, and deep Copilot/AI integration into Windows will make maintaining user facing subscriptions essential for independent model developers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistal to remain relevant longer term.

If the don't maintain that relevance there is increasing likelihood that they will get consumed by other companies whether it's Apple, Microsoft or Google to form a foundation for their OS, or other cloud providers.

timcobb | root | parent
That make sense, but what about the specific bifurcation we're seeing here of super primo models versus still good models being available to subscriptions?

It's kind of annoying not getting access to the primo model and paying 200 bucks a month. I understand 200 bucks a month is basically nothing though.

Like I don't totally understand why they'd let me have it for a couple weeks and then take it away and say I can have it but I have to pay retail and retail is like $1,000 a day.

It's better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all??

ygjb | root | parent
It's a trade-off. Every hyperscaler is buying and building compute capacity as fast as they can dodge red tape. There is limited compute capacity, and scarcity is a real thing.

As a consumer I can choose to buy subscriptions to a range of things, including $5 droplets or VMs on a broad range of cloud hosting providers. I can even buy cheap bare metal at a bunch of providers at an affordable retail rate.

I can also buy "unlimited" AI packages that will be optimized to fit the cost model from a variety of services, with different impacts, such as rolling outages when I consume a daily or hourly allotment.

Right now VC and the investor class are subsidizing the rapid evolution of the services and availability, but that VC is running out. In more traditional economies, AI would have developed and rolled out more slowly, and through metered subscriptions, with the eventual rolling out of "unlimited" packages like telephone, internet, or cell services once the market became commoditized.

We have seen a big inversion of that with the race to "win" AI marketshare. Now the true cost is being exposed, and the most competitive and capable models are hideously expensive to operate, so it makes sense that we are moving to metered billing for a utility service. If you want gas, you can buy regular or premium. If you have a premium car you definitely want the premium, but for most people regular is good.

Give it a couple of years, and the survivors will settle around fairly industry standard models of consumer grade services, pro-sumer accounts, and business/enterprise models.

Things are still shaking out, but I get the sadness. Luckily I work at a big tech company who is banging the drum on doing experimentation so I use my prosumer claude pro and other accounts at home for hobby stuff, and save my heavy lifting and potentially experimentation for work :P