Thats... sort of wild, and I would think unsustainable with other offerings available
No, that's the whole business model -- the subscription plans are a teaser with mixed-to-low profitability, but they're self-serve, have low support demand, and create a breadth of familiarity and brand attachment. It's a genuinely good deal for individuals and small businesses but represent a subsidized marketing program for Anthropic and OpenAI.
Enterprise sales are where the revenue for the $1T valuations comes from. If they were forced by competition to offer subscriptions to all those organizations, they'd blow up tomorrow.
What other offerings? The other providers are either similarly priced for enterprises, or nonstarters for security reasons (there's very real concern in enterprises about hosted open models being modified to covertly inject security vulnerabilities, and it's not cost effective to self-host them.)
ChatGPT does a similar thing
My personal ChatGPT account is a Business account with 2 seats at $30/ea (minimum 2 seats required).
Why? Because for $60 you get ChatGPT Pro, significantly cheaper than the $100 normally required for the next level personal plan!
Is that some sort of legacy pricing? because on https://chatgpt.com/pricing/?type=team I see an option of either £15/ month or £75/ month, per seat, 2 seats required. So it's more expensive than a single £89/ month pro subscription.
How is 2 x 15 more expensive than 89?
The 2x15 is not ChatGPT Pro you're getting, it's the equivalent of the "Plus" plan. So yes, you can get 2 "Plus" subscriptions for more money than it would cost to get them as a personal ones.
The 2 x 15 gets you the permission to use Claude at API rates, it comes with no or minimal usage.
no, it works because they are the best. What other offering is there?
It doesnt matter if they are the best. For the same reason hundreds of orgs are on microsoft teams right now. Large companies often care about raw dollars and cents a lot more than "actual lift per dollar". I hesitate to even speculate how much more the api pricing is for them at that scale. I know for me personally its something like 10-25x cheaper to be on subscription pricing. The only way to combat that is to set aggressive dollar limits, which seems counterproductive if we are going to argue the whole reason they are on the platform is because its "the best" and they dont mind paying for the privilege.