> I'm easily getting $10K/month of value from my Anthropic subscription. (Rough estimate of how much I would have paid someone else to create the things I've (co)created with Claude Code so far.)

I know it's hard to place a value on how much a utility saves a business, but honestly this math is like the piracy math and we didn't buy it back then either.

Some teenager downloading 20k songs does not mean that they saved $20k[1], nor does it mean that the record labels lost $20k.

In your case, the relevant question is "how much did your revenue increase by after you started 10x your utility code?"

[1] Assuming the songs are sold on the market for $1 each.

that seems like a silly way to think about it.

OP wanted a thing. in the past, they've been OK paying $10k for similar things. now they're paying $200/month + a bunch of their time wrangling it and they're also OK with that.

seems reasonable to consider that "$10k of value" in very rough terms which is of course how all value is measured.

> OP wanted a thing. in the past, they've been OK paying $10k for similar things.

Okay, then their costs should have come down similarly, no? OP said they were a business and that these weren't luxury hobby things but business needs. In which case, it must reflect on the bottom line.

I operate as a business myself (self-employed), and I can generally correlate purchases with the bottom line almost immediately for some things (Jetbrains, VPSes for self-hosted git, etc) and correlate it with other things in the near future (certifications, conferences, etc).

The idea that "here is something I recently started paying a non-trivial amount for but it does not reflect on the bottom line" is a new and alien concept to me.

When people made studio ghibli versions of themselves for free, were they creating hundreds of dollars worth of value since that's how much it would've cost a freelancer to commission such a picture? I would say rather the value of the pictures themselves became very cheap.