$200 a month with Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 won't let you replace a $12.5k / month employee - but it's cheap enough that everyone, including you and even your employees, will want to see how much utility they can squeeze out of it.

This is a price to get people hooked up, yes, but also to get them to explore all kinds of weird tricks and wacky workflows, especially ones that are prohibitively costly when billed per token. In some sense, this is crowdsourcing R&D - and then when Opus 7 or whatever comes along to take advantage of best practices people worked out, and that turns out to be good enough to replace your $150k/yr / $12.5k/mo employee - then they'll jack up prices to $10k/month or whatever.