What's is the 'retail cost'? Because nobody (except total idiots) is actually paying their published API pricing.

Most "enterprise" companies are paying full API costs. The subscription deals are only available to consumers. If you want enterprise levels of control over how your staff are using the models you need to pay up.

Not even close. "enterprise" companies are negotiating contracts. Call it pre-provisioned capacity, wholesale pricing, etc. Same is true for AWS, Azure, Salesforce, or literally any SaaS provider ever. There is a reason literally every single pricing page for any SaaS provider has an "Enterprise? call us" column.

The enterprise discounts are not as extreme as the personal subscriptions.

Unless you managed to talk them into that, in which case, share your secrets!

From what I've heard those enterprise negotiated discounts for Anthropic tend to be in the 15-30% range, which isn't anywhere near the deal you could get from using the $100/ or $200/ or $500/month subscriptions.

that still directly contradicts what you said above...

I said "most", not "all". I'll take that risk.

Do you have any data to back that up? Not really worried about which pronouns are used in this case

I do not have hard data that can support my claim that "most" Anthropic enterprise customers are paying full price. Just anecdotal evidence from stories like these:

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-pulse-token-spend-bre... - "I talked with companies spending $5M+ per year on Claude which have received no discounts. If Anthropic offers discounts, it will likely be at a much higher tier."

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-openai-fig... - "Anthropic’s discounts on its models can be around 15% off listed prices, according to managers from the three software firms that buy AI from both companies."

Plus my own personal conversations with a small number of people at medium to large sized companies who said that Anthropic's sales teams were hard to get discounts from.

Really? How much of anthropic's revenue is coming from API usage at public/retail rates (without discounts or credits)?

That information isn't public, but the closest we can get is from the S-1 telling us that for the nine months ending September 30, 2026, consumption-based (pay-per-token) revenue was $26.3bn, subscriptions were $6.9bn.

Page 140 of https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2130357/000162828026...

If that information is not public (of course it's not lol), I don't see why you would follow that up with stats that don't actually answer the question and imply they somehow get us closer to the answer...? do you own anthropic stock/options?

No, I deliberately don't own stock in the companies I write about (or any single companies at all, aside from a Vanguard index fund.)

I've learned enough that I am confident that enterprise companies pay a lot more for their tokens than $100/month subscribers, and that negotiated enterprise discounts don't change that fact in a meaningful way.

I don't disagree that they pay more, but how much more? The value/usage of a $100 sub is also fairly opaque and perpetually decreasing...

Most of their revenue comes from customers pay API pricing.

Those individual subscription plans you get as a consumer are not what their big enterprise customers are using.

Those plans are cheap so you, as an individual, can get familiar with the product and convince your company to get it at work. Your company pays the API prices to get enterprise features.

  > Those individual subscription plans you get as a consumer are not what their big enterprise customers are using.

maybe, maybe not.

i am sure there are companies that push individual employees to get the cheaper individual subscriptions

Big companies actually are paying published API rates, Anthropic and OpenAI models are desirable enough that there is very little wiggle room to negotiate. It's their way or the high way. Same with things like "safety" filters and (for Fable) mandatory data retention.