SemiAnalysis has calculated how big that gap really is. After testing subscription tiers from both OpenAI and Anthropic – running long-horizon coding and agentic tasks until weekly...
This is just Gym Economics though, right? They work on the assumption that only a small number of their member will actually use the service heavily, but the overwhelming majority will turn up to use the treadmill a few times then never visit again.
Ok but it would take 70 users paying $200 to cover the cost of $14,000. So if one person maxes out their usage, there needs to be 69 users who do not use their account at all but are still paying. And that’s just the break even point, still no profit for the AI company.
I’m struggling to believe that many people would pay that much and then underuse the subscription. It seems far more likely to me that this pricing model isn’t sustainable.
Even worse, that calculation is based on that their API pricing is currently providing a positive margin. From what I have seen and heard at this point, API pricing is at best breaking even.
This is just Gym Economics though, right? They work on the assumption that only a small number of their member will actually use the service heavily, but the overwhelming majority will turn up to use the treadmill a few times then never visit again.
Ok but it would take 70 users paying $200 to cover the cost of $14,000. So if one person maxes out their usage, there needs to be 69 users who do not use their account at all but are still paying. And that’s just the break even point, still no profit for the AI company.
I’m struggling to believe that many people would pay that much and then underuse the subscription. It seems far more likely to me that this pricing model isn’t sustainable.
Even worse, that calculation is based on that their API pricing is currently providing a positive margin. From what I have seen and heard at this point, API pricing is at best breaking even.