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points by Moto7451 3 days ago | 0 comments

Anthropic is very good at either convincing or forcing (I’m not sure which) companies to pay for tokens rather than for subscriptions. My old job moved from subs to tokens and everyone started running out of budget mid month. It was a bad move for a company that laid off all of QA and 2/3 of Engineering and committed to everyone making up for it with LLMs.

[–] mosselman 3 days ago

I don't get this, why do people pay for API tokens at all? What is the reasoning?

[–] ghshephard 3 days ago

I don't think Anthropic or OpenAI offer subscriptions to enterprises - it's a hobbyist/solo-entrepreneur kind of thing. I seem to recall SpaceXAI had some kind of hack going where they were trying to use subs with Anthropic and then got cut off.

Enterprises also need very stringent IP protections that you don't get through the subscriptions. Even the Anthropic-API per token license isn't great - sometimes you need to go to 3rd parties like AWS Bedrock to get guarantees regarding no multi-tenant GPUs.

[–] darkwater 3 days ago

You can have subscriptions up to 150 seats with Anthropic.

[–] ghshephard 2 days ago

Ah - so I was somewhat, but not totally wrong. They do offer subs to SMB (I did not know this!) - but for the Enterprise (typically in thousands to tens of thousands) directed through other channels.

[–] mattnewton 3 days ago

Zero Data Retention is the big one I think (and also the ToS don't allow multiple personal accounts for businesses anyways)

[–] dools 3 days ago

I have only ever paid for tokens and never used subscriptions because I need to know that I can generate sufficient real world value at the true cost of inference.

[–] vidarh 2 days ago

This seems like setting money on fire. Nothing stops you from tracking token use on your subscriptions and tracking how much you would spend via APIs for if/when you can't use a sub any more, and taking the savings in the meantime.

[–] dools 15 hours ago

If the stakes aren't real your behaviour won't change

[–] kay_o 3 days ago

You are forbidden from the subscriptions on enterprise

[–] bonoboTP 3 days ago

Claude Teams exists.

[–] KptMarchewa 3 days ago

No Zero Data Retention there.

[–] rat9988 3 days ago

They don't have the choice to begin with