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I think it’s lagging indicator. There were signs of saturation in the end of 2025. From 2025 to March 2026 average developer ai spent gone from $20/mo to at least $200. In my company it’s $1000-1500/mo to anthropic only.

In many cases this 20x+ increase over 3 mo.

This is going in other industries too. Claude cowork is just an example and beginning of the trend.

Show me any product that / company that charge you 20x and customers are happy , well its anthropic

I dont know what world you/I are living in. I do ask claude to enumerate/explain concepts i am not familiar with. I never approached the free tier limit (is there one?). At work, we have a webpage which ia basically a chat to different models, sometimes i use it

Would I be paying 20€ to ask those questions? I dunno, i dont feel any particular need. Would I be paying 200€?! Are you insane hell no

People aren't paying $200 to chat, they're paying to have ClaudeCode or Cowork or Claude for Chrome do the work instead.
The question should really be what is the reservation price of existing buyers.

At some point the price will rise. But the value has to have risen for existing buyers to be ok with that - but can they perceive the value? Hmmm difficult to tell. Benchmarks are not an objective way to measure that.

In the long run google is most likely to acquire a serious cost advantage given their level of vertical integration.

We've been experimenting with claude code handling jira tickets and opening PR -- we're starting with Opus. It costs about $1 per PR that gets merged-- how much does it cost to have a software engineer do that PR? That's your price sensitivity. It will only get cheaper as models get more efficient and people get better at using them, though.
You’re operating in a micro perspective.

Managers of firms care about impact of financials. They don’t care about the metrics you are measuring / gaming. Ultimately all ‘progress’ has to show in the cash flows.

Are you taking more cost reduction projects and more revenue-generating projects? Are you actually delivering? Are customers perceiving you to be as trusted as before? Etc. are the only things that matter. ‘Show me the money’.

To me this is akin to the discussion re. Scrum, agile etc. Who cares? Show me the money.

Totally agree. We cut the scrum this week it is so impractical in the modern world.
This week my spending is > $2000 , and my ceo is very happy, another top user burned $1600.

You personally will not pay , but these who will will replace people who are not productive.

That’s actually the limiting factor. There will be top 5% of developers who will throw away on the street remaining 95%. No EU socialism will protect the rest . It is very unclear what is the new world market , with no web developers , no custom dashboard teams , no analytics teams , no devops whose role is to babysit human devs. From one side it’s a market for opportunity to automate , but human devs are generators of unlimited inefficiencies. Once the market settles down , the demand for lots of tools will shrink.

On my spendings to anthropic . I’m a manager, and top user I burn tokens on tickets creation , planing , even sprint filtering , for sure the most went to coding. Bugs are getting fixed by just sharing a screenshot and a sentence or two of description in 80% of the cases , all the way including to PR creation and making sure release is live and good with tests.

There are ways to cut the cost a bit , maybe 30-40% but it’s not practical .

sure, can't wait to see traders having chatGPT license and trying to convince it to explain the P&L lol. But what do I know
Eh? Is the average developer paying 200$ a month?

I mean, I imagine some top% vibe coding bros paying 200$. I would require some serious evidence that the average developer pays for it.

I certainly wouldn't. It's moderately useful, but not 200$/mo useful.

The "average" in the YC microcosm, I assume.
My work pays for the $200 sub for me. At work in a typical 5h slot I tend to use 35~40% of the usage limit, so the $100 sub wouldn’t let me keep my current workflow and AI usage but I am more often than not using 2x the $100 sub. We’ll see if they keep paying for this or not, because we are not yet sure if using AI like this is sustainable and worth the tech debt of moving faster
But that is your employer paying a license (probably in bulk, I have no idea how much B2B sales cost for AI). My employer pays licenses for a lot of things that I probably wouldn't pay personally.

The person I was replying to said the average developer pays 200$. I call bullshit on that one.

People forgot the price of full msdn back in the day or any "SDK", Low code shit etc.

And I doubt someone can have the cognitive load to follow 10 Claude max. Let alone 1.

I just payed $2300 this week only. I had a few greenfield projects