Item — HN Reader

> A fully maxed-out ChatGPT Pro subscription burns through $14,000 a month of tokens at API prices. Claude Max lands near $8,000. You're paying $200.

The price you pay for a service is not necessarily driven by the cost it takes to provide said service. It is more driven by the value and the demand/supply curve.

Accessing an AI via APIs provides differential value (and usage patterns) than accessing it through a chat interface. So I would expect he price to be quite different.

1 comments

Thanks romshark for publishing my post here :) I'm the original writer so I'll try to answer this question from my perspective.

Agree, price and cost do come apart, and chat and API are quite different products with different dynamics. That's why the piece also uses a serving-cost estimate rather than raw API list price - the real number sits somewhere between the SemiAnalysis figure and hosting-cost estimates, and it's still 10x-plus what we pay for a subscription, depending on usage of course. Usage is where it gets more concrete, margins reportedly go underwater past roughly 11% of the plan limit, and around 5.7% on the top tier. So it's only a subsidy for the people actually hammering it.