Cross posting from a comment on another sub as I feel it is relevant here.

Just to put this revenue into perspective, especially with the recent controversy over usage limits:

Current estimates of Claude’s daily active users is around 18-30m (source)

Hypothetically, if literally every single user was on a 20x max plan for $200, they would contribute roughly $3.6-$6b each month. This is obviously not the case.

It is reported that enterprise customers (\~300,000) make up 80% of revenue, so regular consumers are at most contributing $6b annually, not monthly. This revenue stream is growing rapidly, and they now report 500 customers paying >$1m annually. That means 500 enterprise accounts contribute the same revenue as nearly 10% of all regular consumers accounts. (source)

For the past year we’ve talked about how discounted the Claude code plans are, compared to paying the same amount in API usage, which enterprise does. Personally I use both, and a single day of 20x plan usage would easily cost me over $100 in API.

Consumer accounts are heavily subsidized by enterprise, and while it doesn’t feel good getting throttled by Anthropic, it is simply a practical business decision. My hypothesis is that consumer Claude code plans utilize a deprioritized pool of excess compute at a fixed price, and that pool is shrinking because enterprise needs it. Look at the chart, their revenue has nearly tripled since the start of this year. That means enterprise usage has likely tripled, and the pool of subsidized compute has shrunk by a third.

This is pretty standard practice for the industry, albeit communicated more transparently. Cloud compute providers offer ‘spot’ pricing, which is heavily discounted compute that can be reclaimed at a moments notice when a customer paying full price requests it.

Consumer Claude code plans are simply spot pricing. Yes it sucks, no it’s not communicated transparently, but it is unfortunately pretty fair and likely to continue. 

Yes I am sick of seeing usage limit complaint spam on unrelated posts. Feel free to take your anger out on me, I’m not saying I’m happy about this I’m just saying it’s the reality.

Consumer Claude Code plans are spot pricing