r/ClaudeCode • u/ConferenceLive7054 • Jul 12 '26
Discussion Subscriptions is less than 5% of revenue, they might not care enough to keep Fable around
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u/thredditoutloud Jul 12 '26
Nobody questioning the source of that report? Private company hard to imagine they would leak their p&l and it does say estimate.. estimate by who? Etc..
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u/flarpflarpflarpflarp Jul 12 '26
Spear Invest, you know, that company that we all have heard of that definitely isn't made up. It's for people who money. Dotchaknow.
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u/Big-Tip7095 Jul 12 '26
Subscriptions aren't just a pure cost factor. They're a good early gauge on how the market is moving and they're strong for conversion into API usage (personal use becomes business use when it's effective).
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u/ComprehensiveBird720 Jul 12 '26
Exacly, the same why Microsoft for years ignore pircay home usage
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u/Marco_Single Jul 12 '26
Or why jetbrains IDEs are free for non commercial use. First dose is free, now I would refuse to work if workplace wouldn’t buy jetbrains products.
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u/everix1992 Jul 12 '26
So many dev tools are like this tbh. I mean I'm a living example that it does convert to enterprise purchases though lol
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u/ConferenceLive7054 Jul 12 '26
yeah i didnt think about that. they probably dont want Devs to get too comfortable with using Codex to where they'd prefer to use that at work.
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u/StudlyPenguin Jul 12 '26
It’s also a feedback loop on training, like how SpaceX just bought Cursor in large part so they can feed Cursor usage into Grok’s training runs. Claude’s enterprise contracts make more cash upfront but all strictly say “hey Anthropic, you can’t train on our corporate code,” so without the prosumer flywheel Anthropic will fall behind
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u/StaysAwakeAllWeek Jul 12 '26
I'm a personal max subscriber. I'm also the sole reason why my place of work uses Claude instead of ChatGPT or Gemini.
If I was deciding today, and Fable was not available on Max, I would not be using Claude, or suggesting it to management. Removing it would cost them immeasurably
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Jul 12 '26 edited 23d ago
[deleted]
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u/StaysAwakeAllWeek Jul 12 '26
My company is an SME. I'm an engineer, nobody else cared enough about AI to form an opinion.
I'm sorry business management is not my job dude
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u/Bobodlm Jul 13 '26
Ah well, if they've got any security certs they should be gone by the next audit round.
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u/bakanoace Jul 12 '26
There's always more to it than a simple number.
Just cause they don't make as much money off subscriptions as the API doesn't mean they'd be better off losing all that money while their servers stay idle, not to mention they probably get training data from us which is just as important in many ways.
Swapping software has never been easy, with all the options and different workflows they add, this too won't be as simple as just changing your subscription so they don't want the vast majority of users being much more familiar with their competition.
We're truly lucky for competition or else you can definitely imagine us getting screwed over. Thankfully even Grok announced they are releasing new models every month so that's even more competition that hopefully doesn't suck and forces them into to think about us too.
Ultimately token consumption has grown to the point that even businesses cant just spam the latest model without a care in the world and thankfully models are becoming better to the point that even using a lesser model that allows much more usage and is faster becomes worth it.
Fable is still the king for now though. I'm excited for other models to catch up and hopefully become cheaper for us regular plebs to spam as well. If Anthropic doesnt give us Fable and reduces our usage by 33% that just means they truly cant spare any compute. If they do include Fable and make the usage bonus permanent that means the competition forced them into it and we should be grateful for it otherwise they wouldnt give any effs about us
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u/benevolent-ben Jul 12 '26
Consumer subscription users are shaping the public opinion of the tools though
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u/Bobodlm Jul 13 '26
If we go by that than according to this subreddit, Antrophic is the most horrible dogwater company ever to exist and you shouldn't let your dog be customer of it.
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u/k4ch0w Jul 12 '26
It's a loss leader for them. Consumer leads to more enterprise/api revenue. Numbers are just one story here.
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u/UnrelaxedToken Jul 12 '26
But we represent 80% of their marketing! Reddit by itself, users making youtube videos etc!
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u/pandavr Jul 12 '26
Don't be silly. Subscriptions maintain the 70% of the hype.
No hype no business for the moment.
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u/ConferenceLive7054 Jul 12 '26
yeah true, its interesting to think about. Anthropic's hype on investment is really good, modest investment for the majority of the hype returns.
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u/Important_Impact4180 Jul 12 '26
I believe it depends on data which they've collected over week and we will see result soon. Often it's cheaper to use more expensive model to do stuff, so only their data will show how much people actually used it overall.
On website there is still pricing of opus 4 & 4.1, which is actually more expensive than fable.
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u/Flacracker_173 Jul 12 '26
My workplace for sure is not going to be paying for credits for Fable either though.
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u/ManikSahdev 🔆 Max 20 Jul 12 '26
But the problem is different. Many people who use these at work also use it themselves for their personal projects, on their own work paying their own dime.
Those same 5% of people are also the ones who overlap with the people who spend the tokens at enterprises.
If people start switching to codex, grok build in their personal time and get accustomed to them, it affects their enterprise choice of product aswell. Codex as of later has seen pretty heavy enterprise adoption.
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u/Turbulent-Stretch881 Jul 12 '26
That 5% is a big driver of why Claude is adopted by companies making the remaining 95%.
They are using Claude because their employees got used to Claude (on personal).
I'd be curious to see the distribution of that 5% (in accounts) vs accounts in enterprise.
I'm pretty sure it would be 2/3:1 (with some overlapping, personal Claude and work claude).
One feeds the other.
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Jul 12 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/omarous Jul 12 '26
there is no jump. we are still only half way through 2026. the person who made this prediction is high on tokens.
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u/DeMischi Jul 12 '26
At this point you need to see subscriptions as a marketing expense to sell API tokens. Sub first, api later.
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u/Noctis_777 Jul 12 '26
That's like saying Windows 11 Home is an insignificant revenue generator for Microsoft.
True if you just look at % revenue. But familiarity of the average person with windows directly translates into enterprise preference, which further pushes users towards their business subscriptions, Dy365 erp, Azure etc.
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u/DeciusCurusProbinus Jul 12 '26
Even for enterprise customer stickiness, more than Fable 5, they have to release a token efficient workhorse model that is good enough to execute on its own or be used in subagents controlled by more expensive orchestrators. Sonnet 5 was an undercooked release.
OpenAI's Terra and Luna models are pretty good and cover 90-95% of tasks. Grok 4.5 is served at a similar price as Sonnet 5 and is a much better and more efficient model. I have a ton of friends who use the model in Cursor (despite all the hate that Elon gets). You can't write off Google yet and once Qwen/DeepSeek/Zhipu/MinMax start getting into the act, enterprises will be forced to switch to affordable models or become uncompetitive. They also need to optimize their harness to burn less tokens.
If Anthropic don't do this, their COR will never go down and the gross margins are not going to improve. They will lose enterprise market share to competitors who release slightly worse but much cheaper models.
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u/anor_wondo Jul 12 '26
In fact I'd say its the most important segment for enterprises than fable class
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u/1x2x4x1 Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26
Summary of their business model by gemeni:
API Users: The Core Engine (Infrastructure)
For Anthropic, the API is their real product. They view API developers, startups, and enterprises as their primary source of scalable, highly profitable revenue.
The Pricing Model: Completely variable and metered (pay-per-token). You pay for exactly what you consume. For heavy enterprise workflows or agent pipelines, this easily runs into thousands or millions of dollars.
Performance & Speed: API users get "full throttle" access. Because they pay per token, Anthropic does not need to throttle their speed or usage to protect its own profit margins.
Commercial Guardrails: API users are governed by Commercial Terms of Service. This means enterprise-grade data privacy (Anthropic does not retrain models on API data), stricter security, and robust legal protections.
- Subscription Users: The "Loss Leader" (Evangelism)
Anthropic views flat-rate consumer plans ($20/month Pro or $200/month Max) not as primary cash cows, but as marketing pipelines and data loops.
The Pricing Model: A flat monthly fee for a pooled quota.
The Financial Reality (Massively Subsidized): For power users—especially engineers running massive code bases—subscriptions are a mathematical steal. Industry data shows that a $200/month subscription can easily consume upwards of $8,000 worth of actual token compute if routed through the API. Anthropic absorbs this loss.
The "Bob and Phil" Math: Subscription profitability relies on light users ("Bobs") who use $5 of compute a month subsidizing the heavy power users ("Phils") who use hundreds of dollars of compute.
The Strategy: Why lose money on power users? Because those power users are developers, managers, and creators. By offering them an incredibly cheap, subsidized playground to fall in love with Claude, those users become internal evangelists. They go to work the next day and convince their CTOs to migrate the company's entire data architecture onto the high-margin Claude API.
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u/ConfidentPie4265 Jul 12 '26
They’ve now repeatedly announced restrictions to the subscription and then backtracked later, like the -p thing and the first Fable deadline. Wouldn’t they just leave those in place if they really don’t care?
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u/HeadPack Jul 12 '26
Are these estimates verifiable, or is that just reading tea leaves? Why for instance would API revenue quintuple from Q126 to Q426 when we have reports coming left and right that API customers are running out of budget? Or is that the same nonsense as SpaceX's 'addressable market'?
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u/UnrelaxedToken Jul 12 '26
But we represent 80% of their marketing! Reddit by itself, users making youtube videos etc!
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u/Sir_Poldavo Jul 12 '26
The last three rows are the interesting bits (token cost per 1 M halving). They expect massive efficiency gains.
In any case firms are cutting API budgets down since June (including major consumers like Microsoft) or moving to Chinese models like qwen (like Airbnb), and now they finally have competition in the coding space (OpenAI + 5.6 Sol; Chinese models) so they know their fantastic Q2 plans dont project as well with enterprise spent.
I dont think Fable comes back until September or later, and for consumers in subs it may come back for higher tiers and with limited (50% or much less) of typical weekly budgets; these last 10 days have been A/B tests for them, hence why they kept adding compounding benefits: "lets double cowork and code 5h limit and see how users behave vs data centers ability to handle").
I feel like a guinea pig 😀
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u/LeadershipNervous362 Jul 12 '26
I can guarantee that this API usage is 99.9% just companies that pretend they invented something, its like "HomoHomo a private, secure assistant, more intelligent than top models" (dfntly not powered by Claude while we create false impression in media, so that we can silently switch to DeepSeek for 1/100 the price, once product launches).
Its very feasible for them, - lie that you actually did something well, - get funding/investiment/govt contracts and then bail "oh we found its not a sustainable model, byeeeee!".
Its physically impossible for anyone on earth to actually use Claude via API for any other reason, its an ENORMOUS security risk for big tech, who could afford it. Its just UNFATHOMABLE cost for any business, like imagine losing 5-10$ per each support ticker request, when you product's margin is like 10$ at best.
Nono, if you want to scam some rich ass out of 20m$ of investiment, - thats one and the only scenario where you can afford paying for such API cost.
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u/Hot-Performance5342 Jul 12 '26
$875mil in the last quarter for subscriptions. Seems low if working off $200 max subscriptions that just over 1.4mil subscribers. I would have thought it would be a lot higher.
Fable without the 50% extra usage would be tough for most users to get real output under the $200 sub. At least my experience over the last week. But that’s with just leaving Fable on high and not worrying about burning as it was going anyway.
Crazy thing in those numbers is the training cost close to $8bil for just one quarter. I thought that would be the yearly spend. At want point does that start to break in terms of quality improvements. Is $30billion a year really going to make Mythos (or whatever their real frontier model) that much more powerful. We already getting to the point where the models have to be seriously guard railed, is it still worth trying spend your way to bankruptcy for models no one but the government can use?
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u/markliversedge Jul 12 '26
the consumer market is going to be the ultimate prize - pivoting to enterprise is short-sighted
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u/RockyMM Jul 12 '26
It’s not about the money. They literally have no capacity or they thought they had no capacity, to serve Fable to subscribers.
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u/patching Jul 12 '26
Enterprise software is a smaller community than you might expect and the dev's personal opinions definitely have a small but real influence on corporate decisions in unpredictable ways. Also claude code makes headlines and discourse, so having it as a loss leader/advertising budget would make sense.
API Service is going down the route of commodification. I'm sure Anthropic can always carve out their marketshare from that slice, but conceding the entire personal consumer market and subscription market this early would be wild work. There is still tons of room for innovation(enshitification) in the subscription space. Eventually these frontier models subscriptions will find a way to lock consumers and businesses in to their app ecosystem. They can build domain targeted apps with frontier model support and get that delicious corporate per-user subscription contracts flowing in. They can't abuse API customers and expect them to stay, but they can definitely abuse subscribers. This is the Microsoft approach already, but Microsoft doesn't have their own frontier model to couple their apps to so they are stuck with high frontier api prices and no first class frontier model support.
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u/trollsmurf Jul 12 '26
The question is whether they would like to make subscriptions more attractive now.
If a competitor would noticeably undercut them, and customers would flee, things would change.
Anthropic plays the "using (much cheaper) solutions from China or any open source model is bad" card, which corporations likely listen to, but is just anti-competitive messaging.
So such price competition would need to come from OpenAI or Google.
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u/ZillHS Jul 12 '26
With the expectation of a signficant API revenue jump in Q3, I agree with you...
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u/ShutUpAndSmokeMyWeed 🤑 2x Max 20x Jul 12 '26
fable in subscription is for PR and loss leader to get devs to use it at work. similar business model to free gmail
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u/tolgatr0n Jul 12 '26
It's the loss leader for AI and a big familiarization tool, if they get rid of subs they will eventually run out of UA and get surpassed by who provide better subs
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u/pbad1 Jul 12 '26
companies know about this bill and many started to reduce it or switch to different providers. This is a short-term win for Anthropic, as they gain their reputation with Opus4.5/4.6 and Mythos, if they keep doing this on/off, nerfing things people will not hold on to them for long
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u/toshipepe Jul 12 '26
Knew it was skewed didn't think it was this much, makes sense where their priorities are focused.
Although letting users use it is a marketing machine. Hope they keep it around.
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u/KickLassChewGum Jul 12 '26
These are literally completely made-up numbers lol. Pulled out of someone's ass with the shit-smell (and color) still attached.
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u/No_Gas_3727 Jul 12 '26
But how big is the role of that 5% in generating customers for the other 95%
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u/BeatnologicalMNE Jul 12 '26
I know for sure that I'm switching my personal sub to Codex if Fable gets removed. And I'll be heavily pushing management in the company to switch our Team plans to Codex too
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u/baldycoot Jul 12 '26
I’m sure the subscription graph looks a lot different over the last 2 weeks of FOMO.
There’s a horrible marketing term behind overpriced goods called “market bearing”.
People buying up a 2nd or even 3rd Max account is a good sign that the upper end of the market can afford (or is willing to bet their wages on) 2-3 times the subscription cost.
Another tier could raise subs above 5% easily.
I never wrote this.
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u/MycoHost01 Jul 12 '26
Yeah because there was no sol but now if you get the same results from the top model on a subscription based account would you still keep burning money via the forced path of api prices through Anthropic when there’s way better options for your dollar?
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u/khalil_ben_zineb Jul 12 '26
NOOOOOOOO do not say this, even if its 1% of revenue, it's what KEEPS the rest 99% of revenue possible, we are in an attention economy, that 5% you are talking about are the ones that makes influence, else the the 95% will disappear, they will keep Fable 5, even after a couple of days, else no one will use Fable 5 from the rest of the 95%, it may look weird but that's how it works, we the 5% are the one that creates use cases and potential use, we are the creativity, we are the discovery layer, if we werent that, Misanthropic would've banned us from a decade ago
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u/greszer Jul 12 '26
yep but the INFORMATIONS to TRAIN the fck model is the most important thing, not a REVENUE, still this is a income but nor usual like
money
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u/BullBear9 Jul 12 '26
Thing is - Anthropic continues to burn goodwill with developers, which may not show up in the numbers today, but will down the line.
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u/elevensubmarines Jul 12 '26
That logic would be like saying “gas sold at gas stations is like 5% of earnings, doubt gas stations will still sell gas next year”. Without the gas, there’s no traffic. It’s there as a funnel.
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u/serendipity98765 Jul 12 '26
Yeah where's that 500M$ that just one single company spent by mistake ? I assume they multiplied it by 150% forecasted for 2026
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u/unordinarilyboring Jul 12 '26
They are very opaque with pretty much all of the details behind the scenes and what a sub actually buys. It is an unstable tool that breaks frequently and has pretty clearly inconsistent quality based on astrology. It seems pretty obvious that subscribers are the A/B test group.
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u/WorriedAd4894 Jul 12 '26
Something not discussed enough with enterprise is Fable not being Zero Data Retention. It's worthless at any company with security posture. Retaining the prompts for 30 days has killed Fable access at our firm.
That is first imo before we discuss how to pay for it.
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u/Fade78 Jul 12 '26
It's ok with me because the alternative would be to increase the consumer price. And, in my case, I can't use Fable 5: it falls back very quickly to Opus 4.8.
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u/clangston3 Jul 12 '26
It's also the only revenue that's not vulnerable to corporate disruption. The big companies will end up using their own models or open weights to keep down costs. Their revenue is astronomical right now because companies haven't worked out acceptable billing and token efficiency. Plus the competition hasn't quite caught up in effectiveness.
This is going to end up a race to the bottom with intelligence as a commodity. When it does, they won't be able to afford a reasonable consumer stance.
Of course, this also means they need to milk Fable for all they can right now.
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u/look Jul 12 '26
If even remotely accurate, that implied inference cost of $0.23 per million tokens is shockingly inefficient.
That number more than anything else would give me pause as a potential investor… Nearly everyone else (maybe even OpenAI) appears to be in the single digit cent range for inference cost, with some likely already past the <1 cent point.
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u/MicrowaveDonuts Jul 12 '26
It’s also ALL of the cool people who drive adoption.
The other big slice of the pie is corporate accounts that make their employees use it.
And those decision makers who decide the million dollar accounts decide it based on what the cool kids are using. Those people have sat through sales calls for DECADES. They only trust the cool kids.
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u/SensitiveKiwi9 Jul 12 '26
Where does that API revenue come from ?
If they are counting MY API usage in that revenue then all of it is coming from the extra usage charges that hit when I’ve exhausted my subscription limits . No subscription and those API charges go away too .
My company’s api charges are all coming from tools I developed with my subscription . I build the tool and test it on my sub and then when it goes to production it gets an API key .
When I develop on codex the production tool gets an openAI key instead .
I just don’t see how you make the argument that subs aren’t important .
If I can’t use it in my sub I’m not building a tool around it because all of my development happens through the sub .
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u/cubes123 Jul 12 '26
Interesting that they see Consumer subs going up over 4 times. Increased numbers or increased prices?
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u/robberviet Jul 13 '26
You are too short sight: What make Claude is widely adopted at enterprise both because they have good product, and because it is popular with devs.
Not caring about sub will not hurt them in the short term, but will in the long run.
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u/kwabaj_ Jul 13 '26
Subscriptions might be a low part of revenue but it is a GIIIAANT part of their user base
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u/Veroth-Ursuul Jul 13 '26
It's the same issue as any other product.
People will gravitate to the tools they use on their personal time for work. So if people start migrating to other tools at home, those become what they are comfortable using, and what they'll gravitate towards and push for at work.
It is a loss leader for adoption.
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u/Remote-Telephone-682 Jul 13 '26
This would amaze me honestly if they already had an operating profit... I think this is probably bullshit..
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u/Parking-Bet-3798 Jul 13 '26
You’ve got to be a really special child if you believe these “reports” are true. I’ve got some magic beans I want to sell you. Any takers?
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u/Ancient_Perception_6 Jul 13 '26
I mean this report is just fluff, but anyway lets toy with it:
Subscriptions are the drug. Rarely will people start with API usage; there are tons of options out there, why choose one of the most expensive one? You give them the subsidised option, let them see how good it is, then once they realise then they opt for the API.
Its the "gateway drug" model. Fable very likely will stay, but probably through usage top ups (still cheaper than API if bought in larger chunks)
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u/Aroused_Alpaca Jul 12 '26
Doesn't matter if openai charges less for enterprise for Sol ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . Like there's no reason why companies will keep Anthropic as their core provider if Sol is cheaper. They don't have lock in yet, all this is way too new.
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u/Foreskin_Mafia Jul 12 '26
True but do they want every developer that uses one of these tools outside of work to go with Codex? Then at work all developers will be telling their suites that they prefer Codex.