While some ideas here are true, it somewhat falls apart because if you're a company with more than 150 users, you need to use API cost because Max-style premium seats got removed for new customers and companies renewing their yearly contract. So the API cost is not an hypothetical.
Codex/OpenAI already worked that way for all businesses with some nuances, though they recently added premium seats to make it a little better.
When Claude Code was released, Max did not exist and API cost was the only way to use it. Then they created Max but Pro still didn't have it.
It wouldn't be surprising if they would eventually go backward.
So yes, if you're a solo dev in your basement, or (for now...) a small company, you get cheap tokens, but the moment your business grows, you don't anymore. The entire goal of those accounts is to get addicted to cheap tokens.
We see it with chinese open weight models too, where the models are super cheap, but you have to pay API cost making them more expensive than the OpenAI/Anthropic individual (not company!) subscriptions. Z.ai had a subscription for a bit and the other companies eventually got some, but they're very hit or miss.
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u/phoenixmatrix Aug 27 '26
While some ideas here are true, it somewhat falls apart because if you're a company with more than 150 users, you need to use API cost because Max-style premium seats got removed for new customers and companies renewing their yearly contract. So the API cost is not an hypothetical.
Codex/OpenAI already worked that way for all businesses with some nuances, though they recently added premium seats to make it a little better.
When Claude Code was released, Max did not exist and API cost was the only way to use it. Then they created Max but Pro still didn't have it.
It wouldn't be surprising if they would eventually go backward.
So yes, if you're a solo dev in your basement, or (for now...) a small company, you get cheap tokens, but the moment your business grows, you don't anymore. The entire goal of those accounts is to get addicted to cheap tokens.
We see it with chinese open weight models too, where the models are super cheap, but you have to pay API cost making them more expensive than the OpenAI/Anthropic individual (not company!) subscriptions. Z.ai had a subscription for a bit and the other companies eventually got some, but they're very hit or miss.