>Two people can't use a single machine at the same time make it wear out twice as fast
The machine doesn't care about the number of people using it. If it's constantly being used, it will wear out faster. You are conflating "we price based on expected under-utilization" with "costs don't scale with usage." Those are different things.
The inverse correlation you talk about isn't relevant here - People buy gym memberships intending to go, feel good about the intention, and then don't follow through. The business model is built on that gap. That's pretty specific to fitness and a handful of similar industries where aspiration drives purchase.
Anthropic doesn't sell based on a "golly gee I hope people dont use this" gap - they sell compute. Different business.
> Anthropic doesn't sell based on a "golly gee I hope people dont use this" gap - they sell compute. Different business.
There is nothing anywhere hinting at that.
They don’t sell compute. They sell a subscription for LLM token budgets that they hope people don’t use because the compute is vastly more expensive than what they charge or what users are ever willing to pay.
Especially with enterprise subscription plans the idea is for customers to never utilize anywhere close to their limits.
>If it's constantly being used, it will wear out faster.
Yeah, but there's an absolute limit to that, beyond which the cost doesn't keep increasing. Beyond that point, the QoS goes down (queues).
>You are conflating "we price based on expected under-utilization" with "costs don't scale with usage."
I'm not conflating anything, I'm responding to what you said:
>If gyms faced a situation where people would go and spend 18 hours working out every day for a month, they would probably change how they billed things.
Why would a gym need to change how they bill things if all their customers were aiming for maximal utilization, when their costs would barely see any change? I doubt your typical gym operates on razor-thin margins.
Gym costs absolutely scale with usage. Equipment wears faster under heavier use. Cleaning and maintenance staff hours scale with how much the facility is used. Consumables like towels, soap, and chalk go faster. HVAC runs harder. The reason gyms can offer flat-rate pricing is that they bet on under-utilization, not that costs are flat.
Setting that aside, even if we accept your argument that gym costs barely scale with usage, then that makes gyms a bad comparison case for Anthropic, whose costs directly scale with usage. You can't use the gym model to defend Anthropic's pricing decisions if the two cost structures are nothing alike.
I'm arguing that both gyms and Anthropic have usage costs that scale with usage, but gym business model assumes a large margin of under-utilization and there's a hard cap to "power user" - I think both of those extremes don't apply to Anthropic's situation. Under-utilizers aren't paying for AI they have a free tier. There's also a natural ceiling on how much any one person can use a gym. There's no equivalent constraint on API usage.
> The reason gyms can offer flat-rate pricing is that they bet on under-utilization, not that costs are flat.
Yes. In fact i remember hearing about a gym which offered a flat-rate pricing model but explicitly excluded certain professions from partaking in it. I remember the deal was excluding police, bouncers, models, actors and air stewardesses. They had a separate more costly tier for these people. (And I think i heard about it from the indignation the deal has caused online.)
> Under-utilizers aren't paying for AI they have a free tier.
Sure they do. Free tiers suck. I may not always need to use AI, but when I need it, I don't want to immediately get hit by stupidly low quotas and rate limits, or get anything but SOTA models.
The machine doesn't care about the number of people using it. If it's constantly being used, it will wear out faster. You are conflating "we price based on expected under-utilization" with "costs don't scale with usage." Those are different things.
The inverse correlation you talk about isn't relevant here - People buy gym memberships intending to go, feel good about the intention, and then don't follow through. The business model is built on that gap. That's pretty specific to fitness and a handful of similar industries where aspiration drives purchase.
Anthropic doesn't sell based on a "golly gee I hope people dont use this" gap - they sell compute. Different business.