this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2026
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$14000 in API pricing is not $14000 in costs, though. Costs are hard to calculate because of the huge capital outlays and unknowns about hardware lifecycles, various business deals, and limited public knowledge.
It's likely that inference costs for good-enough models will go down over time. China's API pricing tells us the direction already. Energy costs will be a driving factor in the west, I guess.
So.. they are almost certainly subsidizing plans right now, but on average, it won't be by sooo much. Your average ChatGPT user will hardly use Codex, for example. Your average developer is not token-maxxing either.
Why are they subsidizing plans? To build a sticky customer base ... which means they want you to stick to their tools - their coding agents/harnesses, their integrations, etc. Models are/will be increasingly interchangeable, so they are building sticky ecosystems instead.
neither copilot nor anthrophic offer a business ready harness and people are going open source already. Yeas, their cli, ide integrations are nice but security-wise all this is rather begging the agent not to do dumb stuff instead if actually restricting it in access to customer data, secrets etc.
I've seen a datapoint that an 8 hour business day with Claude is about 1 kUSD, so 20 business day month is some 20 kUSD. More with agentic AI.
I have no doubt some people can do that with a large project, a /goal loop, and (probably) poorly defined requirements.
My experience (using Claude models, but not Claude Code) is about $20-40/day worth of API costs in a collaborative mode, picking the right model for the task. Plan, implement, review & test features or bugs.
I get where I'm going faster, but not 10x faster nor 100x the cost. :-P