Anthropic Subscriptions Offer 5x+ More Value Than OpenAI

Subscription plans are still the primary way consumers and small businesses pay for AI. These plans are highly subsidized—as we previously explained in June—but can still make economic sense as powerful customer acquisition and marketing tools. For example, the goodwill engendered by OpenAI’sgenerousresets is partially responsible for the recent surge in Codex adoption and has forced Anthropic to repeatedlywalkback planned subscription nerfs to avoid getting clobbered in the court of public opinion.

Furthermore, because subscription plans are so heavily subsidized, they can also have a large impact on margins and revenue per MW despite only being a small portion of total revenue. Consider the following rough numbers for Anthropic.

Despite being just 10% of overall revenue, subscriptions can take up over 40% of inference compute and lower blended revenue per MW by ~$36M. Subscriptions are even more important for OpenAI, as they make up a larger portion of their total revenue. For specific numbers, see our Tokenomics Model.

In other words, if you want to accurately model AI lab financials, you need to understand their subscription limits.

So how do limits actually work? The way to think about subscriptions is that your monthly payment grants you some numbers of “credits”. Each (model, token type) combo consumes a different amount of credits. Because credit cost ratios can differ dramatically from API price ratios, the “value” of the same plan changes depending on what model and workload you’re running. Put differently, it doesn’t make sense to say a plan is worth $X in isolation—you need to consider the full (plan, model, workload) tuple.