$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.
To be fair, protecting credentials and important data is the company and individual’s responsibility. The building blocks to restrict access are there, but are often not leveraged (even by large companies with the ability to invest)
Sandboxing is one of them: Both Codex & Claude’s sandboxing is reasonable (sandbox-exec, Linux cgroups & seccomp). Many others are lacking, sometimes deliberately.
I do most coding with Pi these days, and I have it heavily sandboxed. I expose sensitive services via a localhost network service with auth (typically for running scripts outside the sandbox). Reads are limited to the system binaries/libs, nad writes to the project dir & Pi’s own dirs. If I choose to give a particular session creds, then I have to be very deliberate. I also force egress traffic through a proxy (just logging for now, but I have plans)
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
$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.
To be fair, protecting credentials and important data is the company and individual’s responsibility. The building blocks to restrict access are there, but are often not leveraged (even by large companies with the ability to invest)
Sandboxing is one of them: Both Codex & Claude’s sandboxing is reasonable (sandbox-exec, Linux cgroups & seccomp). Many others are lacking, sometimes deliberately.
I do most coding with Pi these days, and I have it heavily sandboxed. I expose sensitive services via a localhost network service with auth (typically for running scripts outside the sandbox). Reads are limited to the system binaries/libs, nad writes to the project dir & Pi’s own dirs. If I choose to give a particular session creds, then I have to be very deliberate. I also force egress traffic through a proxy (just logging for now, but I have plans)
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