Anthropic earlier last year announced this pricing scheme
- \$20 -> 1x usage
- \$100 -> 5x usage
- \$200 -> 1̶0̶x̶ 20x usage
As you can see, it’s not growing linearly. This is classic Jensen “the more you buy, the more you save”
But here is the thing. You are not selling hardware like Jensen. You are selling a software service through an API. It’s the worst possible pricing for the category of product. Long term, people will game the hell out of your offering
Meanwhile OpenAI decided not to do that. There is no quirky incentive for buying bigger plans. \$200 chatgpt = 10 x \$20 chatgpt, roughly
And here is where it gets funny. Despite not having such an incentive, you can get A LOT MORE usage from the \$200 OpenAI plan, than the \$200 Anthropic plan. Presumably because OpenAI has better unit economics (sama mentioned they are turning a profit on inference, if you are to believe)
Thanks to sounder pricing, OpenAI can do exactly what Anthropic cannot: offer GPT in 3rd party harnesses and win the ecosystem race
Anthropic has cornered itself with this pricing. They need to change it, but not sure if they can afford to do so in such short notice
All this is extremely bullish on open source 3rd party harnesses, OpenCode, Mario Zechner’s pi and such. It is clear developers want options. “Just give me the API”
I personally am extremely excited for 2026. We’ll get open models on par with today’s proprietary models, and can finally run truly sovereign personal AI agents, for much cheaper than what we are already paying!