I think it’s lagging indicator. There were signs of saturation in the end of 2025. From 2025 to March 2026 average developer ai spent gone from $20/mo to at least $200. In my company it’s $1000-1500/mo to anthropic only.
In many cases this 20x+ increase over 3 mo.
This is going in other industries too. Claude cowork is just an example and beginning of the trend.
Show me any product that / company that charge you 20x and customers are happy , well its anthropic
I dont know what world you/I are living in. I do ask claude to enumerate/explain concepts i am not familiar with. I never approached the free tier limit (is there one?). At work, we have a webpage which ia basically a chat to different models, sometimes i use it
Would I be paying 20€ to ask those questions? I dunno, i dont feel any particular need. Would I be paying 200€?! Are you insane hell no
The question should really be what is the reservation price of existing buyers.
At some point the price will rise. But the value has to have risen for existing buyers to be ok with that - but can they perceive the value? Hmmm difficult to tell. Benchmarks are not an objective way to measure that.
In the long run google is most likely to acquire a serious cost advantage given their level of vertical integration.
We've been experimenting with claude code handling jira tickets and opening PR -- we're starting with Opus. It costs about $1 per PR that gets merged-- how much does it cost to have a software engineer do that PR? That's your price sensitivity. It will only get cheaper as models get more efficient and people get better at using them, though.
Managers of firms care about impact of financials. They don’t care about the metrics you are measuring / gaming. Ultimately all ‘progress’ has to show in the cash flows.
Are you taking more cost reduction projects and more revenue-generating projects? Are you actually delivering? Are customers perceiving you to be as trusted as before? Etc. are the only things that matter. ‘Show me the money’.
To me this is akin to the discussion re. Scrum, agile etc. Who cares? Show me the money.
This week my spending is > $2000 , and my ceo is very happy, another top user burned $1600.
You personally will not pay , but these who will will replace people who are not productive.
That’s actually the limiting factor. There will be top 5% of developers who will throw away on the street remaining 95%. No EU socialism will protect the rest . It is very unclear what is the new world market , with no web developers , no custom dashboard teams , no analytics teams , no devops whose role is to babysit human devs. From one side it’s a market for opportunity to automate , but human devs are generators of unlimited inefficiencies. Once the market settles down , the demand for lots of tools will shrink.
On my spendings to anthropic . I’m a manager, and top user I burn tokens on tickets creation , planing , even sprint filtering , for sure the most went to coding. Bugs are getting fixed by just sharing a screenshot and a sentence or two of description in 80% of the cases , all the way including to PR creation and making sure release is live and good with tests.
There are ways to cut the cost a bit , maybe 30-40% but it’s not practical .
My work pays for the $200 sub for me. At work in a typical 5h slot I tend to use 35~40% of the usage limit, so the $100 sub wouldn’t let me keep my current workflow and AI usage but I am more often than not using 2x the $100 sub. We’ll see if they keep paying for this or not, because we are not yet sure if using AI like this is sustainable and worth the tech debt of moving faster
But that is your employer paying a license (probably in bulk, I have no idea how much B2B sales cost for AI). My employer pays licenses for a lot of things that I probably wouldn't pay personally.
The person I was replying to said the average developer pays 200$. I call bullshit on that one.
tbh everything about the current implementation of "AI" is starting to look like hot porridge when it comes to real world products.
Is the prompting workflow so convenient that it’s worth having to spend twice or thrice as much time double checking the accuracy of the inference and fixing bugs?
How long until we collectively decide that to reduce the probability of errors we’re better off going back to writing our own functions, methods, classes etc. because it gives us granular control?
Last but not least, we’re devolving to mainframe and terminals…
I’m replying from the cold east coast (from the edge of a wood chair in a lovely iykyk type of restaurant) to a human posting from el cap on hn; We have achieved peak technology. Oh yeah, I’m working on urban logistics, powered by AI.
My immediate observation when I first learned of the Quipu and its use: nodes and edges.
Potentially a graph to be completed by the owner via verbal communication/interpretation as a supplement to the material instrument; a single source of information that could be interpreted differently depending on the societal role and vocation of the owner.
Something is not right. The sequence of the story starting with the accidental invite and the total ignorance that the "guest" was there. The pieces of the puzzle are not puzzling. The ideal next step would be a forensic device audit.
Also, taking into consideration something as simple as UNC5792, what if the "guest" was bridged-in? iykwim
