This is how much your ChatGPT and Claude usage costs OpenAI and Anthropic

As the costs of using AI have increasingly started to bite enterprise users, individual users face an uncomfortable reality that leaves a question hanging: for how long will AI giants be able to subsidize subscriptions? The answer might be more on the optimistic side, at least for the near future.

While it has long been known that OpenAI and Anthropic subsidize individual users of ChatGPT and Claude, new calculations show how large this disparity is.

SemiAnalysis, a research and analysis company specializing in the semiconductor and AI industries, found that a $200/month subscription plan is far more generous than previously thought. According to its calculations, while it's widely believed that a $200/month plan maxes out at roughly $2,000/month in tokens (assuming API pricing), the actual numbers are closer to $14,000 for ChatGPT and $8,000 for Claude.

For the cheapest subscription plans, costing around $20/month for both ChatGPT and Claude, the real value of the available tokens is $700 and $400, respectively.

However, this doesn't necessarily mean the companies won't be able to subsidize these subscriptions and still make profits.

For example, in May, The Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic registered an "explosive rate of growth" that could help the company become profitable for the first time, as the AI giant moves toward a high-margin, enterprise-first model and leverages strong revenue growth from API partners rather than relying on consumer subscriptions.

What's more, by subsidizing subscriptions, the company builds its user base and gathers training data for its models, which, in turn, helps attract more enterprise users.

"The margin on a subscription plan is a function of the average utilization," SemiAnalysis said, giving an example that, if we assume both companies have 75% API gross margins, a heavy user on Anthropic’s $200/month Claude Max 20x plan would generate a -900% gross margin for the company, while even moderate 20% utilization already drives margins to -100%.

In contrast, at 1% utilization, the same plan could yield a +90% gross margin.

"Obviously, this is way worse than API overall. However, explicitly nerfing subscriptions leads to huge public backlash, and the rapidly falling cost of intelligence means you'll be able to profitably serve Opus 4.8 level models for $20/month in the near future," the analysts said, adding that "it's far more likely the labs will withhold new features/models from subscription plans."

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