Anthropic Subscriptions Offer 5x+ More Value Than OpenAI

nryoo

One of their three identical accounts had ~20% lower limits and the explanation was an "extremely tiny" A/B test. Makes the "5x" kind of a joke. I'd honestly take a slightly worse plan if it just published the actual token limits.

dude250711

Let's hope they don't nerf Opus 5.5

davidguetta

Submarine ?

redhale

> subscription gross margins are way lower than API and meaningfully reduce revenue per MW for both OpenAI and Anthropic I don't know about everyone else, but there is no way in hell I would pay even $200 for API-priced tokens for personal use. So at least for my sample size of one, Anthropic's revenue would not be higher if they dropped their subscription plan (they would get $0 from me instead of $200 per month).

throwuxiytayq

This says “Anthropic gives you 5× more API-priced model usage”, which is not equivalent to “Anthropic is 5x as much value”. This does not take into account model/harness efficiency. I tried looking up some benchmarks and Claude seemingly uses roughly 5x as many tokens while taking its sweet time to complete a task. No such thing as a coincidence.

yube01

but ai credit runs out really really fast

_fw

My theory is that for a large amount of people, “work are paying anyway so what do I care?”. I lost my job recently, so gave myself an AI budget of $100 to help with search and applications. If I put that in OpenAI or Anthropic, I’d hit limits quickly and lose whatever I didn’t use. Or… I could put the same money in OpenRouter, use open models at 1/25th the price, and only need to pay more when I’ve spent what I put in. Back in January when Claude Cowork was new and Claude Code was one of the only performant harnesses, it would have been a tougher decision. But Hermes, dsh, agy, codex, opencode, pi… they make it so easy to achieve so much with such a low budget. I know it’s a cliche nowadays to say “just use cheaper models” but the value they offer is SO much greater. And i can switch to GPT6, or Opus 5.5 in two clicks for tasks anyway. My point is this: OpenAI and Anthropic are pulling stunts like this because they don’t care about you and your subscription. So stop caring about them.

gizajob

What’s news to me is that Anthropic reports that it has 88% gross margin. I find that extremely hard to believe with the capex required to build and run the models.

viraptor

This is a joke. > Token efficiency is also an extremely relevant factor, but the industry unfortunately lacks reliable data here. Many people like to cite this chart from Artificial Analysis, but we do not believe the benchmark tasks in the AA Intelligence Index are at all representative of real work people do with LLMs. Right, so they just ignore the fact that different models use very different number of tokens to achieve the same thing. Ignoring that means they can't say anything about "value". This is like comparing numbers with different units. They're Atokens and Otokens.

esperent

My chatgpt pro account gave me 62k of their "credits" which they try to sell you at extortionate rates when your subscription runs out. I spent two days hammering it and used about 4k of those. This is clear manipulation to prevent me from complaining about lower limits until it's out of the news cycle, but I don't care. As soon as those are gone, if my $200 account doesn't give me the value it used to, I'm out. The random resets are also clear manipulation in this regard as well. Rather than just give me a fixed weekly limit which I could then get a sense of and know if it's getting reduced, they throw out a ~0-3 resets a week at random, unexpected intervals so that I'll never know.

himata4113

if anyone wants a lifehack just get $100 sub from anthropic, get $80 sub from z.ai, download omp.sh, set task/advisor to glm 5.3 flash with max thinking, default opus 5.5 with medium thinking, slow set to xhigh thinking and design set to xhigh/max - max will produce significantly more complete designs. day2day performance difference is negligible, there's less refusals and you always have glm 5.3 for whenever opus 5.5 arbitrarily decides to terminate your conversation. This is enough to run 2 concurrent sessions 16 hours a day.

xzjis

The title is misleading: by token count, it’s only 3× more valuable. And there’s also a major error in the calculation: it doesn’t account for the “generous” resets that are mentioned at the beginning of the article! Taking the 1 to 2 weekly resets into account and comparing tokens, the ChatGPT Pro 200 plan works out to be between 1.2× and 1.7× more cost-effective per token than Claude’s for Astra/Fable, while for Sol/Opus it’s more like 0.7× to 1.04× as valuable. However, this also doesn’t take into account the fact that, as another commenter pointed out, GPT-6.1 Sol currently uses fewer tokens to perform the same task (according to that comment, 5× fewer tokens, but I haven’t verified those numbers). My figures are very rough, but the conclusion in the title is clearly false and clickbait. I get the impression that OpenAI offers better value for now, even if that means we’re relying on those “generous” resets continuing to happen.

rurban

But back in February the OpenAI offer was better. Have both of them. Nowadays Anthropic really is the best again. But only after DeepSeek raised its prizes.

chilmers

I have subscriptions to both, one for personal and one for work use, and I haven't really come close to hitting the limits since the release of Opus 5.5 and GPT-Sol 6.1, and I'm no longer hitting any of the capability limits I used to experience when using the "mid" tier models, so I don't miss using Astra. It feels like limits at pretty much a solved problem right now, for my level of use.

k7peak

I wonder how subscription breakage (people who pay, but don't use a fraction of their subscribe-for-paid-token-count) plays into the frontier labs gross margins. A number we will likely understand if/when they go public and something users can track locally if they choose.

hervem

> but the gap is still massive even if you switch to comparing the number of tokens. Token doesn't have the same meaning at OpenAI vs Anthropics, they use different tokenizer. How can this be used for comparison?

marvstazar

Somewhat tuning out these "X is better than Y" news and articles, as things are still moving quite fast. In a few weeks, OpenAI offers more value for money and the cycle repeats again. As a Claude subscriber, I am quite enjoying the value I get from Anthropic. But I am not forgetting that this is their loss leader, and API access is still their main driver. So strike while things are good, but expect some pullback in the future.

gehsty

How do we know 100% subscriptions are subsidized, it’s a possibility that they are actually ok (ie some people over use, majority under use and on net profitable) and the API pricing is actually just super expensive. Subscription is a buffet and API is a private chef :)

scotty79

There's a simple explanation here. Anthropic has way more inflated api token priced than OpenAI what is plainly visible on cost charts.

Bigsy

Hmm I'm not sure this is really the case I have the pro level of each, and GPT 6.1 Sol feels virtually unlimited to me atm, doesnt feel the same with opus and its probably only a few percentage points better and not in all situations.