Anthropic ARR went $1B -> $4B in the first half of this year. They're getting my $200 a month and it's easily the best money I spend. There's definitely something there.
If that is the case at some point the music is going to stop and they will either perish or they will have to crank up their subscription costs.
I use claude code exclusively for the initial version of all new features, then I review and iterate. With the Max plan I can have many of these loops going concurrently in git worktrees. I even built a little script to make the workflow better: http://github.com/jarredkenny/cf
As I said above, I don’t think a single AI company is remotely in the black yet. They are driven by speculation and investment and they need to figure out real quick how they’re going to survive when that money dries up. People are not going to fork out 24k a year for these tools. I don’t think they’ll spend even $10k. People scoff at paying $70+ for internet, a thing we all use basically all the time.
I have found it rather odd that they have targeted individual consumers for the most part. These all seem like enterprise solutions that need to charge large sums and target large companies tbh. My guess is a lot of them think it will get cheaper and easier to provide the same level of service and that they won’t have to make such dramatic increases in their pricing. Time will tell, but I’m skeptical
The only answer that matters is the one to the question "how much more are you making per month from your $200/m spend?"
I'm just worried that I'm doing it wrong.
Claude 3.7 Sonnet supposedly cost "a few tens of millions of dollars"[1], and they recently hit $4B ARR[2].
Those numbers seem to give a fair bit of room for salaries, and it would be surprising if there wasn't a sustainable business in there.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/25/anthropics-latest-flagship...
[2] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-revenue-hi...
If you need to repeatedly remind it to do something though, you can store it in claude.md so that it is part of every chat. For example, in mine I have asked it to not invoke git commit but to review the git commit message with me before committing, since I usually need to change it.
There may be a maximum amount of complexity it can handle. I haven't reached that limit yet, but I can see how it could exist.
I've found though that if you can steer it in the right direction it usually works out okay. It's not particularly good at design, but it's good at writing code, so one thing you can do is say write classes and some empty methods with // Todo Claude: implement, then ask it to implement the methods with Todo Claude in file foo. So this way you get the structure that you want, but without having to implement all the details.
What kind of things are you having issues with?
The goal for investors is to be able to exit their investment for more than they put in.
That doesn't mean the company needs to be profitable at all.
Broadly speaking, investors look for sustainable growth. Think Amazon, when they were spending as much money as possible in the early 2000s to build their distribution network and software and doing anything they possibly could to avoid becoming profitable.
Most of the time companies (and investors) don't look for profits. Profits are just a way of paying more tax. Instead the ideal outcome is growing revenue that is cost negative (ie, could be possible) but the excess money is invested in growing more.
Note that this doesn't mean the company is raising money from external sources. Not being profitable doesn't imply that.