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.
2. They don't have a moat. DeepSeek and Kimi are already good enough to destroy any high margins they're hoping to generate from compute.
Just because something is highly useful doesn't mean it's highly profitable. Water is essential to life, but it's dirt cheap in most of the world. Same goes for food.
I find a combination of local Ollama models, with very inexpensive APis like Moonshot’s Kimi with occasional Gemini 2.5 Pro use, and occasionally using gemini-cli provides extraordinary value. Am I missing out by not using one or more $200-$300 a month subscriptions? Probably but I don’t care.