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
As I note above, Anthropic probably is in the black. $4B ARR, and spending less than $100M on training models.
Profit is for companies that don't have anything else to spend money on, not ones trying to grow.
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.