This article is one chapter of my book Delphi in all its glory – AI-assisted development, the fifth book of the series.
Anthropic’s figure above, $150-250 per month, is the average across enterprise deployments. A heavy user is a different story.
Some Delphi users investigated what their subscription would cost at API list prices. One of them, in July 2026, ran a script over about one month of their Claude Code logs. The result: about $11000.
Are we screwed if Anthropic ever makes us pay that? The answer is a dichotomy:
Must it happen? On paper, yes. With its Max plans, Anthropic is bleeding money like a dragon with 7 severed heads.
Can it happen? No. Within 24 hours everybody would switch to some cheaper Chinese model (or even a local one). Few can afford $11000 per month per developer.
But first let’s discuss where does such a big number/cost come from? About 3/4 of it are cache reads. At every turn, Claude re-reads the whole conversation.
Those logs held 11.2 billion cache-read tokens in 40700 messages: about 274K tokens re-read per message. A cache read costs only a fraction of the normal input price, but at this volume it still makes up most of the bill.
SemiAnalysis (May 2026) estimates Anthropic’s gross margin on inference at over 70%. So that month really cost Anthropic about 30% of the list price: $3300 or less. That’s still 16 times the $200 of Max 20x, the biggest Max plan.
If that user is on the $100 plan and still far from the weekly quota, the loss is even bigger: Anthropic gets half the money, and the plan still allows more use.
From July to 25 September 2026 (mostly Opus 5), my usage was worth over $15500 at list price, about $7400 of it in September alone. At a 70% margin, my September cost Anthropic about $2200. I pay $200. So yes, on a heavy user Anthropic does lose money.
The /clear command cuts the size of the conversation that Claude re-reads. Here’s another dichotomy: you want to clear as often as possible, to keep the context small. But you cannot, because rebuilding the context after a clear also costs money.
This was one chapter of a whole book
You just read one chapter of Delphi in all its glory – AI-assisted development: more than 400 pages about Claude Code and AI for Delphi programmers. Written by a Delphi programmer, with the failures documented next to the wins.