Monopoly isn't the only thing that allows you to charge large margins.

API inference access is naturally a lot more costly to provide compared to Chat UI and Claude Code, as there is a lot more load to handle with less latency. In the products they can just smooth over load curves by handling some of the requests slower (which the majority of users in a background Code session won't even notice).

It's why every integration basically tries to piggyback off of a subscription, and why Anthropic has to continuously play whack-a-mole trying to shut those services down.

they're obviously trying to steer customers to the monthly subscription instead of the pay-per-token API.

now, the consensus of the commentards on this website, who don't have access to any of anthropics financial data, is that the monthly subscriptions are a money loser!

so either the leading AI company's business dev team is wrong or the Jacker News comment section is wrong, it is a mystery