Hi Simon, nice article. The parent there may be making the same assumption I am, that large enterprise _never_ pays sticker price.
Also, to just color in the picture here, as I haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere, there is a very large Saas company at the moment who has given everyone unlimited tokens on Claude. And they have a dashboard showing who spends the most. So the "budget" went from about USD500 per per person (split between Claude and cursor) in Jan to... Well a soft limit of USD100k... Per month... Per person.
People can still see the top line sticker price on their spend, but honestly I can't believe that the Saas is paying that full price when the invoice comes in.
That said, there are some finance reports which are probably dropping soon where we will find out!
> The parent there may be making the same assumption I am, that large enterprise _never_ pays sticker price.
I shared that assumption until yesterday, when I found out that it wasn't holding for LLM pricing from OpenAI and Anthropic. That's what inspired me to write this piece.
I think those token leaderboards are an obviously terrible idea and will go extinct very quickly now that people are paying attention to costs.
But the feature list at https://claude.com/pricing#team-&-enterprise literally lists "tiered incentives on committed spend" and "non-standard terms" as perks of the sales-assisted Enterprise plan. Maybe "non-standard terms" could mean "we dance for you if you pay", but what would "tiered incentives on committed spend" mean besides "we can negotiate on price if you bring the volume"
Volume discounts may be available for high-volume users. These are negotiated on a case-by-case basis.
* Standard tiers use the pricing shown in Model pricing
* Enterprise customers can contact sales for custom pricing
And there are discounts available through "Claude Platform on AWS":
Anthropic rates your token usage in USD at standard per-model, per-feature rates, applies any negotiated discount, converts the result to CCUs at $0.01 per CCU, and reports the CCU quantity to AWS Marketplace hourly. Your AWS bill shows a single CCU line item.
> With the pricing change, customers of Claude Enterprise, a two-year-old bundle of products meant for large companies that now includes Claude Code and its work assistant, Claude Cowork, will have to pay for the amount of computing capacity they consume while using the software on top of a monthly flat fee of $20 per user, an Anthropic spokesperson confirmed.
The sentence you quoted doesn't say anything about the token price for enterprises matching the sticker price. It just says that enterprises are paying a consumption based price (presumably billed as some $/token), on top of a per-seat fee.
> I found out that it wasn't holding for LLM pricing
You're correct. When a type of cloud service grows large enough and has a few competitive suppliers, enterprise pricing tends to coalesce with the large buyers paying around the same price for the same thing. While that might be lower than the publicly cited rate card, the private price similarly large customers pay ends up being similar.
One reason is that the very largest, long-term enterprise customers are so valuable, they can command MFN clauses ensuring no one else is paying substantially less for the same thing, then the rest of the rate card for smaller customers flows down from that. There's a strong disincentive for vendors to cheat or allow big disparities between similar classes of customers because the number of people involved on both sides of these deals is large enough that word will get around eventually.
Large scale enterprise sales and purchasing in a given sector tends to be rather circular. Account execs move to other vendors and call on the same customers, while purchasing agents can move to other customer firms. Personal relationships, reputation and credibility matter. Lying to screw a large customer over just to make one commission or quarterly quota can be a very bad long-term career move. Sometimes purchasing agents or executives quietly compare notes off-the-record with their peers from other similarly-sized firms. After dinner drinks at industry association meetings and trade shows can be quite productive in terms of verbally exchanging 'market insight' with peers.
When there are significant pricing differences, its usually due to different volume commitments, SLA/QoS guarantees, payment terms and other material factors which justify the difference. Source: been there, done that inside a top ten valley tech company. Once was in a meeting where a newly minted EVP tried to get a long-time senior account exec to pressure a huge customer by being semi-dishonest. The account exec schooled the EVP on the fact that the EVP could only make him unemployed for about 8 hours but that huge customer not wanting to work with him could make him unemployed forever. :-)
I do know of moderate-size companies deploying OSS LLMs on their own GPU clusters, for ownership/security/maybe cost reasons. I'm somewhat surprised F500 companies are apparently just handing over all their data to the model providers.
Could be fantastic for small shops while it lasts. The big guys have to pay 10x for precious tokens.
