Anthropic Enterprise Edition now charges based on usage, and heavy users' costs may double or triple

ME News report, April 15 (UTC+8), according to monitoring by 1M AI News, Anthropic has, in recent weeks, changed Claude Enterprise from a fixed subscription model to usage-based billing. Previously, enterprise customers paid a fixed fee of up to $200 per person per month, which included a certain quota of discounted token usage; this has now been changed to a $20 monthly per-person base seat fee plus additional charges based on actual compute usage. Redress Compliance, a software licensing consultancy, co-founder Fredrik Filipsson estimates that the costs for some heavy users will double or triple. Enterprises with fewer than 150 people are unaffected, and Team subscriptions (up to $100 per person per month) remain unchanged.

Anthropic says that under the old model, some customers frequently hit usage limits, causing work interruptions, while others failed to use up their prepaid quotas. The new model is “better able to reflect the reality of the shift in workloads from fixed seats to agent-based usage.” The direct drivers are the surge in usage of Claude Code and AI work assistant Claude Cowork. Because agent-based products can run continuously for long periods—and even execute scheduled tasks automatically—the consumption of compute power far exceeds that of traditional conversational scenarios.

Sudip Roy, former Cohere inference lead and co-founder of Adaption Labs, notes that subscription pricing is essentially based on the assumption that users will not fully use up their quotas; once agents consume the entire quota, “profit margins are effectively eroded to the point of near ruin.” This is not a problem unique to Anthropic. Replit and Cursor already adjusted their pricing last summer due to cost pressures from agent products, and Salesforce also adopted usage-based billing when it launched Agentforce at the end of 2024. When AI agents can continuously consume compute, the underlying assumption behind seat-based pricing no longer holds.

OpenAI, on the other hand, went in the opposite direction: in early April, it launched a new Codex subscription tier at $100 per person per month (with a quota between the $20 basic plan and the $200 Pro plan), aiming to attract teams that require cost predictability with fixed pricing.

(Source: BlockBeats)