We are on Anthropic's Team plan at Upbound, and we are about as AI-pilled as a company gets. All of our engineers write code with Claude Code every day, on a bundled seat. It's a flat monthly price with limits, and you don't really see the token meter.
Then one of our engineers switched to opencode and started running Opus 4.8 straight through the API instead of on his bundled plan. I looked at his usage a few weeks in. He was averaging about $5,500 a month. Same person, same work, roughly what he had been doing on the bundled plan at $125/mo. The only thing that changed was that we could suddenly see the token meter.
That made me want to know what it would cost us if everyone moved off bundled seats and onto per-token pricing. It is not just hypothetical. Anthropic moved its Enterprise customers to usage-based billing earlier this year, tokens on top of the seat, and shut off bundled-seat usage from other coding agents. As they start optimizing for margins, it's clear to us that more policy changes are coming soon.
It's not easy to see the tokens on a bundled plan
I was surprised by how hard it is to see the tokens consumed on a bundled plan. The analytics dashboards do not report tokens. The usage API that would report them needs an Enterprise account, as far as I can tell, which we do not have.
Luckily, Claude Code writes a local log of every session, with token counts per message, and keeps roughly the last thirty days before it prunes. We wrote a small script that reads those logs and totals the tokens by model, priced at Anthropic's published rates. It emits only counts and costs, no prompts and no code, so people can run it and share the output without leaking anything. The script is here, and it runs on your own machine in about a minute.
So we had some of our engineers run it and share their results for much of June.
The subsidy multiple
Priced at list, the engineers' Claude Code usage ranged from $639 to $5,586. About 90% of it is Opus, mostly Opus 4.8. These are floors, because the local logs had already pruned part of the month for most people by the time we looked.
Set that against Anthropic's Premium seat at $125 a month, and that's an average of 24x more expensive if we switched to paying for tokens. The average covers a wide range: our lightest measured user came in around 5x, and our heaviest about 45x. I have started calling this the subsidy multiple: the tokens you burn in a bundled plan, priced at list, divided by what you pay for the seat.
A few caveats: all prices are at list, not at a rate a big customer negotiates. A large share of it is cache reads from long agentic sessions, which bill at a tenth of the input price, so someone will argue the cost is softer than it looks. A bundled plan is also not all-you-can-eat: past the included limit you either get throttled or, with extra usage turned on, pay the overage at API rates. We have it on and barely touch it, a few hundred dollars a month, even as hard as we lean on Claude Code. The flat seats absorb nearly all of the usage above, which is the subsidy said another way. Even after all of that, the shape does not move.
Owning our intelligence
So we are doing the thing that follows from taking that seriously. Open-weight models are closing on the frontier faster than anyone expected. We've started looking at running our own models, where the cost is compute we control rather than a token price someone else sets and can reset whenever the market lets them. It also keeps our prompts and context ours. We're doing this on Modelplane, our open control plane for inference, of course.
It feels like a big correction is coming in AI, and we're planning for it. I'm curious what your subsidy multiple is.
