It is widely known that the Claude Max 20x plan doesn’t buy you just $200 worth of API (Application Programming Interface) credits in a slightly more convenient format. It’s closer to … well, an order of magnitude is what I have heard, but I’ve heard other people say it goes up to $5,000–6,000 worth of API credits.1 In any case, it’s a lot. What’s the catch?
Enterprises — not startups, usually — shy away from Claude Max 20x because it has certain data retention properties that they consider too commercially valuable to waive away.2 So instead they either work through the API directly or use something else like GitHub Copilot for Business.
In a way we can see this as Anthropic subsidizing all software that is not enterprise and closed source. What works really well for this? Open source software!
There are all kinds of reasons why Anthropic might want to subsidize open source specifically, of course. One I find less convincing than you might imagine is the flywheel effect. It is true that more open source in the world means more code to train the next model on, but it’s also true that if the majority of this code is being built through Claude Code anyway, then Anthropic already possesses that data stream, and in fact a much richer superset of it: the entire back-and-forth that led to the final product.3
I suspect some companies of some sophistication are test-driving a two-tiered strategy here: open-source everything that isn’t core to the business but is helpful, so that they can safely develop with the much cheaper Max 20x plan, and then only make actual API calls for the small, truly proprietary or trade-secret-y parts of the org. (I say this making no claims as to whether Anthropic’s Terms of Service actually allows this.)4
Of course, it may be the case that most code in a private enterprise can’t be safely open-sourced to take advantage of this cost optimization. One can dream.