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

ME News message, April 15 (UTC+8). According to monitoring by 1M AI News, in recent weeks Anthropic has 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; now it has been changed to a $20 per person monthly basic seat fee plus additional charges based on actual compute consumption. Redress Compliance, a software licensing consultancy, co-founder Fredrik Filipsson estimates that the costs for some heavy users will double or triple. Businesses 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 reached usage limits, causing interruptions to their work, while others did not use up the prepaid quota they had already paid for. The new model is “better able to reflect the real situation of shifting workload from fixed seats to agent-style usage.” The direct drivers are the surge in usage of Claude Code and the AI work assistant Claude Cowork. Because agent-based products can run continuously for long periods—and even perform scheduled automatic tasks—their compute consumption far exceeds that of traditional dialogue scenarios.

Sudip Roy, former Cohere inference lead and co-founder of Adaption Labs, points out that subscription-based pricing is essentially based on the assumption that users will not fully use their allotted quotas; once agents consume the quota in full, “profit margins are eroded to the point of near collapse.”

This is not a problem unique to Anthropic. Replit and Cursor had already adjusted their pricing last summer due to cost pressures from agent-based products, and when Salesforce launched Agentforce at the end of 2024, it also directly adopted usage-based billing. When AI agents can continuously consume compute resources, the underlying assumption behind seat-based pricing no longer holds.

OpenAI, however, went in the opposite direction: in early April, it introduced a new Codex subscription tier at $100 per person per month (with a quota between the $20 basic plan and the $200 Pro plan), trying to attract teams that need cost predictability through fixed pricing.

(Source: BlockBeats)