(Image credit: Future)
If you pay for ChatGPT or Claude and you genuinely lean on it by spending your day coding, running agents or even churning through long research sessions, then you're getting one of the best deals in tech right now. And yet, you're also the reason the deal won't last. At least that's the uncomfortable takeaway from a new analysis by research firm SemiAnalysis, which bought every paid tier from OpenAI and Anthropic and deliberately ran them into the ground. The team pushed each plan with long, agent-style coding tasks until it hit the weekly usage cap, then worked out what all those tokens would have cost at standard pay-as-you-go API rates.The gap between what you pay and what you get turned out to be enormous.What the numbers actually say
(Image credit: Future)The long-standing rule of thumb was that a $200-a-month plan tops out at around $2,000 of usage. SemiAnalysis found the real ceiling is far higher. In fact, in the most extreme case, roughly 70 times the sticker price.Here's how the tiers stack up, based on the firm's testing. The figures are the approximate API-equivalent value if you push a plan to its absolute limit (see chart above).In other words, a maxed-out $200 ChatGPT Pro plan could represent around $14,000 of compute a month if you bought the same volume through the API — a roughly 70x markup in your favor. Claude's top tier lands near $8,000, about 40x. Even the entry-level $20 plans can return many times their price in raw usage.One important caveat to keep in mind: these are API-equivalent figures, not what the companies actually spend. It's essentially the retail price you'd pay to buy that many tokens through the API, which is marked up well above the providers' true compute cost. So OpenAI isn't literally losing $14,000 on you, of course, but the directional point, that heavy subscribers are heavily subsidized, holds up.Why this is happening
