Also relevant that in recent months, Anthropic gave huge subscription subsidies to gain hype and mindshare ($5000 per month worth of tokens for a $200 subscription according to one report and other Reddit analysis I’ve seen), and probably also to temporarily paper over their higher inference costs relative to GPT (for similar coding ability). So I think you may have in part fallen for a highly successful marketing campaign, but on Anthropic’s part, not OpenAI’s.
(I think OpenAI also gave and is giving large subsidies, but not as large as Anthropic’s because their inference costs/pricing are lower to begin with.)
Fwiw, I don’t think that $5,000 figure is meaningful—the quote is saying (iiuc) that someone using Claude Code could use the equivalent of $5,000 in API credits, if they used their full usage allocation for each time period. But a very high fraction of users aren’t using the maximum possible tokens on these plans. When people were taking advantage of the plan pricing in 2025 to get max token use, Anthropic adjusted the allowances and presumably they’re now comfortable with overall Claude Code token spend on different plans. The $5,000 figure may be from before that adjustment, and only applied to the extreme right tail of token users even at the time afaik.
In general I would expect trends like Claude Code/Codex adoption to be driven more organically than by marketing campaigns, since growth has been so consistent and on such a large scale. I don’t think you get revenue 10xing every year from a creative marketing strategy.
Also relevant that in recent months, Anthropic gave huge subscription subsidies to gain hype and mindshare ($5000 per month worth of tokens for a $200 subscription according to one report and other Reddit analysis I’ve seen), and probably also to temporarily paper over their higher inference costs relative to GPT (for similar coding ability). So I think you may have in part fallen for a highly successful marketing campaign, but on Anthropic’s part, not OpenAI’s.
(I think OpenAI also gave and is giving large subsidies, but not as large as Anthropic’s because their inference costs/pricing are lower to begin with.)
Fwiw, I don’t think that $5,000 figure is meaningful—the quote is saying (iiuc) that someone using Claude Code could use the equivalent of $5,000 in API credits, if they used their full usage allocation for each time period. But a very high fraction of users aren’t using the maximum possible tokens on these plans. When people were taking advantage of the plan pricing in 2025 to get max token use, Anthropic adjusted the allowances and presumably they’re now comfortable with overall Claude Code token spend on different plans. The $5,000 figure may be from before that adjustment, and only applied to the extreme right tail of token users even at the time afaik.
In general I would expect trends like Claude Code/Codex adoption to be driven more organically than by marketing campaigns, since growth has been so consistent and on such a large scale. I don’t think you get revenue 10xing every year from a creative marketing strategy.