They released Sonnet 5 with a temporary price reduction until August. Everyone was excited, but in reality, they increased the tokenizer size by 50%. As a result, the actual cost went up by 50%, they shifted everyone's attention to decrease.
Thus, Anthropic is raising prices but not telling anyone about it. Nobody is really aware of it. You go to the pricing page, the price looks the same. Yet people are actually paying 50% more.
Very shady marketing.
And of course they lie about 35% again. In reality with coding it is 50%.
UPD: I run playcode.io, so it’s my job test all models, their pricing, quality in order to provide best price/quality/speedy/reliability to non-techy.
Jokes aside - can’t wait. Your book The Lean Startup helped me so much. I read it tens of times. It’s one of the reason I got great traction with mine startup https://playcode.io - AI App Builder on our custom cloud.
I built a complete clone if fly.io infrastructure: VMs, networks, etc. so I have my Vercel on bare metal machines to maintain full-stack apps on https://playcode.io.
It took more than a year.
Why? Cloud infrastructure is too expensive.
Thanks for the read. It is a bit more complicated than you think.
I completely rebuilt this sync engine + orm with relations, lazy loading etc, using Vue + Pinia in https://playcode.io. Google Linear’s videos, they explained in detail their architecture.
Yes, I spent a few months. But it worth it. Every new field, model I need to add, it is so straightforward. I do love frameworks and foundations. They make live easier later by a lot.
When playing busy Dota 2 (realtime game), it was crashing sometimes. I asked Claude Code any advice (without any hope) and it debugged somehow that I have unstable IP address and a rented VPS server will improve my connection. I could not believe, it worked…
The real problem is this: no cheap model right now produces a genuinely beautiful, usable UI when it comes to website building. Not one.
And here’s the core tension. The models keep getting better. GPT 5.5 improved. But it also got more expensive. Opus 4.7 to 4.8 has become outrageously priced too, up 50%, and 4.6 was already brutally expensive to begin with. API pricing is a real pain.
What’s missing is any meaningful supply of affordable, democratically priced models you can actually embed into your own service. For me that’s playcode.io, whether it’s the website builder or the app builder. The moment we give users access to these models, the cost becomes a serious blocker. There’s no way around it.
The same dynamic explains Cursor. Why did they go build their own Composer 2.5 model? Because relying on third-party models is simply too expensive for users unless they’re carrying a Claude Code or Codex subscription. So Cursor had to roll their own. It’s a real mess, honestly.
And Chinese models don’t close the gap either. They’ve improved, the free-tier ones especially, which is great to see. But the limitations are significant:
• No multimodality. They don’t accept image input.
• You can’t attach a screenshot, show a UI, or hand it a PDF.
• They feel heavily stripped down overall.
• They’re just not polished. Not even close.
Opus, by contrast, feels like a finished, deeply refined product. Everything else is still rough around the edges. And that’s exactly why Anthropic can charge what they charge: because they actually deliver. That’s the whole problem in a sentence.
Don’t get me wrong, but 7K LoCs means it is still an early attempt to make a coding agent. It starts easy “ah it can edit and read files!”, but it requires a lot of extra effort to make properly for many edge cases, especially caching, price optimizations, etc.
I’ve been implementing custom coding agent in https://playcode.io for 3 years already. Far beyond of 7K LoCs.
So when you compare to “shitty slow” Claude code - I don’t agree.
Is it a joke? GitHub is not perfect, but it is mostly free and survives billions of commits every day. You don’t think We are all able to scale a service so well.
I don’t know, I love it. There are many alternatives like bitbucket, gitlab, but GitHub is still better overall.
Well, what about PlayStation, etc?
Yes it has a PC inside. But, you own it with exceptions. A terminal for games. Similar to phones now. Some advantages and disadvantages here.
Anyway, they Own it, they Built it and they have Their rules.
I don’t know. Partly true.
I came to web development, when low level things solved: frameworks, ORMs, OSs, databases.
I don’t know sql nor c++ well. But I can create a system, a value based on the abstractions. Everyone told me: Ruslan, you don’t know SQL, what a shame! Well I do not have problems and did not have about it.
Probably we are going to be fine with AI abstraction too. People will use it, stuck with problems, dig deeper, learn, improve, same as we had with frameworks and its source code.
Yeah, so sad it is dead. I mean it works, but no more high progress. So it is a legacy. But it worked so fast and smooth :(
At the same time Craft is too focused to replace Google Docs with swipes. Feels weird.
So have to use Notion from phone and VSCode with Claude code on computer. I miss normal implementation of Claude code on my phone :( I really wish to have always computer and access to it maybe. Official Claude code iOS app works weird.
Founder of https://playcode.io - ai app builder.