SemiAnalysis just published a sharp thread of primary research on AI subscription economics.

Their team bought one of each Anthropic and OpenAI subscription plan, ran long-horizon coding tasks until the weekly limits were exhausted, and back-calculated what each subscription actually delivers at API-equivalent pricing.
The headline numbers — up to $14,000/month of usage on a $200 ChatGPT Pro plan and $8,000/month on Claude Max 20x — are 4× to 7× more generous than the widely-circulated ~$2,000/month rule of thumb.

They then modeled subscription gross margin under the assumption that the underlying API carries a 75% margin.












