Demand is exploding, compute power is tight! Claude changes enterprise pricing, now charging based on compute consumption.

Anthropic quietly changed the pricing method for Claude Enterprise Edition; heavy users' bills may rise sharply.

Anthropic recently adjusted the pricing model for its enterprise product Claude Enterprise. According to The Information's April 14 report, this change had not been previously disclosed.

Under the new model, enterprise clients no longer pay a fixed subscription fee, but instead pay a monthly base fee of $20 per user, plus an additional charge based on actual compute usage. An Anthropic spokesperson confirmed this.

The adjustment has begun to take effect in recent weeks, but some customers will only notice the change when their contracts are renewed.

From $200 to usage-based billing, costs for heavy users may triple

Under the old model, enterprise clients paid up to $200 per user per month for a certain quota of discounted tokens—similar to a prepaid data package.

Fredrik Filipsson, co-founder of Redress Compliance, which helps enterprises negotiate software licensing contracts, stated that for heavy users, the new pricing could potentially double or even triple their costs.

Several IT executives said they are aware of the change and are tracking whether actual bills will rise significantly.

It is worth noting that the adjustment does not affect small enterprise customers with less than 150 users—these clients use the Team subscription, which costs a maximum of $100 per user per month, and the pricing structure remains unchanged for now.

Why change? Compute cost pressure is key

Anthropic's official explanation: Under the old model, some heavy users often hit their usage caps, forcing work interruptions; others paid but didn't use up their quota.

An Anthropic spokesperson said the new pricing "better reflects how customers actually use Claude, as workloads are shifting from fixed-seat productivity tools to agent applications."

The logic is not complicated: Usage of Claude Code and Claude Cowork (an AI assistant capable of automating tasks across apps) has surged recently, and this type of agent application requires heavy computing power—they can run continuously for long periods, even automatically executing tasks every 30 minutes.

Sudip Roy, co-founder of AI software developer Adaption Labs and former Cohere director of inference, said: "If users keep hitting usage caps, subscription profit margins will be wiped out. Subscription pricing is essentially designed for 'underutilization.'"

He added that, "usage-based billing is more beneficial for service providers and clearly less advantageous for heavy users."

Claude Code's explosive growth forces pricing restructuring

The direct trigger for this price adjustment is the explosive growth of Claude Code.

According to The Information, Claude Code's annualized revenue jumped from $1 billion in December 2024 to $2.5 billion in February 2025, and is still accelerating in recent weeks. Meanwhile, weekly active users doubled from January to February.

This growth pushed Anthropic's overall annualized revenue pace to $30 billion in early April, nearly twice the level at the end of last year.

However, the rapid increase in usage has brought cost pressures. Last year, Anthropic's inference costs grew more than threefold, leading to a lower-than-expected gross margin.

Earlier this month, Anthropic also announced that customers using Claude Code subscriptions who call third-party agent tools like OpenClaw would need to pay extra—due to the heavy compute consumption. Claude Code lead Boris Cherny wrote on X: "Compute is a resource that needs careful management, and we prioritize customers who use our own products and APIs."

OpenAI seizes the opportunity as the industry shifts collectively in pricing models

While Anthropic adjusted its pricing, OpenAI appears to be stepping up its efforts. In early April, OpenAI launched a new Codex subscription tier at $100 per user per month, between the $20 and $200 tiers, labeling it as "better supporting Codex's growing usage demand." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that Codex's weekly active users surpassed 3 million last week.

However, Fredrik Filipsson said that the Anthropic enterprise customers he has contacted show no signs of leaving—they remain satisfied with the productivity gains Claude provides.

"When your product truly creates stickiness at the user level, you can let usage drive revenue instead of locking people into seats," he said.

In fact, usage-based billing is not unique to Anthropic. Salesforce adopted consumption-based pricing for Agentforce at the end of 2024; ServiceNow sells software based on employee numbers, but AI features are charged based on usage. In the AI programming field, Replit and Cursor also restructured their pricing models last summer due to operational cost pressures.

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