If you’re spending $1K per month on LLMs – putting aside whether this is productive or ethical for a moment – wouldn’t it make more sense to just pony up the $5K-$10K or so that it would cost to provision a private, local model? Might that not actually be superior in terms of corporate security?
Definitely. We do this at my job. But a server big enough to provide a comparable service would cost at least $30k. And you likely need more than one. And you still need someone to maintain it.
The title is misleading. They didn’t cap it, they just declared that if you are spending more than that, you have to be able to explain what you’re spending it on and why, giving it a business reason and a project to associate the costs to, which I expect almost all Claude users at Accenture probably can. This is simply an accounting change, not a company-wide shutdown of Claude.
Heavy use remains possible, but it now needs a budget owner.
So only if it can be recharged to a customer
I mean, that’s literally Accenture’s default business model (same as almost any consulting/professional services company), so it shouldn’t be surprising. My point is that it’s not an indictment of AI, and their AI usage isn’t actually going to go down; it’s just Accenture doing Accenture things. They’re not a charity, they’re not using AI for fun, they’re using it to make profit, and they make profit by charging their customers for every cent of AI they use on their behalf, usually with a hefty markup, in addition to everything and anything else they can justify charging against their customer’s accounts. It’s a very profitable business model, and I’m sure they love using AI for it and will continue using AI just as heavily if not even more in the future.
Ten times over.
Alternate headline: C-Suite Execs Come To The Realization That AI Costs Money
i saw a post that was something like “youd think the cocaine class would understand why the first hit is free”
And it’s going to cost a whole lot more once the investments dry up and they’re going to have to actually pay for all the data centers under construction.
Prolly not. When the bubble pops these data centers will be sold off for cents on the dollar and a bunch of the companies go bankrupt. There will be a glut of equipment, so prices will fall. People will buy up the scraps and provide compute services cheaper.
The number of AI datacenters that are actually datacenters and not just fields of gravel is low.
You’re more optimistic than I am. My bet is that when the bubble pops the government will step in to bail out these companies, especially household names like Nvidia, and none of the data center equipment ever finds its way into the hands of regular people. It’s gonna get repurposed into a pillar of our surveillance hellscape, attempting to weed out people who are guilty of precrimes or thoughtcrimes, providing pretext to arrest political opponents and undesirables by going “they were dangerous! Our trillion dollar AI said so!”
Nvidia is the one selling the shovels during the gold rush. They’re not at risk of going bust.
It’s all the LLm companies leveraging themselves to the eye balls to buy Nvidia chips for their datacenters that are at risk.
Impossible. It would require C-suites:
- having a brain
- realize that they fucked up
- accept it without having a brain aneurysm
- making decisions to prevent that in the future
C-suite still on unlimited Claude plan
I have a friend that works there. They told me about this, and I was like “per day?”
I was not prepared to learn that the budget was less than a dollar per day. Might as well just stop using AI agents that that point.
Yeah it’s basically useless for agentic work. Especially with frontier models.
I just want to put “$29 per month” into perspective:
Imagine a white collar employee earning $100K per year. $100K / 250 working days is $400 per day. Payroll tax and benefits can easily add +50% to that, so it’s not a stretch to guess that our hypothetical employee costs the employer $600 per day.
$29 per 20 working days is about 1/4 of 1% of that cost.
Yeah, that’s like the breakroom coffee budget for the employee that month…
Might as well just stop using AI agents that that point.
Wouldn’t that be terrible…
Wait what? How? But wasn’t AI the thing to make business save tons of money by replacing workers with an almost free “artificial worker”??
Are you telling me that, as everyone and their mothers were saying, this was just a lie? Who could’ve thought?!
Two trillion valuation, where are you going?
Nevrr forget, Accenture used to be Arthur Anderson, of Enron infamy. They deserve any financial ruin they get, IMO.
Sheeit thanks for the reminder (and trip down memory lane)
Fuck AA
That’s basically saying that they shouldn’t use Claude at all.
Good.
In my company some of the top users spend over $3000/m. $29 is maybe 30 mins - 1 hour continuous running for a *medium" sized model like Sonnet. Not sure about cheaper models.
I spent $200 in one session the other day, watching the clanker design, implement, and review the change. Still have no idea what I did but my name is on the commit
Sounds fulfilling.
/s
I hate it of course. I need to find an exit strategy
Fair point, but not any less fulfilling than my day job already was, arguably maybe a little more fun to be spending the company’s money on nonsense. My job pays my bills very adequately, that’s normally the only fulfilling thing about it.
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Interesting. Yeah, me and my coworkers spend about $1000 per month—so far. The bill keeps going up. One AI workshop thing they made us do spent $100 just in 1 session.
Amateurs.
I’m spending 4000$ per month.
Well duh? I doubt $29 get you anywhere at the moment and that nonsense is only going to get more expensive.
I’m willing to bet that only a fraction of that spend was work task related.
If my productivity (and therefore my job) were measured not by results but by amount of tokens I use, you can bet I’m gonna burn tokens for absolutely everything during my work shift. Even if it’s just asking the chatbot what time is it every second.
Exactly.
The $29 cap signals that per-seat AI budgets cannot yet cover agentic coding tools, which cost heavy users anywhere from $500 to $1,000 a month.
It may be so, but that tells me even if they wanted to use it for productive work, it’d still cost them about that much.
For now, that’s not crazy. I have a company-provided api key and subscription. Now maybe they bumped me to the a $100/mo tier without telling me, but as far as I know the lowest tier keeps me in tokens heat about all month and I use it a lot. I switch over to API for a few hours per month and probably spend more in that time than my sub costs all month.
I spent about $2k developing a set of tools and AI orchestrates them for me, and I can add new tools to orchestrate as needed. Caveat: I do more production support and my teams do the production development work. We are all on subscription plans, but they do more hand development than I do.
Point being, you can easily spend >$1k/mo and me and several people on my teams did before we got subscriptions, but the subs give some AI assistance without going all-in on AI coding, which is the sweet spot IMO.
Silly Accenture, that’s not the way to tokenmaxx.
$29 is enough for one of them pro plans. That’s plenty if you’re not wasteful.
But do companies like Accenture get that subsidized plan at scale? At API rates that can easily be thousands of dollars.
The free tier might actually give more usage
