I didn’t realize the business plans were token metered differently from the Pro plan I’ve been on for a while. $20/month, and it has session/weekly limits, but I rarely hit them, and I use it, a lot.
I do wonder if this will encourage businesses to branch out into running local models for simpler tasks.
Why even bother at all? What can you do with those tokens? Ask for the weather twice?
The Haiku 5.5 model is actually quite inexpensive. I’ve used it to implement multiple features this month and have only spent $4 of my $20 monthly budget.
Are you using api or subscription?
The legacy code I’m managing is a clusterfuck of the highest order. Even Sonnet struggles to analyze it sometimes 😑
I’m happy this is only a small part of my job, but oh my…
The $29 figure is doing a lot of quiet work in this story, because that’s exactly what a Pro plan costs. So the real message isn’t really a budget cap, it’s ‘stop expensing API tokens and expense a subscription instead’. I’d bet a chunk of that $1,000 spend was people wiring API access into internal tooling and prototypes, which feels productive right up until finance sees the invoice and has no idea what any of it maps to. The part that’ll actually sting is that this is how a lot of shadow automation dies: not because it didn’t work, but because nobody could explain the line item. At least a hard cap forces the conversation that should’ve happened months earlier.
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?
Not at the moment. It’s definitely cheaper to buy LLMs as a service than running an in-house server hall. Anthropic and OpenAI are running at a loss, you know.
Now, risking to lose your data to the service provider is another thing.
Look at it this way, if I pay Open AI $1k a month, their people make sure it works they month. If I let Joe from finance spend $10k on computer parts, Joe needs to ensure that it runs or I need to hire someone who is knowledgeable on local models. If I’m a simple firm, $12k a year might be cheaper because someone else makes sure it works and I can fire Joe when the fancy autocorrect loses a bunch of clients by falsifying work. Then I don’t have to spend even bigger bucks hiring a new Joe because no one knows how to work the damn server he replaced the break room with.
It depends, sometimes the private API models are better at a specific task to the point it wouldn’t be worth using one that is worse. (Really it’s the harnesses around them tbh)
Overall sovereign AI is where it’s at. If you have good enough tooling in place
Definitely. We do this at my job. But a server big enough to provide a comparable service would cost at least $30k. And you likely need more than one. And you still need someone to maintain it.
I’ve heard that GPU’s for this work are exceedingly hard to get ahold of as well. Glm 5, which i think is near frontier model capabilities, takes around 1.5 Tb of vram un-quantized.
Not hard. Just really fucking expensive and might have a long lead time.
So hard, then.
Amateurs.
I’m spending 4000$ per month.
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.
explain what you’re spending it on and why, giving it a business reason and a project to associate the costs to
I love these chilling effects
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.
$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.
Well duh? I doubt $29 get you anywhere at the moment and that nonsense is only going to get more expensive.
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.
That’s basically saying that they shouldn’t use Claude at all.
Good.
o.O my budget can be requested up to $2k/month.
$29/month is like… not using it lol
It goes back to being a tool, not just the method. Still quite productive.
Silly Accenture, that’s not the way to tokenmaxx.
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
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.
Might as well just stop using AI agents that that point.
I don’t work at Accenture, but at a group that had a similar journey from adoption to scaling back to only the included tokens and I would say that is precisely the idea: giving up on ‘Agentic’ use of AI, but still have enough for some acceleration.
From what I gather, in our group the findings were:
- Obviously, it was costing a heavy chunk of change and then even more expensive when rates were hiked
- There was no good way for them to even know what productive end the spend went toward, they know which employee expended a bunch of tokens, but no idea what they would have used it on
- Despite a crank of volume of stuff, they weren’t seeing any business value of the stuff. Requests still took about the same time to fulfill, etc
- The most eager AI producers got ahead of their skis, and their stuff was useless because nothing and no one could reliably fix/tweak it after a certain point.
- All the scary ‘AI will ruin IT security’ that the AI companies themselves have been expressing likely didn’t help either.
- Perhaps the most uncomfartable of all, they found out that however good or bad an AI project turns out to be, management can’t tell the diference until it is too late. Being able to ‘manage’ the content has always been flawed, but the AI dials it up to eleven by ‘looking’ just right as a demo to someone that understands neither the customer nor the process of creating the work, but blows up in their faces in delivery. Kind of like how so many technology article writers breathlessly talked about the photoshop clone, despite many of them never having touched the relevant software, then heavy users reporting that it is actually shit, but the people writing about it have no context to know, but felt compelled to talk about it anyway. Those are management in the fields using AI.
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…
In my company some of the top users spend over $3000/m. $29/m is maybe 30 mins - 1 hour constant usage a month 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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