Anthropic quietly doubles its estimate for how much engineers can expect to spend on Claude Code tokens

• Anthropic more than doubled its estimate of what an average developer will spend on tokens "per active day."
• Now, Anthropic estimates the average cost per developer per day is around $13.
• Earlier this month, the AI startup said it would be $6 per developer per day.

Yesterday's Claude Code costs are not today's.

More specifically, sometime in the last few weeks, Anthropic more than doubled its public estimates for how much an enterprise developer and almost all average users spend on tokens for Claude Code.

Anthropic now says that the average cost per developer per active day is $13, with costs remaining below $30 per active day "for 90% of users."

"Across enterprise deployments, the average cost is around $13 per developer per active day and $150-250 per developer per month, with costs remaining below $30 per active day for 90% of users," Claud Code website reads. "To estimate spend for your own team, start with a small pilot group and use the tracking tools below to establish a baseline before wider rollout."

Archived versions of the same page showed that before April 16, the previous estimates were $6 per developer per active day with costs remaining below $12 per active day "for 90% of users."

Tokens are how large language models break down words into numerical inputs and outputs, and are essentially the building blocks of AI chatbots like Anthropic's Claude.

Ed Zitron, the CEO of EZPR, a tech and business PR firm, first pointed out the change on X. Zitron was previously a columnist for Business Insider.

The changes are a small snapshot of a much larger issue: AI costs are going up.

It's a change that is affecting everyone, from everyday users to developers to large companies. The rise of AI agents in particular has pushed frontier AI model providers like Anthropic, in addition to hyperscalers, to the breaking point as they struggle to fulfill skyrocketing demands for compute.

Last week, Anthropic sparked outrage among users when it appeared that Claude Code was no longer listed as available for Pro users on Anthropic's pricing page. Anthropic later said that it was testing a change for 2% of new users.

At the same time, Amol Avasare, Anthropic's head of growth, said that Anthropic's subscription plans "weren't build for this."

"Engagement per subscriber is way up," Avasare wrote on X. "We've made small adjustments along the way (weekly caps, tighter limits at peak), but usage has changed a lot and our current plans weren't built for this."