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brian austin
brian austin

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OpenAI just raised at $852 billion. I pay $2/month for Claude instead.

#ai #chatgpt #claude #programming

OpenAI just raised at $852 billion. I pay $2/month for Claude instead.

OpenAI closed a funding round today valuing the company at $852 billion.

Let that sink in.

For context: that's more than Goldman Sachs, more than Ford and GM combined, more than almost every company in the world that makes physical things.

And they charge $20/month for ChatGPT.

The math of $852B

At $20/month × 300 million users (their claimed user base), that's $6 billion/year in potential subscription revenue.

But most users are on the free tier. Their actual subscription revenue is a fraction of that.

So how do you justify an $852B valuation?

You don't. You raise from Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth funds, you burn cash on GPU clusters, and you charge developers $20/month hoping nobody does the math.

What $20/month actually buys you

ChatGPT Plus at $20/month gives you:

  • GPT-4o access (with rate limits)
  • DALL-E image generation
  • Plugins
  • A slice of an $852 billion company's future

Here's what I actually use in a day:

  • Code review
  • Explaining error messages
  • Draft emails
  • Debugging logic
  • Quick research

For that use case, I don't need the $852B infrastructure. I need an API call.

How I pay $2/month instead

I use SimplyLouie — a Claude API proxy that gives me flat-rate access for $2/month.

Claude (from Anthropic) is legitimately better than GPT-4o for coding and reasoning tasks in my experience. And $2/month is $18/month less than ChatGPT Plus.

Here's the curl command:

curl https://api.simplylouie.com/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "claude-3-5-sonnet-20241022",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Explain this error: Cannot read properties of undefined"}]
  }'
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Works in Claude Code:

# In your shell
export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://api.simplylouie.com
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=your_key_here

# Now run Claude Code normally
claude
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Works in Cursor, Windsurf, any tool that accepts a custom base URL.

The valuation tells you something important

When a company raises at $852B, they are not optimizing for your experience. They are optimizing for their next fundraise.

Every product decision is filtered through: does this help us justify the valuation at the next round?

That's why ChatGPT reads your browser state. That's why Copilot injects ads. That's why the rate limits get tighter the closer you get to hitting them.

The incentives are not aligned with you as a user.

What $2/month means

At $2/month, SimplyLouie has different incentives:

  • Keep the API working
  • Don't do anything weird with your data
  • Give developers a reliable, cheap endpoint

No ads. No upsells. No browser fingerprinting. No $852B to justify.

50% of every subscription goes to animal rescue. The other 50% keeps the servers running.

Try it

7-day free trial. Card required but not charged for 7 days.

simplylouie.com — Claude API for $2/month while OpenAI figures out how to justify its $852 billion valuation.

Posted on the same day OpenAI announced the funding round. Sometimes timing is everything.

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