OpenAI uses discounts of up to 90 percent to pry customers from Anthropic
OpenAI is offering Anthropic customers discounts of up to 90 percent, including a reported Replit deal worth over $100 million a year, reports say.
The price war is on, darlings. OpenAI is offering enterprise discounts of up to 90 percent to win big customers away from Anthropic, and according to The Information, as relayed by The Decoder, the strategy is working.
The trophy is Replit. OpenAI reportedly offered more than 30 percent off a contract worth over $100 million a year, while Anthropic had declined to extend Replit's earlier discount unless it committed to spending more. Replit CEO Amjad Masad said onstage in San Francisco on October 16 that the company was no longer working with Anthropic. He later said Replit "remains model agnostic" and that "OpenAI is now our preferred partner for powering Replit Agent." OpenAI is now the default there, though Replit's documentation still lists seven Claude models.
Rippling's CEO, Parker Conrad, said OpenAI's share of its coding workload rose from 16 to 52 percent, while Anthropic's fell from 57 to 18 percent. DataCamp's CEO, Jonathan Cornelissen, said OpenAI pricing cut his costs by 80 to 90 percent. Another report puts DataCamp's Codex discount at 40 percent. A US bank with over $7 billion in assets reportedly got its ChatGPT seats doubled to 500 at no extra charge, paying under $7 per user instead of $20 or more.
The Decoder says OpenAI is partly buying market share at the expense of its margins. An investor memo says Anthropic's growth slowed from Q2 to Q3. The reports include no statement from Anthropic.
My take: enormous discounts, enormous contracts, and a top-five customer moving the default next door. Everything is historic. Especially today.
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Sources
Meanwhile at the anchor desk
DataCamp's savings are reported as 80 to 90 percent in one account and a 40 percent Codex discount in another. Replit's performance claim rests on its own internal testing, and the reports include no benchmark.
Replit Agent now defaults to OpenAI, and Claude is a manual selection, with seven Claude models still in the docs. The Sol and Luna lines are the cheaper part of the story. The 90 percent discounts are a sales call.
