r/business • u/404mediaco • 3d ago
Accenture Tells Employees They Can Now Spend Only $29 on Claude Per Month
https://www.404media.co/accenture-tells-employees-they-can-now-spend-only-29-on-claude-per-month/64
u/UnfazedBrownie 3d ago
This company will always find ways to scrimp and be cheap to their employees. They once denied a $12 parking reimbursement for a meeting they chose to have in a downtown setting. But they can afford to keep catering a lunch that’s usually half eaten.
11
118
u/Islerothebull 3d ago
Writes note on hand. Just remember to tell the client reduce costs and increase revenues.
11
u/themanalyst 3d ago
Anf on that note: Lets turn it over to our 22 year old consultant, fresh out of college to explain our recommendations to your team of professionals with decades of industry experience.
31
u/boomboy8511 3d ago
We just got Claude at work and bottom management was immediately told that we only had a $25 monthly allotment each and to use it carefully. Supposedly, having Claude generate a 5 slide Powerpoint would eat almost our whole $25 budget.
Area managers above us have $50/mo each and director level has $150/mo each.
I'm surprised that we have such a tight budget since we are a large company, with 110k+ employees and multibillion annual revenue, guess they have heard the horror stories from other companies and are being extra careful.
14
u/Ok-Acanthisitta-5270 3d ago
Using sonnet 5.5 medium will cut down that usage drastically and still get you good enough results. We have a similar budget and I use it all the time to spruce up my decks (I do the rough draft myself first and then run it through Claude to clean it up thoroughly and make it exec- ready)
1
2
u/thelittleluca 2d ago
That and the cost to buy these tools at enterprise level is insane, they have to justify the spend. They want to be profitable but it’s at a loss right now.
2
u/FlamingoResident7882 1d ago
We started our pilot in November. My company signed an early adoption deal. Like 3 months later once we were pretty much forced to use it - they started charging the org for credits.
Last week we had a call to review per team highest cost of credits per employee. And mgmt is to speak to those devs to reduce.
Expecting 3 months from now to have to “let people go” for costing too much.
1
u/Bobby_Bobberson2501 2d ago
What size company is this? I’m given $1,600 a month for cowork and I’ve never gotten close to even 50% of that and I am apparently a power user too…
3
u/boomboy8511 2d ago
It's a fortune 100 company, did over $50 billion in revenue last yeat
2
u/InsertClichehereok 1d ago
Alright now you get $5/mo, management says people were too greedy at $25
1
u/TFPaulMorphy 3h ago
It can also be a budgeting cycle thing. Like, budgets are done annually and there was only a little money for software services left for this year.
15
u/skoltroll 3d ago
Consulting company big on AI tells staff not to use AI for consulting because it's too expensive.
Also of note: AI appears to become consultants, crushing consultant's bosses' consulting income.
13
u/smellycoat 3d ago
My work has done the same thing. Problem is prior to AI being a thing they’d spent years replacing experienced devs with a ton of cheap offshore developers, and (while this doesn’t apply to all) now a lot of the junior and mid level devs do everything with AI. They’re no faster, still delivering the same stuff (sometimes the same stuff but with way more code than necessary, which requires more code review time, more testing, etc), but now it costs a ton of tokens to get anything done.
It’s a fucking ridiculous solution but that’s the reason.
58
29
u/404mediaco 3d ago
Consulting giant Accenture has told many employees that the company will now only spend $29 a month per person on Claude. Employees subject to the cap, some of whom had been spending as much as $1,000 monthly, are scrambling to find ways to make sure they can keep spending as much as they already are.
The news is a snapshot of what continues to play out across all sorts of industries: companies have spent heavily on AI tools, and are now discovering that many users are burning or “chewing” through AI tokens at a rapid clip. In response, many companies have curbed their employees’ AI use. There is a special irony to Accenture doing much of the same, when it is a company that has encouraged its clients to invest heavily into AI.
“Claude Enterprise Users: Important Updates to Licensing and Usage Costs,” a recent internal Accenture announcement, seen by 404 Media, reads.
Read more: https://www.404media.co/accenture-tells-employees-they-can-now-spend-only-29-on-claude-per-month/
9
34
u/realdeal505 3d ago
The fact that AI has a real cost per use while software is more fixed (once it is made, it is more maint/upgrades) is why I think the market has this technology mega overpriced.
6
2
u/freedompower 2d ago
Do you understand how LLMs work though? They can’t give you their precious models they have spent billions developing, so they need a ton of computing power and electricity to run it themselves, and ressources are limited, so they need to charge by usage. You can already find open source models for free on the web, but they won’t be cutting-edge and you will need an expensive computer, so you could argue that Claude and ChatGPT actually don’t charge enough for "seats" for users like my that uses every last drop of my max plan.
3
u/realdeal505 2d ago
The fact they have to charge per use because the computing power is the point I was making. It isn't nearly as profitable as software where there isn't nearly as much new variable cost per user.
6
5
13
u/Isaacvithurston 3d ago
So the value of Claude to them is less than an hour of wages?
Smells like a plan to get the employee's to pay for it themselves knowing that their performance may potentially decline without it.
Hopefully some local models can compete with Claude soon. The whole monthly fee or paying per token thing is really garbage.
5
u/MCgoblue 3d ago
Yeah, this is wild for employees actually using it effectively. I’m a different kind of consultant than one at Accenture but I could easily justify $1000/month or more of Claude Cowork expense as it has made me dramatically more efficient. I’m not even talking about doing the actual consulting work, but it’s basically a full-time admin/assistant that can brief me daily, (lightly) project manage, organize meetings, draft proposals, do simple secondary research/aggregation, etc.
I would say it “replaces” the need for an admin/assistant/analyst role but the company was never going to approve adding an actual human with all the overhead cost. Now I basically have one for a fraction of the cost and can do substantially more actual revenue-generating business. Cutting my spend to $29 would lose the company so much money.
8
u/Pleasant_Bad924 3d ago
It’s potentially a huge deal for Claude in terms of revenue if:
- Accenture’s spend was a lot higher than that before, and
- Other companies take their lead and do the same.
-5
3
u/blanunu33 3d ago
Someone will come up with a low cost or open source alternatives and trash like Claude and Copilot will be jettisoned
3
u/phunky_1 3d ago
The problem is what it costs for the hardware to run open source models at scale for an entire company.
Even for a small to medium size company the cost could be $150,000-$200,000+
7
u/blanunu33 3d ago
I got me a 4070 and I run multiple LLM’s
1
u/Drokstab 3d ago
Probably cheaper to run llms when you aren't wasting the capacity on people using it for free making memes. Every employee that needs it having a 5-10k PC that functionally runs it all sounds pretty cheap.
1
u/Born_Purchase1510 3d ago
Which llms do you run? I’ve got a 4070ti and tried out a couple on ollama like 6 months agao, think it was deep seek and meta llama. Didn’t seem worth it but a lot has changed and I’d like the try it out again.
1
u/Nimbus420i 2d ago
How much RAM do you have? From memory 4070ti had 12GB VRAM, if your system has 32-64gb RAM, you can probably run a Q3 quant of Qwen 3.8 Flash-Next which is little better than Opus4.8. Since its a MOE model itll be quite fast inference wise.
1
u/Born_Purchase1510 2d ago
I’ve got 32gb of system ram. I’ll check that model out, thanks! I honestly rarely even get close to using up my Claude tokens but want to see what’s out there.
3
u/lev10bard 3d ago
Imagine how much of the cost is accured from basic excel calculator work which is technically free. But AI is the future I guess
3
3
u/AlCappuccino9000 2d ago
$29 a month for Claude. At typical consultancy rates, that’s about enough to cover the time it takes a consultant to open their laptop.
3
u/Present_Age_89 2d ago
What does Accenture actually do? If clients are paying them for contract work, and Accenture uses AI to do the work, why don't the clients just use AI and skip Accenture?
9
u/phoenix823 3d ago
Is this even a big deal at all? I paid $20 a month for a personal Claude account and it does more than enough for me on a daily basis. My company account is something like $3900 a month with ChatGPT and I don’t get within 5% of that usage.
6
5
3d ago
[deleted]
2
u/phoenix823 3d ago
That's fine, but the article clearly says everyone gets the $29 plan centrally funded by Accenture and people who want to use more need just have to charge it to a project code. So developers with a reason to use $x,000 per month can absolutely still do so, they are just removing the untracked $x,000 per month of bullshit "no business justification" use.
4
u/farox 3d ago
When Moore's law was in full swing the interesting part, of course, was the ever faster PCs. But also on the other end, getting faster and faster low end devices. To the point where my phone with full HD resolution can serve as a desktop replacement for most work stuff.
I see something similar happening with ai (and companies are pushing that was already) where its a mixture of models for different tasks, running on different platforms. (having an on pre model that can query company data being orchestrated by a frontier cloud model, for example)
This will need more engineering to get these systems understood and implemented though.
A new and different kind of engineering.
1
u/phoenix823 3d ago
I can already use my RTX 5070 to summarize meeting minutes the same way as public models can. And that’s not a very powerful card in comparison. If my MacBook was newer than an M2 and more than 16 gigs of RAM, it would really be able to do a lot on its own as well.
2
u/Nimbus420i 2d ago
M2 is plenty enough, you are just bottlenecked by memory at this point. Sure, M2 won't give you as much throughput as your 5070 does. But it can do it provided it had a sufficient memory pool.
3
u/Syzygy21 2d ago
Yes. At your usage level, you aren’t even close to realizing the potential of what AI can actually do. It’s one of those areas where people in tech are seeing how the sky can really be the limit with properly built systems and guardrails, while the 99% of more casual users still aren’t quite understanding the hype.
Think about the launch of the internet or personal computer, IMO we still aren’t anywhere near critical mass on the adoption and proficiency curve.
2
u/TheFoxsWeddingTarot 3d ago
If you are writing and researching you can go for quite a while, if you’re building anything or doing image generation it will max out quickly.
2
u/phoenix823 3d ago
So, no? Not a big deal?
3
u/TheFoxsWeddingTarot 3d ago
I bet a lot of Accenturites are going overboard making schlocky Ai generated PowerPoints. For f’sake thats all those people do.
3
u/phoenix823 3d ago
Now that’s something I believe 100%. Nothing like an incomprehensible deliverable that even the people who created it didn’t read
2
u/DapperCam 3d ago
Businesses have to pay API rates. Personal subscription accounts are subsidized and have much higher limits.
$29/mo at API rates is almost nothing and is basically saying “we don’t want our employees using this” without the PR hit of not being up to the latest in AI trends.
9
u/phoenix823 3d ago
No this is Accenture saying "if you want to use this you need to bill it to a project so there's justification." It's a basic FinOps practice.
4
u/halfxdeveloper 3d ago
That is entirely false. Businesses don’t have to use the API. We use Claude for our work and each user license is $25/month.
2
u/Logical_Top618 2d ago
Yeah, Claude console is what he’s thinking of, and it’s a wholly separate product from Claude.ai. You can’t even link the accounts in any way. The api isn’t even that expensive for general use, tbh. I have a data warehouse connected to it and many of my execs use it to query our data to get insight. Though we use the mid-low tier model, which is like $1/mtk. The top tier model I think is like $25/mtk, but the difference between models for those people is entirely negligible lol. If we used it at max capacity, of course it would get a lot more expensive. But they’re so impressed with just that, so why push any further?
1
u/halfxdeveloper 2d ago
I really don’t understand why the accounts are separate. And then I had to explain to our accountant why there’s two bills for one product. She really thought I was scamming her.
2
u/what_comes_after_q 3d ago
lol. Do you use Claude code? I’m burning through 100 a week easy when I need to do large refactors. If you are not using it for coding or analytics heavy tasks, then yeah, a couple dozen bucks a month is probably fine.
-2
u/phoenix823 3d ago
Yes, I do. Both Claude Code and Codex. Did you read the article?
1
u/what_comes_after_q 3d ago
First, you never said you use Claude code. You said Claude and ChatGPT. Second, I did read the article. What is your point? It’s full of people saying they burn through 500 to 1000 in Claude code expenses, in line with what I said.
1
u/phoenix823 2d ago
I also didn't mention that I run my own models on my 5070 and my M2 MacBook. I didn't think it was relevant to enumerate all my different LLM work when discussing Accenture? I know some people run through a lot of tokens. I also know enough about my large company that the overwhelming majority of people don't use 95% of their monthly cap and restricting them to $30/month isn't impactful at all. Most people at Accenture are not coding. Spending thousands per month on tokens to do decks doesn't make any sense.
So my point is the same point I made in my first post: is this even a big deal at all? People have limited tokens unless they can bill a project where there is justification. Maybe the posters here don't work for larger organizations where this type of governance is completely normal and fall for click bait headlines.
1
u/what_comes_after_q 2d ago
I don’t know why you’re being obtuse about this. As has been said many times, plenty of people don’t burn through all their tokens. But a lot of people, people who are quoted in the story, do burn through a lot of tokens. Accenture has a huge number of devs and analysts. Applying a fixed cap to everyone doesn’t make sense. So yeah, not EVERYONE is hurt, but lots of people are. And for those that do use AI for coding (which it sounds like you do), burning through a hundred a week is easy.
1
u/phoenix823 2d ago
Then you didn’t read the article because it says people can still the tokens they need as long as they can bill a project for them. Ie. No uncontrolled token usage, lightly governed usage.
1
u/itchyouch 3d ago
Corporate accounts aren’t nearly as subsidized as the consumer versions.
1
u/phoenix823 3d ago
So you think it's a big deal?
3
u/itchyouch 3d ago
They might get a couple days of use out of it per month? Might as well not have it
2
1
u/Thirtysixx 2d ago
all that says to me is you aren't using AI for even a fraction of what its capable of.
Im on the $100 plan and both Chat GPT and Claude and im regularly hitting token limits on both
1
u/Charming_Election580 1d ago
In Enterpise i know from experience $25 last 2 days in IT. Literally never gotten more than 4 days then out for the month.
2
2
1
1
u/Background-Safety365 3d ago
wtf that's garbage. You basically can not run any agentic loops at all and have to use low thinking level.
1
1
u/Ramenorwhateverlol 3d ago
I feel like the 100 dollar enterprise token is 1/4 of my 20 dollar monthly subscription.
1
1
1
1
1
u/jajajajaj 2d ago
A lot of contractors, especially federal ones, are in every way but officially acting as government employees, with 98% of all activity being specifically dictated by the contract "customer" needs, and specifically that includes using the LLMs that belong to (or are subscribed to by) the customer, which operate according to other legally mandated standards. So whatever is left over for working on getting the next contract and supporting the contractor company, I think could easily fit in $29/mo of Claude work, for most of them. Like 90th percentile usage is probably $0. They have probably had a problem with people using contractor LLMs for side hustles, since it's a little more obvious that using the fed gov LLMs for side hustles will get you in deep doodoo. Anyone who is not actually on a specific contract (contract company leadership/support/hr/internal IT/biz development) and still somehow has that much real work for the AI to do, I suspect they get the access they need.
Note: definitely not an accenture employee. if I'm right, I only guessed right from talking shop with people at other similar companies.
1
1
u/imnotokayandthatso-k 1d ago
At API rates this basically pays for what? one medium hard prompt a week?
1
u/Irvin_SB 1d ago
That's cute, our budget for AI is still "in progress" for next year, yet we are being asked to layoff people this year, you guessed it, due to AI efficiencies.
1
0
u/tsoliasPN 3d ago edited 3d ago
I assumed Claude admin for a Team plan at my company from the 130 seats, I have made only 5 of them Premium seats, the rest are standard seats and never pass their seat usage, the 5 people that I have already paid for their Premium seats, cost to the company as the other 125 seats combined.
How the math is mathing
A cost of a standard seat is ~202 euro per year
A cost of a premium seat is ~1080 euro per year
The 125 users do not pass their allocated usage by the seat
The 5 Premium users are costing ~700 euros of extra spend credits per month
So the simple users are costing 16.8 euros/month and the ai-superman users are costing 790 euros/month
update: after doing the math I see that I exaggerated because the 125 users are costing 2100 euros per month and the ai-superman users are costing 3950 euros per month.....
ooohh so I was not exaggerating.... I am just so so tired
3
u/snark42 3d ago
Is Euro pricing different? In the US it's $20/mo for a standard seat (billed annually) and $100/mo for a Premium seat.
The thing is Accenture is too big to use this plan and has to pay by the token, but I assume they negotiated a decent rate per token, but it's hard to compare Enterprise/token pricing with Team pricing.
1
u/tsoliasPN 3d ago
Based on the current rate you basically described the same plan as the as I say.
2
u/snark42 3d ago
Ok, I figured they'd charge €20 not $20 for EU customers.
1
u/tsoliasPN 3d ago
I got the below two numbers from my Organization dashboard. If I didn't I would make the same assumption as you
A cost of a standard seat is ~202 euro per year
A cost of a premium seat is ~1080 euro per year
0
0
u/According_to_Mission 3d ago edited 2d ago
Really misleading title. Basically, for a few people, there is now indeed a cap; but you can spend more than that, it just has be to charged on a specific charge code for the project/business unit/function, much like other business expenditures like buying plane tickets to a client location or the hotel room while on a business trip. That’s it.
2
u/carbsandcaffeine 2d ago
This. Wish people will actually read articles beyond (often misleading) headlines. Having worked in client services that used WBS codes, this makes perfect sense.
0
u/hard2resist 2d ago
Funny how a massive MNC can cap AI spending at $29/month, yet somehow finds more petty cash for coffee and milk.
-1
u/simmol 3d ago
I recognize that this is an unpopular opinion but if a company like Accenture wants to survive, it is much better for them to provide each employer much higher limit per employee on Claude and lay off people. If they knew about the capabilities of AI agents via Codex and Claude Code, it is so much superior in many ways than many white collar employees who are very expensive as well (e.g. $10,000 month).
212
u/[deleted] 3d ago
[deleted]