I'm sure there's plenty of good reasons however it's frustrating they can't be transparent that they're doing it and they still charge you full price.
Software > hardware is a hell of a pivot, and Alphabet and Meta already do hardware. Unless they are building a huge IP moat and have proven themselves competitive with hardware, I don't see the rosy future.
I'm sure there was a point in time when everyone thought horses had a great moat.
The software engineers are also the most likely to pivot to local inference. I know several engineers playing around with local as a hobby. After the first bill comes in that means nobody gets the Christmas bonus this year, they'll resolve the issue and start figuring out how to adapt their workflow.
And somehow I doubt that they'll need frontier for the majority of customers who just need crud and libraries hooked up. Yeah it won't be as easy as with frontier but it just means the party is over and it's time to get back to work.
So ... Maybe security audits need frontier ... And they can pass the price increase onto their customers, I presume, easily enough.
I'm not convinced thats sufficient to pay off the bill that it took to get frontier in the first place.
[And so far, I haven't met a single software engineering customer, although surely they have to exist somewhere, who was actually comfortable vibe coding their crown jewels or even anything vaguely auxiliary. Please engineer ask the magic box to generate code for us. I think they'll be just as happy checking a box they says 'save money by using agentic development' if they box is hooked up to some future price gouging frontier or hypothetically cheaper local setup]
And yes, of course, the scam is almost done. Time to go the bank $$$.
"The proposed offering consists of 825,000,000 shares of Class A common stock. Of these, 801,351,354 shares are being offered by Anthropic and 23,648,646 shares are being offered by certain existing stockholders. Anthropic will not receive any proceeds from the sale of shares by the selling stockholders."
WTF - so basically insiders / investors are dumping their stock on dumb money retail investors / our 401ks and the company is getting NOTHING?
The company is making a lot of money from the 800M shares they do own that they are selling.