[harrall]

This is how free drink refills, airplane tickets, Internet service, unlimited data plans, insurance, flat rate shipping, monthly transit passes, Netflix, Apple Music, gym memberships, museum memberships, car wash plans, amusement park passes, all you can eat buffets, news subscriptions, and many more work.

Either you get a flat rate fee based on certain allowed usage patterns or everyone has to be billed à la carte.

[dimmke]

This is a different case - those all have limitations based on human behavior (it's not necessary or possible to constantly be washing your car the entire month when you pay for unlimited washes) - that doesn't exist here. The types of plans available should reflect that reality. If gyms faced a situation where people would go and spend 18 hours working out every day for a month, they would probably change how they billed things.

Your comparisons are all also "unlimited" situations to Claude's very much limited situation. You can't buy a plan for Claude that is marketed as being unlimited. They're already selling people metered usage. They're just also adding restrictions on top of that.

[coldtea]

They sell metered usage while having the implied expectation that most wont use it fully. Power users and users of stuff like OpenClaw don't match that idea.

So they further restricted the metered caps, which were only offered to NOT be reached by that many.

Simple as that.

[dimmke]

>Power users and users of stuff like OpenClaw don't match that idea.

Then they should figure out how to structure an offering that accommodates this type of usage not just blanket ban it

[lelanthran]

> Then they should figure out how to structure an offering that accommodates this type of usage

They did, didn't they? You can pay the non-plan rate.

> not just blanket ban it

They didn't do that. The email specifically tells you how to use Openclaw with Anthropic. There is no "blanket ban".

[satvikpendem]

Why "should" they? There's no reason they would especially when their competitor now owns OpenClaw.

[dimmke]

Because a big part of Anthropic's story is that they build based on how people actually use AI. Power users aren't just annoying edge cases, they're signal. Throttling them and calling it done is inconsistent with that.

[lelanthran]

> Power users aren't just annoying edge cases, they're signal.

You got that right; in this case they are signalling that AI token providers are not going to be able to run at a profit anytime soon.

Not sure if that helps or hurts your argument, though.

[2000UltraDeluxe]

> Power users aren't just annoying edge cases, they're signal.

Not all power users. Some re-invent the wheel and/or do things inefficiently, and in most cases there's no business incentive to adapt the service to fit the usage patterns of those users, or of other users that deviate from the norm in regards to resource usage.

[saaaaaam]

They build based on how _people_ use AI.

[satvikpendem]

Sorry to tell you but generally any company's "story" is all marketing and PR, if it interferes with their making money, which it does in this case, that company will not hesitate to leave it behind.

[bergheim]

Oh the billion bollar vc backed pre ipo companys story was this? Omg and they somehow are not delivering up to your standards? Damn they better get their act together lest people like you will whine on twitter about them losing their way

[aleph_minus_one]

> Why "should" they?

Because it is clear that there is a market demand for it.

[coldtea]

There is also a clear market demand for $10 bills sold for $5, but I don't see you tapping into that opportunity!

[what]

They did figure out how to structure an offering that accommodates that type of usage: pay for your tokens.

[guiambros]

They did: just use the metered API.

[throwthrowuknow]

Don’t cry while you’re ruining it for everyone.

[NeutralCrane]

Isn’t that just usage based charges?

[jyrkesh]

"Unlimited" has always been a lie. There is no free lunch. There are always limits.

I've had to unwind "unlimited" within startups that oversold. I've been bit by ISPs, storage providers, music streamers, fuckin _Ubers_, now AI subscription services, that all dealt in "unlimited". None of them delivered in the long run.

I'd be mad at Anthropic if it weren't for the fact that my experience now can see this sort of thing from a mile away. There are a lot folks, even on HN, that haven't been around for as long. I understand the outrage. I've been there. But these computers cost money to run, and companies don't operate at a loss in the fullness of time.

Once you know that unlimited trends towards limited, the real question is whether we're equipped as a society to deal with the fact that the capital-L Labor input to the economic equation is about to be replaced with a Capital input for which only a handful of companies have a non-zero value.

[duskdozer]

You can both know that "unlimited" means "limited" and also be pissed that they market it as such and try to conceal the actual limits.

[alsetmusic]

> You can both know that "unlimited" means "limited" and also be pissed that they market it as such and try to conceal the actual limits.

Reminds me of when ATT had a fake 5G decoration on phones.

"AT&T won’t remove fake 5G logo even after ad board says it’s misleading"[0]

You can just get away with lying. That's the level of enforcement that exists against unethical behavior in business today.

0. https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/20/21265048/att-5g-e-mislead...

[chrismorgan]

On your 1.5Mbps link, you could theoretically download 500GB per month. A huge amount, but I believe it was often genuinely allowed, because their uplinks could cope with it. Unlimited could genuinely be unlimited.

But now you might get things like “unlimited” 1Gbps… which reverts to 10Mbps (1% speed) or worse after 3.6TB (eight hours). And so your new theoretical maximum is about 6.8TB per month rather than 330TB.

[jmalicki]

This is all just the classic "the first hit's free" business model.

[fluoridation]

>If gyms faced a situation where people would go and spend 18 hours working out every day for a month, they would probably change how they billed things.

Not the best example. The upkeep cost of a gym is pretty flat regardless of how much people use the facilities. Two people can't use a single machine at the same time make it wear out twice as fast. The price of memberships is not correlated to usage, it's inversely correlated to the number of memberships sold.

[harvey9]

Two people can't use a machine at the same time is the issue. If you have 50 machines and 200 customers all of whom want to be in the gym 18 hours per day that's quickly going to lead to cancelled subscriptions. Now you need more space and machines or some other way to balance things.

[fluoridation]

Agreed, but it's an indirect causal link, not a direct one. If the demand far outstrips the possibly supply the demand will have to go down, and it can either go down by people accepting that they can't be in the gym as much time as they would like, or as you say by memberships being cancelled (in which case the price may go up or something else might change).

[dimmke]

>Two people can't use a single machine at the same time make it wear out twice as fast

The machine doesn't care about the number of people using it. If it's constantly being used, it will wear out faster. You are conflating "we price based on expected under-utilization" with "costs don't scale with usage." Those are different things.

The inverse correlation you talk about isn't relevant here - People buy gym memberships intending to go, feel good about the intention, and then don't follow through. The business model is built on that gap. That's pretty specific to fitness and a handful of similar industries where aspiration drives purchase.

Anthropic doesn't sell based on a "golly gee I hope people dont use this" gap - they sell compute. Different business.

[fmbb]

> Anthropic doesn't sell based on a "golly gee I hope people dont use this" gap - they sell compute. Different business.

There is nothing anywhere hinting at that.

They don’t sell compute. They sell a subscription for LLM token budgets that they hope people don’t use because the compute is vastly more expensive than what they charge or what users are ever willing to pay.

Especially with enterprise subscription plans the idea is for customers to never utilize anywhere close to their limits.

[fluoridation]

>If it's constantly being used, it will wear out faster.

Yeah, but there's an absolute limit to that, beyond which the cost doesn't keep increasing. Beyond that point, the QoS goes down (queues).

>You are conflating "we price based on expected under-utilization" with "costs don't scale with usage."

I'm not conflating anything, I'm responding to what you said:

>If gyms faced a situation where people would go and spend 18 hours working out every day for a month, they would probably change how they billed things.

Why would a gym need to change how they bill things if all their customers were aiming for maximal utilization, when their costs would barely see any change? I doubt your typical gym operates on razor-thin margins.

[dimmke]

Gym costs absolutely scale with usage. Equipment wears faster under heavier use. Cleaning and maintenance staff hours scale with how much the facility is used. Consumables like towels, soap, and chalk go faster. HVAC runs harder. The reason gyms can offer flat-rate pricing is that they bet on under-utilization, not that costs are flat.

Setting that aside, even if we accept your argument that gym costs barely scale with usage, then that makes gyms a bad comparison case for Anthropic, whose costs directly scale with usage. You can't use the gym model to defend Anthropic's pricing decisions if the two cost structures are nothing alike.

I'm arguing that both gyms and Anthropic have usage costs that scale with usage, but gym business model assumes a large margin of under-utilization and there's a hard cap to "power user" - I think both of those extremes don't apply to Anthropic's situation. Under-utilizers aren't paying for AI they have a free tier. There's also a natural ceiling on how much any one person can use a gym. There's no equivalent constraint on API usage.

[fluoridation]

>You can't use the gym model to defend Anthropic's pricing decisions if the two cost structures are nothing alike.

Am I? I think you read something into my comments that I didn't write.

[krisoft]

> The reason gyms can offer flat-rate pricing is that they bet on under-utilization, not that costs are flat.

Yes. In fact i remember hearing about a gym which offered a flat-rate pricing model but explicitly excluded certain professions from partaking in it. I remember the deal was excluding police, bouncers, models, actors and air stewardesses. They had a separate more costly tier for these people. (And I think i heard about it from the indignation the deal has caused online.)

[TeMPOraL]

> Under-utilizers aren't paying for AI they have a free tier.

Sure they do. Free tiers suck. I may not always need to use AI, but when I need it, I don't want to immediately get hit by stupidly low quotas and rate limits, or get anything but SOTA models.

[Aerroon]

Rent doesn't work that way... yet. Imagine if it did though, people would be arguing:

"Well, you're not expected to be able to live in that home the entire month that you paid for!"

[taneq]

The commons? Tragic.

[TeMPOraL]

à la carte is honest; overprovisioning just slows progress by preventing demand from creating pressure to innovate proper solutions.

[rvba]

Internet service and unlimited data plans work like this though.