[extr]

I mean surely you can understand the the difficulty of their position, right? It's as if Waymo offered a subsidized, subscription based plan that models a certain type of ridership as typical but then people start scheduling rides on a timer with no one in it, far outside the original use case of "Get me from point A to point B". And of course the line between what is acceptable is quite fuzzy. You could imagine it being seen as okay to send a rider-less Waymo to pick up groceries occasionally - but not to schedule one every single day at 4:30PM to pick up a single ice cream cone.

You can argue that this is unfair and they should provide clearer guidance. Well - as soon as they do people find ways to skirt the letter of the rules to once again take advantage of the economics of the subscription model. So should they just scrap the entire plan? Ruin it for people who are using it as it was intended (coding agent, light experimentation/headless use outside of that)? That doesn't seem right either.

[tempaccount420]

I don't think anyone would want the type of user that OpenClaw users are as customers...

There will be a time for OpenClaw, but in the current world with limited compute, that time is not now.

[athrowaway3z]

I think HN needs a regular reminder that most things sold are commodities -without limits or re-use. Coal and wheat have no DRMs.

This kind of thing is the exception. Subsidized subscriptions work to distort the power of the market. The more successful they are (in destroying competition), the worse it leaves consumers.

While i get the individual steps that leads them to this "difficult position", I think i'll just keep telling everybody to cancel their sub and make sure to not get locked in.

[extr]

> Most things are sold as commodities without limits or re-use.

This is somehow doubly wrong. Not only are most economic goods NOT commodities, there are plenty of economic analogs to AI subscriptions (streaming, telecom, gyms, buffets) and none of them operate as "unlimited with no restrictions on re-use". Really just terribly misinformed way of thinking here.

[athrowaway3z]

In most parts of the world telecom & gyms are commodities - America is 'further ahead' in letting companies distort markets without regulation.

But i think you misunderstood the scope of my claim. We can argue whether its 30% or 70% of an average paycheck is spend on fungible things and per line item how much of it is fungible and not - but I was also including all the B2B sales.

Companies that let themselves become entirely dependent on specific suppliers do worse.