I'm not against the pricing, just seems uncommon to frame it in the way they did, as opposed to the usual 'assume the customer expects more performance will cost more'

I guess they have to sell to investors that the price to operate is going down, while still needing more from the user to be sustainable

You can, until they turn it off.

Anthropic is pulling the plug on Haiku 3 in a couple months, and they haven't released anything in that price range to replace it.