I grew up in an Asian household of six. We definitely took food home at AYCE places. My parents definitely knew it wasn't OK, but they felt like they were gaming the system (like a dubious life hack of sorts) and saving money, so they were actually quite proud of it, bragging to friends how much they were able to get.

To be human indeed!

Even the API pricing is subsidized by investors. When that stop, pricing will escalate.

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

Simple as that.

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.

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.

I don't know what that means in this context.

> Internal projections show the company reaching cash-flow break-even in 2028, after stopping cash burn in 2027.

What does that have to do with them implementing restrictions on their plans because they are currently running at a loss?

Okay, lets say their internal projections[1] are accurate: were those before or after Openclaw released? Maybe their projections were made on the assumption that people would stop using $10k/m worth of tokens on a $200/m plan? Or that those users doing that will only be doing code? Or that the plan users won't be running requests at a rate of 5/minute, every minute of every hour of every day?

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[1] Where did you find those projections? I'm skeptical, at their current prices and current plans, that a break-even at any point in the future is possible unless they shut off or severely scale down training. Running at a per-unit loss means that the more you sell, the larger your loss - increasing your sales increases your loss.

Raising prices is a bad strategy if you have a smaller base that costs enormously larger than the rest. "A million users that cost $1 and one user that costs $10 million, charge everyone $10 equilibrium", you're screwing over almost all of your users. The $20/month sub price is basically just not trying to capture the openclaw users, it doesn't make sense that all of the vanilla Claude users should subsidize them (and in fact it wouldn't even work because they will just go to Gemini or ChatGPT if your cheapest paid plan was very expensive to try to subsidize the other users)

Just a few years ago this was the standard business model for startups: attract VC money, offer plans at a loss, capture a huge market, boil the frog with incremental price increases to become profitable.

Companies like Uber wouldn't have been anywhere near as successful if they had been forced to make a profit from day one.

> is there a way to use the quota that's not 'abuse'?

I think my answer is “no.” In that I’ve never thought of the limits as “quotas,” and I don’t think I’ve heard Anthropic speak of them that way. Quotas are to be used up, while limits are to signal that what you’re doing is outside the envelope of acceptable use. Quotas are to be met, limits are to be avoided.

I interpret the intention of the subscription, like a membership at a makerspace, to be to allow novices to experiment with stuff, to take on personal-scale projects, to allow them to learn without having to understand the tool’s economics upfront. To play without fear of expensive mistakes.

And, like the makerspace, it can only offer generous limits to the extent that most of us rarely bump up against them. If you’re doing production runs in the makerspace, you’re crowding out the other members, and something’s gotta give.

To the extent that we do bump against the limits during “ordinary” use—and we do with Claude Code, especially those of us around here—it’s really frustrating. The limits need to rise in order for it to remain attractive to casual users like me, the economics still need to add up for the subscription program as a whole, and part of that is separating out what patterns of use belong under a different regime.

If these harnesses or OpenClaws or whatever stop making sense as soon as they have to pay their actual costs, then that’s a pretty good sign they’re abusing the spirit of the subscription.

But Anthropic seem more than happy to service those uses via the API or metered usage, and even to sweeten the deal with more reliable access and bulk discounts. I certainly wouldn’t characterize the same automated usage as “abuse” via that channel.

And I'm skeptical of the 6x-8x claim myself. They'd have to explain that in more detail.

That's a "fixed" constraint, because maximizing future adjusted value is what companies do.

So they don't play little games with mass products. If they did they would be harming their own bottom line/market cap.

(For small products, careful optimization often doesn't happen, because they are not a priority.)

Note this thesis explains what is going on here. What was previously one kind of customer (wide distribution of use), is now identifiably two. The non-automated token maxers (original distribution) and automated token maxers (all maxed, and growing in number). To maintain margins Anthropic has to move the latter to a new bin.

But the customer centric view also holds. By optimizing margins, that counter intuitively incentivizes reduced pricing on lower utilized products. (Because margin optimization is a balance to optimize total value, i.e. margins are not the variable being maximized.)

The alternatives would be bad for someone. Either they under optimize their margins, or change regular customers more which is unfair. Neither of those would be a rational choice.

(Fine tuning: Well run companies don't play those games. But companies with sketchy leaders do all kinds of strange things. Primarily because they are attempting manage contradictory stories in order to optimize their personal income/wealth over the companies. But I don't see Anthropic in that category.)