>You can't create a tiered paid plan for the whole world that fits everyone.
replyI mean, you can. Electricity is already sold that way. Subscribers with uncharacteristic usage spikes don't get blackouts, they get a slightly larger bill, and perhaps get moved up a tier.
Very valid. My comment was fixated around the fact that big tech has the addiction to have subscriptions for everything. It's common that you provide generic subscription plans for the masses and supply "call us" custom plans for the specific (usually corporate) needs. If anthropic doesn't provide that or vibe coders are too cheap to do that, then those are issues, but the subscription models are itself valid. It is certainly misleading to a degree, but we've stopped complaining about this a while ago.
replyIt's pretty stupid because as others in this thread have pointed out it's already not a flat plan. Even from their side it makes zero sense to bill things this way rather than based on usage. It's not like a VPS where your VM shares the hardware, which consumes electricity more or less regardless of what you use the machine for.
replyThose yottabytes of VRAM are also consuming electricity constantly.
replyThe difference being that an LLM request is not an operating system. Since they're compartmentalized and ephemeral, you can very easily distribute requests among your available hardware so that you can switch off machines during periods of low activity.
replyYour capital costs for buying those machines don't go away.
replyThat's a problem that already exists in power generation and delivery, and it's already been solved. Bills are sums of fixed terms and variable terms.
replyCustom payment schemes are late stage profit generation. It requires hoards of salespeople or an AI that can actually do math.
replyIt's just how hyperscaling works. You are not wrong, but in the wrong timeline.
I'm not talking about custom, negotiated service contracts, I'm talking about simply charging people for what they use.
replyBut that would be using (a special Claude code version) of the API; as it stands now, I have tried the current api for fun and I hit $200 well within an hour. So if they would charge for real use, no one would use it as there are competitors who have less harsh limits with tier plans still. If all go away then I will be running open models on vast.ai or so as those are now viable (been testing with glm 5 and it's great for coding). So tier subscriptions cannot go away as it will end those companies fast.
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