Either you get a flat rate fee based on certain allowed usage patterns or everyone has to be billed à la carte.
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.
So they further restricted the metered caps, which were only offered to NOT be reached by that many.
Simple as that.
Then they should figure out how to structure an offering that accommodates this type of usage not just blanket ban it
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".
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.
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.
Because it is clear that there is a market demand for it.
Yes, and that's exactly the problem I'm pointig at.
Your comment "that people would love an offering without the discussed restriction" ignores the pricing burden of that, which is why it's confused why Anthropic don't just offer this.
The API has no restrictions; what is the people's objection to 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Am I? I think you read something into my comments that I didn't write.
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.
What do you expect them to do? You are looking at a business currently running at a loss, and complaining about their billing even though this is not a price-rise?
Unrelated, is it still possible to use $10k/m worth of tokens on their $200/plan?
Internal projections show the company reaching cash-flow break-even in 2028, after stopping cash burn in 2027.
They’ve already implemented several of the features that put OpenClaw on the map.
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.
I'm sorry is there anything even close to sonnet, much less opus, that can be run on a 4080? Or 64gb of ram, even slowly?
* Weird thing of the day: https://huggingface.co/Jackrong/Qwen3.5-27B-Claude-4.6-Opus-...