> When we do land on something, if it affects existing subscribers you'll get plenty of notice before anything changes. Will hear it from us, not a screenshot on X or Reddit.
If you don't want things like this spreading through screenshots of X and Reddit, don't run "tests" like this in the first place!
(Also "if it affects existing subscribers" is a cop-out, I need to know the pricing of Claude Code for NEW subscribers if I'm going to adopt it at a company with a growing team, or recommend it to other people, write tutorials etc.)
Has this ever been true? You will almost always see some anecdotal screenshot a long time before any company would rat on themselves.
Yes the random screenshots include a lot of false positives. But official comms have a lot of their own problems given how companies behave nowadays.
I can't trust Anthropic to manage their products in a way that supports my workflow.
ive been trying to make the case all year that if we're going to let employees do shit with ai, lets try claude. in the past like.. 2-3 weeks all that goodwill has basically evaporated.
local inference needs to take off asap because all of these entities actually suck and i wouldn't trust a single sla with anthropic. they are not acting like a serious company right now, this is a joke.
I enjoy Codex the most
But like Claude I’m not loyal to any of them.
No serious business uses Pro or Max, they are all on Anthropic API billing.
In fact with this move it is plainly obvious that Anthropic is moving compute from prosumers towards enterprise.
It will be interesting to see how it all plays out, but I suspect if cost continues to increase and output only improves incrementally from here, that the cost will be the final decider rather than the competence.
I could see it being a thing we use only sometimes, for some things, but ultimately remain reliant on developers to get the work through the pipeline.
Larger companies are using Claude through AWS Bedrock and are willing to easily pay $5k+ per engineer per month for it.
Developer salaries are driven up by scarcity - scarcity of developer skills overall and scarcity of developer skills in specific places like California. If AI models destroy the scarcity then the price worth paying for a coding agent will drop dramatically.
Maybe Anthropic can get away with it for a couple of months. But this will not last.
So the % is debatable of course. There's cases where an AI agent can save weeks worth of investigation, there's cases where you are mainly blocked due to processes, and many different circumstances. It's up to every company on their own to decide it. But if they decide it's 50%, why shouldn't they spend 50% of salary on it?
Like imagine a large company with thousands of microservices. You need to build a feature, before you had to setup cross timezone team meetings to figure out who owns what, what is happening in each microservice, how it all connects together. But now you can essentially send an AI Agent to scour and prepare all this material for you, which theoretically in this planning could save hours of back and forth meetings.
If 1 hour / 1 eng costs $200, then a 10 people 1h meeting avoided would save $200 x 10 = $2000 alone.
I don't see it as a replacement for dev, it's more of a multiplier.
This not nothing.
With Sonnet it's a bit better, but I can get the same performance with GPT-5.4.
Now I'm pretty much paying the 20€ for Claude Pro so it can plan/review stuff and then I use pi.dev + GPT-5.4 for the actual work.
That said, I seem to be caught in that 2% test if I open in a private tab. What nonsense. I wouldn't be paying for Claude if it wasn't for its quality abilities, which necessarily includes Claude Code.
I find that with Opus 4.7 I can do two messages. Once I had a short session with 4-5 messages and it consumed $10 in extra usage.
This relegated Claude to a backup option in addition to Codex, which has the better desktop app anyway, and much better usage limits.
I’m considering to even cancel Claude entirely.
A/B testing people without their informed consent is immoral, unethical, and should be illegal.
so, what i'm saying is : I think a lot of companies align themselves with the cash first and then measure whether or not the negative image/user impact is manageable .
(in fact I know they operate this way.)
Generally, yes. Make your software better first before releasing it and you won't need to make changes to it.
Want a new feature that you didn't have before? That's a new software product.
> or you're happy with A testing, but not A/B testing
I'm happy with testing when the user has explicitly opted-in for it.
Sure. Let me just A/B test whether or not you'll respond positively or negatively to having your news delivered via push notification or delayed by 10 minutes.
I'm sure you would appreciate being tested on without your consent, just so that I can make an extra quick buck at your expense. Nothing amoral or unethical about it.
Sounds like someone who doesn't care about being a sheep. Or maybe someone whose salary depends on having sheep.
I agree, but can you really use Claude Code on the Pro plan as a full time developer, or professional 'knowledge worker' without hitting the usage limits fairly early in the day anyway?
I'm in the academia, and Claude's performance in my field could be described as a very fast junior grad student. When I use Claude Code, I typically spend a few hours figuring out what needs to be done exactly, and describing it in sufficient detail. Then Claude does it in 30 minutes, while an actual student would need days. And then I spend anything from minutes to days evaluating the results, depending on if it needs to be tested with real data and how much weirdness those tests uncover.
But I also have other work to do beyond guiding the automated grad student. Which means my Claude Code usage rarely exceeds 1–2 hours/week.
I have Pro Claude, Plus GPT and Pro Gemini. When one runs out I switch to another project on the next LLM. If I really need a task finished I'll restart it on another LLM, but I'm loathe to do that as it eats tokens just getting back up to speed.
It seems weird to segment this way though. Surely it’s better to just give Sonnet to your bottom tier, rather than cut out the entire Claide Code product entirely?
Give folks a taste rather than lock the whole product behind a $100/mo plan.
his title should be changed to Head of Corporate Bullshitting
They're hitting the physical limits of energy production and chip supply for inference capacity. There's literally nothing that can be done but reduce usage to spread it around for now.
And with no free trial period on top of that, nobody is going to want to pay $100+ just to check it out. I can't imagine the conversion rate of that test being positive.
I imagine Anthropic is trying to see how many users they can push to higher tiers with these new squeezes.
I hate to say it but I imagine it will work.
It’s going to suck for me, because I had gotten used to ridiculously cheap tokens, but I guess the era of subsidized tokens is over.
Until they go public, we are all just guessing.
It's hard to tell, honestly - about half the HN population will tell you that all the token providers are running inference at a profit when using the API and only the subscriptions are subsidised, while the other half will tell you that everything, including both the API and the subscriptions, are subsidised (i.e. running at a loss).
I work for a real business and switched from API billing to max+overflow. It saves money. It’s crazy not to. What are you talking about?
You may also have a very narrow view of how the world actually works, left as an exercise to the reader to figure out which one it is
I, and everyone else I have asked, see this new updated sales UI; sounds like more than 2%.
Or they vibe wrote some bullshit to try and back pedal.
Hope you can still resume working on your projects without AI.
This is concerning though. If I lose my current usage allotment at this price point I will likely switch to codex
It also forces you to keep your workflow mostly harness-independent because Claude supports next to no standards and Codex does some.
Once they get people hooked, deskilled, and paying, the money ratchet only tightens.
And the companies KNOW that theyre replacing engineers, or trying to. So each engineer replaced is X salary a year they now have available, so make it back in SaaS LLM tokens.
I thought inference was cheap so there was little marginal cost of a new subscriber.
Based on how much money Zitron has reported that these companies are losing on every subscription, this feels more like they're just trying to survive. In other words "ohshittification."
Brilliant coinage, if it’s yours, congrats!
My take: it is not enshittification to raise the price for a product whose demand outstrips its supply. That is basic economics. There are alternatives, it’s not a monopoly. If you think it’s the best product, then pay more for it.
Personally I would be perfectly content if the price of Max went up a bit and Pro no longer worked for CC if it meant that Max was faster and more stable.
I had a bit of an epiphany the other day thinking about these VC companies offering products to the public at unsustainable prices. It's classic anticompetitive behavior.
You imagine anticompetitive behavior to come from a monopoly because they can afford to burn money to drive competition out before they bring prices back to profitable but the whole VC burn is the same thing. People talk about it a lot without really saying it explicitly when they talk about moats. The only moat Anthropic and OpenAI have is money and they utilize it by offering products below cost.
The two companies are just trying to outlast the other one until they are the only one left.
So it's not really enshitification as much as you were previously getting the deal of a lifetime.
There are some predatory pricing laws, but they're much more narrow than most people believe. There is no law requiring things to be sold for more than it costs to produce.
I think it's funny that these topics make people angry enough to demand that we make laws to force companies to raise prices. We'll stick it to these companies by forcing them to charge us more! That will show them!
Such laws would be very bad for startups and newcomers because they'd be forced to price their new product higher than established competitors who have economies of scale. It would be a nice handout to the big companies.
This is dumping and it is international trade. Maybe you don't realize it because you're American and have internalized it as business as usual.
These companies probably need to be forced to at least try to price their products at a level that would be sustainable long term.
I think it's funny that we're getting subsidized and discounted services and this makes some people so angry that the comment section is demanding laws that would force companies to charge us more.
> It's classic anticompetitive behavior.
And a slightly lower price.
If it succeeds they can adjust pricing later.
Otherwise they are messing with their new and old customers heads, regarding a service with a name that ought to be reliably interpretable. And seriously messing with their own credibility. Wrong kind of A/B test.
This is incompetence which i would normally discount. But Anthropic seems to be falling all over themselves to irritate customers.
Plenty of Pro subscribers never touch claude-code.