But I literally can not cancel. Trying the app says "you signed up on a different platform, go there" but it doesn't tell me which platform that might be.
Trying to cancel on mobile web gives several upgrade options but no cancel options.
So, do I need to call my credit card? This is the worst dark pattern on subscription I have seen of any service I have ever paid for!
Anthropic had a fairly positive image in my head until they cut off my access and are not giving me a way to cancel my plan.
Edit: after mucking with the Stripe credit card payment options I found a cancel plan button underneath the list of all invoices. So there is an option, I just had a harder time finding it then I have had with other services. Successfully cancelled!
Gemini Advanced offered 2.5 Pro with nearly unlimited rate limits, then nerfed it to 100/day.
OpenAI silently nerfed the maximum context window of reasoning models in their Pro plan.
Accompanying the nerf is usually a psy op, like nerfing to 50/day then increasing it to 100/day so the anchoring effect reduces the grievance.
It's a smart ploy because as much as we like to say there's no moat, the user does face provider switching costs (time and effort), which serves as a mini-moat for status quo provider.
So providers have an incentive to rope people in with a loss leader, and then rug pull once they gained market share. Maybe 40% of the top 5% of Claude users are now too accustomed to their Claude-based workflows, and inertia will keep them as customers, but now they're using the more expensive API instead. Anthropic won.
Modern bait and switch, although done intelligently so no laws are broken.
To the degree there is a moat, I do not think it will be effective at keeping people in. I had already been somewhat disillusioned with the AI hype, but now I am also disillusioned with the company who I thought was the best actor in the space. I am happy that there is unlikely to be a dominant single winner like there was for web search or for operating systems. That is, unless there's a significant technological jump, rather than the same gradual improvement that all the AI companies are making.
When a provider gets memory working well, I expect them to use this to be a huge moat - ie. they won't let you migrate the memories, because rather than being human readable words they'll be unintelligible vectors.
I imagine they'll do the same via API so that the network has a memory of all previous requests for the same user.
You pay for Gemini by the token and you get the full firehose. It costs money, but less than Opus and it smokes that.
It just works. Gemini 2.5 Pro is the king of AI coding and literally everything else has to catch up.
Trust me, I can't wait until there's a model that can run locally that's as good...but for now there isn't.
Always just look at the token cost and get used the token economics. Go into it paying. You'll get better results. I think people thinking they were somehow cheating and getting away with something similar (or better) for $20/mo are in for a big surprise.
I don't know if I would say they should have known better of course. I think Anthropic and Cursor and Windsurf were hiding it a bit. Now it's all coming out into the open and I guess you know the saying, if it's too good to be true...
As if google would say that yes, emails are $5/mo, but there's actually a limit on number of emails daily, and also number of characters in the email. It just feels so illegal to nerf a product that much.
Same with AI companies changing routing and making models dumber from time to time.
Maybe they added a card fee in at the end, but if they didn’t make that abundantly clear, they’ve broken a law in most countries which use the Euro.
Update: below the fold at the bottom of the Billing page is the cancel section and cancel button.
Update 2: just clicked cancel and was offered a promo of 20% off for three months...
Update 3: FYI, I logged in to my Claude account via computer (not iOS or Android).
As long as you don't cancel, you do owe them money. But if they make cancelling intentionally hard, one would likely have a good case in court to still not pay, if one would want to go to court over this.
At the rate the Chinese are going it won't be long before I can shake the dust off my sandals of this bullshit for good.
I still revert to gemini pro 2.5 here and there and claude for specific demanding tasks, but bulk token go trough open weight model at the moment.
Ugh, anyone who says that and really believes it can no longer see common sense through the hype goggles.
It's just stupid and completely 100% wrong, like saying all musicians will use autotune in the future because it makes the music better.
It's the same as betting that there will be no new inventions, no new art, no works of genius unless the creator is taking vitamin C pills.
It's one of the most un-serious claims I can imagine making. It automatically marks the speaker as a clown divorced from basic facts about human ability
And AI already excels at building those sorts of things faster and with cleaner code. I’ve never once seen a model generate code that’s as ugly and unreadable as a lot of the low quality code I’ve seen in my career (especially from Salesforce “devs” for example)
And even the ones that do the more creative problem solving can benefit from AI agents helping with research, documentation, data migration scripts, etc.
Yet the blanket statement is that I will fail and be replaced, and in fact that people like me don't exist!
So heck yeah I'll come clap back on that.
I use AI pretty extensively and encourage my folks to use it as well but I've yet to see this come directly from an LLM. With human effort after the fact, sure, but LLMs tend to write inscrutable messes when left to their own devices.
So are musicians. We think of them as doing creative stuff but a vast majority is mundane.
*: I'm aware of cases like the recent ffmpg assembly usage that gave a big performance boost. When talking about industrial trend lines, I'm OK with admitting 0.001% exceptions.
(Apologies if it comes across as snarky or pat, but I honestly think the comparison is reasonable.)
Are you aware compilers are deterministic most of the time?
If a compiler had a 10% chance of erasing your code instead of generating an executable you'd see more people still using assembly.
The basic nature of my job is to maintain the tallest tower of complexity I can without it falling over, so I need to take complexity and find ways to confine it to places where I have some way of knowing that it can't hurt me. LLMs just don't do that. A leaky abstraction is just a layer of indirection, while a true abstraction (like a properly implemented high-level language) is among the most valuable things in CS. Programming is theory-building!
But... what else? These things are rare. It’s not like there’s a new thing that comes along every few years and we all have to jump on or be left behind, and LLMs are the latest. There’s definitely a new thing that comes along every few years and people say we have to jump on or be left behind, but it almost never bears out. Many of those ended up being useful, but not essential.
I see no indication that LLMs or associated tooling are going to be like compilers and version control where you pretty much can’t find anyone making a living in the field without them. I can see them being like IDEs or debuggers or linters where they can be handy but plenty of people do fine without them.
Where would you put the peak? Fortran was invented in the 50’s. The total population of programmers was tiny back then…
But the big thing is using AI to learn new things, explain some tricky math in a paper I am reading, help brain storm, etc. The value of AI is in improving ourselves.
To me this seems to be the single most valuable use case of newer "AI tools"
> generating a Bash shell script quickly
I do this very often, and to me this seems to me the second most valuable use case of newer "AI tools"
> The value of AI is in improving ourselves
I agree completely.
> help brain storm
This strikes me as very concerning. In my experience, AI brainstorming ideas are exceptionally dull and uninspired. People who have shared ideas from AI brainstorming sessions with me have OVERWHELMINGLY come across as AI brained dullards who are unable to think for themselves.
What I'm trying to say is that Chat GPT and similar tools are much better suited for interacting with closed systems with strict logical constraints, than they are for idea generation or writing in a natural language.
Even if things are going the direction you say, though, Kilo is still just a fork of VSCode. Lipstick on a pig, perhaps. I would bet that I know the strengths and weaknesses of your architecture quite a lot better than anyone on the Kilo team because the price of admission for you is not questioning any of VSCode's decisions, while I consider all of them worthy of questioning and have done so at great length in the process of building something from scratch that your team bypassed.
I believe that at some point, AI will get good enough that most companies will eventually stop hiring someone that doesn’t utilize AI. Because most companies are just making crud (pun intended). It’ll be like specialized programming languages. Some will exist, and they may get paid a lot more, but most people won’t fall into that category. As much as we like to puff ourselves up, our profession isn’t really that hard. There are a relative handful of people doing some really cool, novel things. Some larger number doing some cool things that aren’t really novel, just done very nicely. And the majority of programmers are the rest of us. We are not special.
What I don’t know is the timing. I don’t expect it to be within 5 years (though I think it will _start_ in that time), but I do expect it within my career.
Just as the developer who refused to adopt version control, IDEs, or Stack Overflow eventually became unemployable, those who reject tools that fundamentally expand their problem-solving capacity will find themselves unable to compete with those who can architect solutions across larger possibility spaces on smaller teams.
Will it be used for absolutely every problem? No - There are clearly places where humans are needed.
But rejecting the enormous impact this will have on the workforce is trading hype goggles for a bucket of sand.
This passage forces me to concluse that this comment is sarcasm. Neither IDEs nor the use of Stack Overflow is anywhere near a requirement for being a professional programmer. Surely you realize there are people out there who are happily employed while still using stock Vim or Emacs? Surely you realize there are people out there who solve problems simply by reading the docs and thinking deeply rather than asking SO?
The usage of LLM assistance will not become a requirement for employment, at least not for talented programmers. A company gating on the use of LLMs would be preposterously self-defeating.
I don't think you should use LLMs for something you can't master without.
> will find themselves unable to compete
I'd wait a bit more before concluding so affirmatively. The AI bubble would very much like us to believe this, but we don't yet know very well the long term effects of using LLMs on code, both for the project and for the developer, and we don't even know how available and in which conditions the LLMs will be in a few months as evidenced by this HN post. That's not a very solid basis to build on.
The use cases of these GPT tools are extremely limited. They demo well and are quite useful for highly documented workflows (E.G. they are very good at creating basic HTML/JS layouts and functionality).
However, even the most advanced GPT tools fall flat on their face when you start working with any sort of bleeding edge, or even just less-ubiquitous technology.
Human cognition wasn't designed to make rockets or AIs, but we went to the moon and the LLMs are here. Thinking and working and building communities and philosophies and trust and math and computation and educational institutions and laws and even Sci Fi shows is how we do
I see people starting to unlearn working by themselves rapidly and becoming dependant on GPT, making themselves quite useless in the process. They no longer understand what they're working with and need the help from the tool to work. They're also entirely helpless when whatever 'AI' tool they use can't fix their problem.
This makes them both more replaceable and less marketable than before.
It will have and already has a huge impact. But it's kinda like the offshoring hype from a decade ago. Everyone moved their dev departments to a cheaper country, only to later realize that maybe cheap does not always mean better or even good. And it comes with a short term gain and a long term loss.
a developer using AI in a low-cost region will replace any developer in a high cost region ;)
Nobody knows how this will play out yet. Reality does not care about your feelings, unfortunately.
But on the other hand there is the other end who think AGI coming in a few months and LLMs are omniscient knowledge machines.
There is a sweet spot in the middle.
One thing I miss for the other users, i.e. the casual users that never use anywhere near of their quota, is rollover. If you haven't used your quota this month, the unused will roll over to the next month.
Even better: provide a counter displaying both remaining usage available and the quota reset time.
But companies probably earn so much money from the vast majority of users that having good and clear limits would only empower them to actually benefit as much from the product as they can.
The AI models have a bunch of different consumption models aimed at different types of use. I work at a huge company, and we’re experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for users based on different compliance and business needs. The people using all you can eat products like NotebookLM, Gemini, ChatGPT use them much more on average and do more varied tasks. There is a significant gap between low/normal/high users.
People using an interface to a metered API, which offers a defined LLM experience consume fewer resources and perform more narrowly scoped tasks.
The cost is similar and satisfaction is about the same.
yep
>Adverse selection has been discussed for life insurance since the 1860s,[3] and the phrase has been used since the 1870s.[4]
This is somewhat a different issue that’s largely accepted by courts and society bar that one neighbour who is incensed they can’t run a rack off their home internet that was marketed unlimited.
In some cases, people discover creative ways to resell the service. Anthropic mentioned they suspect this was happening.
The weirdest part about this whole internet uproar, though, is that Anthropic never offered unlimited usage. It was always advertised as higher limits.
Yet all the comment threads about it are convinced it was unlimited and now it’s not. It’s weird how the internet will wrap a narrative around a story like this.
Or the American Airlines lifetime pass.. https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/american-airlines-unlimit...
I thought I had a low usage with my 1.5 years' worth saved. Only reason I paysfor that plan is anything lower and my provider does not offer rollover.
In the same way your next-door supermarket has effectively "infinite soup cans" for the needs of most people.
Nothing in our world is truly unlimited. Digital services and assets have different costs than their physical counterparts, but that just means different limits, not a lack of them. Electrical supply, compute capacity, and storage are all physical things with real world limits to how much they can do.
These realities eventually manifest when someone tries to build an "unlimited" service on top of limited components, similar to how you can't build a service with 99.999% reliability when it has a critical piece that can only get to 99.9%.
When you order the second plate, it comes without the sauce and it tastes flatter. You're filled at this point and you can't order the third.
Very creative and fun if you ask me. I was prepared for this though, because the people we went together said how it's going to go, exactly.
> Stop selling "unlimited", when you mean "until we change our minds"
The limits don't go in to affect until August 28th, one month from yesterday. Is there an option to buy the Max plan yearly up front? I honestly don't know; I'm on the monthly plan. If there isn't a yearly purchase option, no one is buying unlimited and then getting bait-and-switched without enough time for them to cancel their sub if they don't like the new limits.
> A Different Approach: More AI for Less Money
I think it's really funny that the "different approach" is a limited time offer for credits that expire.
I don't like that the Claude Max limits are opaque, but if I really need pay-per-use, I can always switch to the API. And I'd bet I still get >$200 in API-equivalents from Claude Code once the limits are in place. If not? I'll happily switch somewhere else.
And on the "happily switch somewhere else", I find the "build user dependency" point pretty funny. Yes, I have a few hooks and subagents defined for Claude Code, but I have zero hard dependency on anything Anthropic produces. If another model/tool comes out tomorrow that's better than Claude Code for what I do, I'm jumping ship without a second thought.
The field is moving so fast that whatever was best 6 months ago is completely outdated.
And what is top tier today, might be trash in a few months.
- note: "unlimited" does not mean free.
quote source: "Apple Just Found a Way to Sell You Nothing" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytkk5NFZGjs
Don't blame the company, it acts within boundaries allowed by its paying customers, and apple customers are known to be... much less critical of the company and its products to be polite, especially given its premium prices.
This is patently false and has been for the whole existence of Apple. Apple customers are voraciously critical of the company. Just probably not under the delta of importance that you consider.
Repairs have always come with deductibles.
This is standard in virtually every insurance program. There are a lot of studies showing that even the tiniest amount of cost sharing completely changes how people use a service.
When something is unlimited and free, it enticed people to abuse it in absurd ways. With hardware, you would get people intentionally damaging their gear to get new versions for free because they know it costs them nothing.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2024/11/28/mac-own...
There is a case to be made that they sold a multiple and are changing x or rate limiting x differently, but the tone seems different from that.
They appear to have removed reference to this 50-session cap in their usage documents. (https://gist.github.com/eonist/5ac2fd483cf91a6e6e5ef33cfbd1e...)
So even if these mystery people Anthropic reference who did run it "in the background, 24/7", they still would've had to stay within usage limits.
no, even their announcement blog[0] said:
> With up to 20x higher usage limits
in the third paragraph.
It always had limits and those limits were not specified as concrete numbers.
It’s amazing how much of the internet outrage is based on the idea that it was unlimited and now it’s not. The main HN thread yesterday was full of comments complaining about losing unlimited access.
It’s so weird to watch people get angry about thinking they’re losing something they never had. Even Anthropic said less than 5% of accounts would even notice the new limits, yet I’ve seen countless comments raging that “everyone must suffer” due to the actions of a few abusing the system.
Some facts for sanity:
1- The poster of this blog article is Kilocode who makes a (worse) competitor to Claude Code. They are definitely capitalizing on this drama as much as they can. I’ve been getting hit by Reddit ads all day from Kilocode, all blasting Anthropic, with the false claim that their plan was "unlimited".
2- No one has any idea yet what the new limits will be, or how much usage it actually takes to be in the top 5% to be affected. The limits go into effect in a few days. We'll see then if all the drama was warranted.
Can you really ever compete when you are renting someone else's GPUs?
Can you really ever compete when you are going up against custom silicon built and deployed at scale to run inference at scale (i.e. TPUs built to run Gemini and deployed by the tens-of-thousands in data centers around the globe)?
Meta and Google have deep pockets and massive existing world-class infrastructure (at least for Google, Meta probably runs their php Facebook thing on a few VPS dotted around in some random colos /s ) . They've literally written the book on this.
It remains to be seen how much more money OpenAI can burn, but we've started to see how much Anthropic can burn if nothing else.
When companies sell unlimited plans, they’re making a bet that the average usage across all of those plans will be low enough to turn a profit.
These people “abusing” the plan are well within their right to use the API as much as they want. It just didn’t fall into the parameters Anthropic had expected.
LLM subscriptions need to go away, why can’t we just pay as we go? It’s the fairest way for everyone.
Anthropic never sold an unlimited plan
It’s amazing that so many people think there was an unlimited plan. There was not an unlimited plan.
> These people “abusing” the plan are well within their right to use the API as much as they want. It just didn’t fall into the parameters Anthropic had expected.
Correct! And they did. And now Anthropic is changing those limits in a month.
> LLM subscriptions need to go away, why can’t we just pay as we go? It’s the fairest way for everyone.
This exists. You use the API. It has always been an option. Again, I’m confused about why there’s so much anger about something that already exists.
The subscriptions are nice for people who want a consistent fee and they get the advantage of a better deal for occasional heavy usage.
I'm told the $200/month plan was practically unlimited, I heard you could leave ~10 instances of Claude Code running 24/7. I will never pay for any of these subscriptions however so I haven't verified that.
>And now Anthropic is changing those limits in a month.
Which indicates the seller was being scammed. Now they're changing the limits so it swings back to being a scam for the user.
>I’m confused about why there’s so much anger about something that already exists
Yes but much LLM tooling requires a subscription. I'm not talking only about Anthropic/Claude Code. I can't use chatgpt.com using my own API key. Even though behind the scenes, if I had a subscription, it would be calling out to the exact same API.
I would not personally, as I can't spend thousands per month on an agentic tool. I hope they figure out limits that work. $100 / $200 is still a great deal. And the predictability means my company will pay for it.
Unlimited plans encourage wasting resources[0]. By actually paying for what you use, you can be a bit more economical and still get a lot of mileage out of it.
$100/$200 is still a great deal (as you said), but it does make sense for actually-$2000 users to get charged differently.
0: In my hometown, (some) people have unlimited central heating (in winter) for a fixed fee. On warmer days, people are known to open windows instead of turning off the heating. It's free, who cares...
Because Claude Code is absolutely impossible to use without a subscription? I’m fine with being limited, but I’m not with having to pay more than $200/month
Anybody that feels they’re not getting enough out of their subscription is welcome to use API instead.
Claude Code accepts an API key. You do not need a subscription
https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/settings#envi...
When some users burn massive amounts of compute just to climb leaderboards or farm karma, it’s not hard to imagine why providers might respond with tighter limits—not because it's ideal, but because that kind of behavior makes platforms harder to sustain and less accessible for everyone else. Because on the other hand a lot of genuine customers are canceling because they get API overload message after paying $200.
I still think caps are frustrating and often too blunt, but posts like that make it easier to see where the pressure might be coming from.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1lqrbnc/you_deser...
Surely they thought about 'bad users' when they released this product. They can't be that naive.
Now that they have captured developer mindshare. users are bad.
what was the bait and switch? where in the launch announcement (https://www.anthropic.com/news/max-plan) did they suggest it provided unlimited inference?
The transparency problem compounds this. The sustainable path forward likely involves either much more transparent/clear usage-based pricing or significantly higher flat rates that actually cover heavy usage.
So, not unlimited? Like, if the abuse is separate from amount of use (like reselling; it can be against ToS to resell it even in tiny amounts) then sure, but if you're claiming "excessive" use is "abuse", then it is by any reasonable definition not unlimited.
Correct, not “unlimited” as in the dictionary definition of unlimited. Unlimited as in the plain meaning of unlimited as it is commonly used this subject matter area. i.e., Use it reasonably or hit the bricks, pal.
If there is a clear limit to that (and it seems there is now), then stop saying "unlimited" and start selling "X queries per day". You can even let users pay for aditional queries if needed.
(yes i know queries is not a proper term to use here, but the principle stands)
"The real damage: You're not frustrating 5% of users—you're breaking trust with the exact people who drive growth and adoption."
"It's not rocket science. It’s our way of attracting users. Not bait and switch, but credits to try."
> The real damage: You're not frustrating 5% of users—you're breaking trust with the exact people who drive growth and adoption.
> When developers get "rate limit exceeded" while debugging at 2 AM, they're not thinking about your infrastructure costs—they're shopping for alternatives.
Notice a pattern here?
Anthropic never sold Max plans as unlimited. There are two tiers, explicitly labeled "5x" and "20x", both referring to the increased usage over what you get with Pro. Did all the people complaining that Anthropic reneged on their "promise" of unlimited usage not read anything about what they were signing up to pay $100 or $200/month for? Or are they not even customers?
It was never unlimited.
They never advertised unlimited usage. The Max plan clearly said it had higher limits.
This fabrication of a backstory is so weird. Why do so many people believe this?
And to be clear, the users abusing the "unlimited" rates they were offering to do absolutely nothing productive (see vibe-coding subreddits) are no better.
Claude Max, to my knowledge, was never marketed as "unlimited". Claude Max gives you WAY more tokens then $100/$200 would buy. When you get rate limited, you have the option to just use the API. Overall, you will have gotten more value than just using the API alone.
And you always had, and continue to have, the option of just using the API directly. Go nuts.
The author sounds like a petulant child. It's embarrassing, honestly.
But it is so hard to explain to product people, that there is a limit how much certain services can scale and be profitably supported.
you can see here in this Reddit thread from April, when Claude Max was launched, that it was explicitly explained as being limited: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1jvbpek/breaking_...
Max is described as "5-20x more than Pro", clearly indicating both are limited.
here's their launch blog post: https://www.anthropic.com/news/max-plan
> The new Max plan delivers exactly that. With up to 20x higher usage limits, you can maintain momentum on your most demanding projects with little disruption.
obviously everyone wants everything for free, or cheap, and no one wants prices to change in a way that might not benefit them, but the endless whinging from people about how unfair it is that anthropic is limiting access to their products sold as coming with limited access is really extremely tedious even by HN standards.
and as pointed out dozens of times in these threads, if your actual worry is running out of usage in a week or month, Anthropic has you covered - you can just pay per token by giving Claude Code an API key. doing that 24/7 will cost ~100x what Max does though, I wonder if that's a useful bit of info about the situation or not?
Gemini did go from a huge free tier to 100 free uses a day, but I expected that.
EDIT: let me clarify: I just retired after over 50 very happy years working as a software developer and researcher. My number one priority was always self-improvement: learning new things and new skills that incidentally I could sometimes use to make money for whoever was paying me. AI is awesome for learning and general intellectual pursuits, and pairs nicely with reading quality books, listening to lectures on YouTube, etc.
Claude 4 is good enough that people will pay whatever they ask as long as it's significantly less than the cost of doing it by hand. The loss leaders will need to fade away to manage the demand, now that there is significant value.
Everyone was better off without the deception. Now we are in the early days of AI. Providers should be honest but won’t until forced to.
Because just think about it. Unlimited is untenable. Another example, in the early days of broadband in Australia a friend’s parents were visited by a Telstra manager because he “downloaded more than his entire suburb”. A manager!
Really you can’t blame the providers; some users will ruin it for everyone. I am not saying that is anyone specific. But none of this should surprise us. We’ve been here before. Just look back at how other markets developed & you will see patterns that tell you what’s next.
Differentiation through honesty: In a market full of fluff, directness stands out. Customers might respect a brand more for telling the truth plainly, even if the truth isn’t ideal.
The risk: It could scare off some customers who don’t read the fine print anyway. But that may not be a loss—it might actually filter in the right kind of customer, the one who wants to know what they’re really getting.
Just below me as I type there's a comment saying they're refusing to cancel a subscription (may not be below me any more when I finish typing).
Somewhere lower there's a comment saying they do not show the full price when you subscribe, but add taxes on top of it and leave you to notice the surprise on your credit card statement.
Is there an ethical "AI" service anywhere?
I promise I’m not being snarky here - I don’t understand how people are burning through their $200/mo plan usage so quickly. Are they spamming prompts? Not using planning mode? I’ve seen a few folks running multiple instances at once… is that more common than I think?
Let people cook and give them some time find out how to do this. Voice discontent but don't be an asshole.
And how does this compare to case with "Unlimited". Overall will the total used be higher or lower?
> You can tell how it's intentional with both OpenAI and Anthropic by how they're intentionally made opaque. I cant see a nice little bar with how much I've used versus have left on the given rate limits
Well, that's a scam. A legal one.
What's the alternative when every other vendors (eventually) have the same limit?
Otherwise it’s just a change in the offering. You can unsubscribe freely.
This sort of entitlement puts me off. Prices for things change all of the time.
_________ *here's where we tell you the limits we said we didn't have
In subscription plans, users who aren't using 100% of their subscription subsidize other users, which is opaque and not really fair.
some say they have to define a huge limit and that's it.
Limits are sometime hard to define :
- they must be such huge, a user (human) finaly understand it's unlimited else he will compare to competitors
- but no such huge because the 0.1% of users will try to reach it
A fair word could be the one which categorize the type of use :
- human : human has physical limit (e.g: typing word to keyboard / per time).
- bot : from 1 arduino to heavyweight hardcore clusting, virtualy no limits.
they just sells you at 20x more usage limit???? nothing tells me unlimited
“Claude is promising unlimited and it isn’t sustainable.”
“For a limited time only pay us $20 and get $80 worth of credits.”
Look at what these people on HN said!
Come on.
How am I supposed to bait people into my product to screw them up then?
Find a better alternative.
I hold them no ill will for rapidly changing pricing models, raising pricing, doing whatever they need to do in what must be a crazy time of finding insane PMF in such a short time
BUT the communication is basically inexcusable IMO. I don't know what I'm paying for, I don't know how much I get, their pricing and product pages have completely different information, they completely hide the fact that Opus use is restricted to the Max plan, they don't tell you how much Opus use you get, their help pages and pricing pages look they were written by an intern and pushed directly to prod. I find out about changes on Twitter/HN before I hear about them from Anthropic.
I love the Claude Code product, but Anthropic the company is definitely nudging me to go back to OpenAI.
This is also why competition is great though - if one company had a monopoly the pricing and UX would be 20x worse.
why the whole users need to suffer???
I don’t know why you think everyone is going to suffer.
Unlimited for startups work better because they have zero idea on load challenges that come in the future. And they don’t have much idea how well their product will be taken in the market.
Anthropic got the experience and decided they needed to maximize on reasonableness over customer trust. And they are a startup so we all get this.
OTOH there is no such thing as unlimited. Atoms in the universe are finite. Your use is finite. Your time is finite. Your abuse is limited and finite. You are a sucker for believing in the unlimited myth just like think others are suckers for believing in divine intervention or conspiracy theorists are suckers to believe in unlimited power.
Philosophical meandering and blaming the customer for not understanding company's shady marketing is not something I'd consider to be cool.
wait until their investors get fed up with pouring money down the drain and demand they make a profit from the median user
that model training and capex to build the giant DCs and fill them with absurdly priced nvidia chips isn't free
as an end user: you will be the one paying for it
For Claude Code and similar services, we’re still in the very early stages of the market. We’re using AI almost for free right now. It’s clear this isn’t sustainable. The problem is that they couldn’t even sustain it at this earliest stage.
On a more serious note, I'm sure most of the people can't fathom or even think about the resources they are consuming when using AI tools. This things doesn't use energy, they consume it like how a black hole sucks light.
In some cases, your queries can consume your home's daily energy needs in a hour or so.
But hey, this is just a sales pitch from one company I wouldn't trust by taking a dump on another company I wouldn't trust.
