You aren't paying to be using that limit all of the time.

You are paying to be using that limit some of the time. There are 5 hour windows when you are sleeping and can't use it. There are weekend limits.

Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that.

It's structured so users can have bursts of unlimited usage, and spend ~15% of the theoretical max cap, and that's still cheaper than a subscription for that user.

An OpenClaw user can use 6, 7, 8 times what a human subscriber is using.

You guys are arguing on the reality of a subscription, but Anthropic still resides in the coocoo make-up world of growth at all costs backed up by unfathomable investments. They're not acting rationally by trying to present a good product with reasonable backend fundamentals. They're just trying to maintain the money loss to what they have set aside for the quarter. OpenClaw was not planned for, and thus must be fought.

> Everyone on a plan pays for the max set of tokens in that plan.

From Anthropic's perspective, everyone pays to be in bins with a given max.

And to everyone's benefit, there is a wide distribution of actual use. Most people pay for the convenience of knowing they have a max if they need it, not so they always use it.

So Anthropic does something nice, and drops the price for everyone. They kick back some of the (actual/potential) savings to their customers.

But if everyone automates the use of all their tokens Anthropic must either raise prices for everyone (which is terribly unfair for most users, who are not banging the ceiling every single time), or separate the continuous ceiling thumpers into another bin.

That's economics. Service/cost assumptions change, something has to give.

And of the two choices, they chose the one that is fair to everyone. As apposed to the one that is unfair (in different directions) to everyone.

The trade-off is that if you set your usage limits so that you can handle the case where everyone is saturating their limit at all times, then (1) the usage limits would be too small and (2) you're optimizing for a usage pattern that doesn't exist and (3) you're severely underprovisioning, which is worse for everyone.

Instead, you can prioritize people "earnestly" bursting to the usage limits, like the users who are actually sitting at their computer using the service over someone's server saturating the limit 24/7.

The goal is to have different tiers for manual users vs automated/programmatic tools. Not just Anthropic, this is how we design systems in general.

I don’t really follow what you’re saying. You mention the 5 hour limit. Is your expectation that they have enough capacity so that everyone can hit their 5 hour limit all the time? Or you are proposing that’s how they limit capacity for a subscription?

Do you have an example of how this is how they have advertised or sold the plan? I don’t recall ever seeing any advertisement that their plan is simply pre paying for tokens.

There are multiple reasons why this makes sense for Anthropic

- The intention of subscriptions, as anywhere, is a combination of trying to promote brand loyalty, and the gym membership model of getting people to pay for oversubscribed resources that many will never use. As the parent noted, people maxxing out their allowed usage, for whatever reason, are not the most profitable customers, and in this case probably not profitable at all

- OpenClaw is now owned by a competitor, OpenAI, and Anthropic are trying to compete in this space

https://www.semafor.com/article/04/03/2026/anthropic-eyes-it...

- Anthropic are capacity constrained, having sensibly chosen to err on the side of safety (not going bankrupt), and are now trying to do the best they can to manage that.

Presumably they might be acting differently if they had capacity to spare, but even then helping a competitor to build market share in a potentially lucrative segment doesn't make strategic sense.

I do wonder about the wisdom of Anthropic promoting usage-maxxing development patterns such as running a dozen agents in parallel ... maybe not the wisest thing to do when capacity constrained! It would make more sense to promote usage at night with low priority "batch jobs" rather than encourage people to increase usage during periods of maximum demand.

This is what I've been wondering about for a while now. I have the 20x plan as well, which I thought would allow me to try some API coding - but you get zero API usage.

As you said, I would imagine where the token usage comes from is irrelevant - you are generating the same load whether you do it from claude code or some other agent. So it seems like the rules are more to do with encouraging claude code usage, rather then claude model usage.

How many tokens does the $20/month buy me? I want to know what those hard token limits are but they refuse to tell me. I'm pretty sure they've reduced those limits the last week but they won't admit it. It feels like a scammy pricing model.

It's funny that as an avid user and developer on cc, I never used third-party harnesses, never shared my account, have one account and paid for another I just signed up for (both max 20) a more serious side project. And I'm a copius user of claude -p (spawned by their own opus [1m] model) that loops (in code written by opus) = yet I got my second account banned.

When are the honest users ever going to catch a break?

You’re missing something. I’m pretty sure it’s not only about the cost. Anthropic literally doesn’t have enough compute. They have to balance the load between enterprise customers and end users with subscription. If you consider they don’t have infinite compute (ie at their scale there is a limit to how much is available in a given region) and something is causing subscription users to increase usage significantly they do have to find a way to balance.

At least that’s my read. I don’t believe it is nefarious

You are still misunderstanding.

If you max out your token limits, you are costing Anthropic more than you are paying them. They only expect a small percentage of their users to do this, but OpenClaw changed the dynamic.

Anthropic knows that they will lose more users by lowering limits than they will by blocking OpenClaw, because OpenClaw users will overwhelmingly switch to API pricing, while chatbot users will leave for competitors with higher limits.

They are a business. They hope to become profitable. This was the correct move.

If they bundled together these two radically different usage patterns, either the service would become more expensive or the limits would become a lot tighter, in both cases making Claude Code far less attractive to professional users.

Exactly your point. Anthropic is subsidizing their own tools to keep people on their platform. What's wrong with that?

Tokens and these agents(Claude Code/cowork/claude.ai) are separate from model tokens, and they want to discount for their own product usage.

The subscription they sell is a package of these products, not tokens. They never sell token subscriptions, so why do we need to relate tokens with the subscription? Fundamentally, they never meant to sell token usage in that subscription, similar to any other SaaS company trying to sell API usage.

Exactly.

Subscriptions are crazy subsidized.

So you can’t use OpenClaw, OpenCode, etc. because they take you outside their applications/lock in and their ability to easily monetize in the future.

> The agent consuming those tokens is irrelevant.

This is so wrong.

The subscription is to Claude (the app, Claude code, etc) not the API.

Anthropic subsidizes Claude code because they collect a ton of super useful telemetry and logs so they can improve… Claude code.

Wanting to pay for a subscription to Claude and treat it like an API discount is like going to an all you can eat buffet and asking them to bring unlimited quantities of raw ingredients to you so you can cook at home. Ok, not a perfect analogy, but you get the idea.

OpenClaw is a mass project and doing something in the background 24/7.

I haven't even heard of claude -p before your comment.

OpenClaw is for sure not just a good cover story. Or its the cover face of the issue of automated tool workflows.

I don't think they are bothered too much about other frontends who do the same as claude code.

Well this is what happens when everyone hires an actuary to handle their pricing and every business earns its revenue through psuedo-insurance policy subscription products.

I am happy they are banning openclaw users instead of lowering my limits to compensate for these automated agents though.

Are we now banned from using `claude -p` now?

Look guys I use AI to help me re-write shit but for HN comments?

(Maybe I'm just being paranoid here).

Can’t you just use Anthropic models through bedrock?

yes and then still subsidise subscriptions by an order of magnitude

its obvious they will tighten everything and raise prices for years to come

thanks! I never thought of using -p for using claude and gemini for one-shots and in shell scripts before. Nice.

> There's a 5 hour limit and a weekly limit. Those are hard token limits

I mean, humans sleep and do other things than work, so they likely don’t hit their weekly limits or their 5 hour limits every single 5 hour chunk :)

-p gets penalized is not worth using it.

It’s shame they do all this sketchy stuff, I switched to Codex I have enough of their bs.