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.
I downgraded from my $200 a month plan to my $20 plan and hit limits constantly. I try to use the API access I purchased separately, and it doesn't work with Claude Code (something about the 1 million context requiring extra usage) so I have to use it Continue. Then I get instantly rate limited when it's trying to read 1-2 files.
It just sucks. This whole landscape is still emerging, but if this is what it's like now, pre enshittification, when these companies have shitloads of money - it's going to be so much worse when they start to tighten the screws.
Right now my own incentive is to stop being dependent on Claude for as much as I can as quickly as I can.
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.
"Well, you're not expected to be able to live in that home the entire month that you paid for!"
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'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-...
Whether it's human token use, or future OpenClaws
I even think an LLM trained to communicate using telegram style might even be faster and way cheaper.
.- -. -.. / .. --..-- / ..-. --- .-. / --- -. . --..-- / .-- . .-.. -.-. --- -- . / --- ..- .-. / -. . .-- / - . .-.. . --. .-. .- -- -....- -... .- ... . -.. / --- ...- . .-. .-.. --- .-. -.. ...
Terse.
I’m glad they give us the leeway to experiment, and I’m also glad they weed the garden from time to time. To switch metaphors, I’m deeply frustrated when my very modest, commuter-grade use gets run off the figurative highway by figurative hot-rodders. It’s been extra-529y this week, and it’s about time they reined it in a little.
You’re always welcome to pay-as-you-go for as many tokens as you’d like to burn on their infrastructure… or to compute against any of the wide array of ever-improving open models on commodity compute providers…
Thats an interesting way of phrasing it - so is there a way to use the quota that's not 'abuse'? MCP/claude code seems to be want they want you to use it - are loops or ralph abuse as well ?
More users spinning up OpenClaw means that balance starts to shift towards more users maxing their tokens, thus the average increases, so I think their explanation makes sense still.
So they profit overall if I use all my tokens either way? Again, I understand usage limits - I just don't understand why some usage is 'good' and some 'bad' if I'm using the same either way.
>>More users spinning up OpenClaw
I'm pretty sure that's a small percentage of overall users, and probably skewed towards the very people that would be recommending/implementing you model for work/businesses. Seems like that would be the group you are encouraging/cultivating ?
I wonder if anyone else has experienced this?
Perhaps people at Anthropic should ask Sonnet (or Kimi, it's much better value) how power laws and pareto distributions work? You are advertising for people who can justify a virtually unlimited amount of tokens, why is it surprising that they would use as many as you're offering them in the plan?
PS: interesting that you'd use a throwaway account to post this
If you manage developers or product folk, do you allow them to work when you're not looking over their shoulder? All developers can be managers/team leads now. You plan, you delegate, you review.
You're welcome to not do this, surely that's appropriate in quite a few areas of work, but many of us are because we can get more work done than if we we're micromanaging every line of code change. For startups, where a bit of quality can suffer in favor of finding market fit, this is huge.
This is just the morning ones, and saves shitloads of time of clicking around from tool to tool, freeing up time for the thinking and deciding.
Perhaps because your Claude agent usage is not representative of the average user, and closer to the average OpenClaw user levels...
Basically; spin up in the morning eats a lot of tokens because the cache is cold. This has actually gotten worse now that Opus supports a 1Mt context.
So: compact before closing up for the night (reduces the size of the cache that needs to be spun up); and the default cache life is 5 minutes, so keep a heartbeat running when you step away from the keyboard to keep the cache warm.
Also, things like web-research eat context like crazy. Keep those separate, and ask for an md report with the key findings to feed into your main.
This is not exhaustive list and it's potentially subtly wrong sometimes. But it's a good band-aid.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616297
Know what's funny? Openclaw might actually burn less tokens than a naive claude code user; if configured correctly. %-/
With data, it's an engineering target.
They could just 429 badly behaved clients.
Then it's not priced correctly. As I said, you can do all of this without OpenClaw.. claude code ships with everything you need to maximize the limits.
I 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.
Just because outliers can be money-losing doesn’t mean you should raise the price for everyone.
If they are losing money then it's not priced correctly. That's what I responded to.
Yes, subscriptions work as you say. Plenty of people under utilize subscriptions from prime, to credit cards, to netflix. But if they lost money overall, they too would raise prices. Because that's how economics works. Shortage of capacity, high demand, raise prices until equilibrium.
There's other knobs beyond ToS. They just didn't choose those options.
This typically results in a ban for TOS violations after a few windows in a row on a claude subscription
I neither got a warning or a ban or anything - and that was with the double token amount during those days.
So I don't see human usage being something they ban for TOS violation, like you describe. But as always YMMV.
do you have any proof of your statement ?
Ah, to be human!
No, there is a weekly limit as well. Maxing out a single 5h window uses ~10% of the weekly limit
They could easily structure their limits to enforce that kind of pattern fairly on both human and automated users. They could e.g. force a cooldown period between your daily activity bursts, by decreeing that continued heavy use on a 24h basis would count exponentially more towards your limit. That would be transparent and force the claws to lighten their load below that of a typical human user. We're talking about a company that's worth hundreds of billions of dollars and targeting highly sophisticated enterprise users, not consumers; it's just not credible that they'd be technically unable to set that up.
This makes zero sense. I'm paying to use that limit all of the time. If that's too much for Anthropic, they are free to lower the limits or increase the price. Claiming otherwise would be false advertising.
The erosion of the norm of things doing what they advertise rather than being weasel-worded BS is particularly unfortunate, and leads to claims like this.
The issue is, and always will be, competing views on what these services are for. Most, see them as augments of their normal everyday workflow. Others see it as the tool that allows their creativity to flow as fast as their thoughts do. The problem is the service is more than capable of catering to both but the creative vibe commander will hit those limits far faster. Simply telling them to “take a break” is a kin to those video game screen nags that developers were forced to put into games to remind people to pee.
