alt Hacker NewsThere seem to be a ton of people who don't understand how subscription services work. Every single one of them oversells their capacity. The power users that use the services a lot are subsidized by those who don't use it as much, which tends to be the vast majority of the user base. OpenClaw is an autonomous power user. The growing adoption of this walking attack surface was either going to A) cause the cost of Claude to go up or B) get banned to protect the price of the service for actual users.
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They have multiple tiers of service. The whole point of this was to allow "power users" to access more tokens. If someone upgraded to a $200/month Max subscription it's because they're a power user.
It's one thing to pay $5 or $20 per month, which although it's a substantial difference, people pay that much for the convenience of having stuff ready and available - and it's a completely different thing to pay $200 per month. People don't pay that much for occasional usage and many/most people will organise themselves to use all or most of their weekly allowance when the expense is in that ballpark.
If Anthropic miscalculated the amount of tokens, or simply pushed too hard to capture market share, that is a costly mistake because people in this market are very sensitive to price hikes.
They have to be honest about what they can offer for $200. Sure, people don't max their subscriptions but when they're large they make the best of it, or they will likely cancel it. The typical subscription works well below capacity because it's cheap enough that the optionality may be worth it. $200 is not the typical subscription.
My impression is that at the moment the value you get out of Claude is simply incredible.
As a senior engineer, you get an assistant that never gets tired and can do quite a lot on its own. For me, it’s been an eye-opening experience. I used to have a collaborator called M that had a good general culture, but was not too smart. The calculation going into my mind every time I ask Claude for something is: how much would that cost, in terms of time and effort, to get M to do that? M was a resource that costed many thousand dollars per month, plus the time I spent correcting and directing, while Claude is actually smarter and does what it is asked with a degree of autonomy and common sense that M could never dream of.
The flipside of the coin is obvious: Anthropic will find a way to claw back - no pun intended - some of this value by raising the cost of subscription. They would be crazy not to.
The entire point of AI is for it to do shit autonomously?
The whole point is that the users can have it doing shit for them instead of them having to babysit the computer.
The fact that users still have to sit there and argue with it erodes their value proposition. The proposition you can pay fewer salaries.
I run a small third-party harness myself (not OpenClaw, something much smaller). Checked my API key today after this announcement - turns out I was already on a regular API key so it doesnt affect me directly.
But the interesting thing is, my actual token usage running agents is way less than people here seem to assume. Most of the time the agent is waiting for tools, reading files, thinking. The bursts are intense but short. I probably use less tokens per hour than someone doing a long manual coding session with lots of back and forth.
The real issue for me isnt cost, its that they can just change the rules whenever. I had to drop everything today to verify my setup still works. Thats the tax of building on someone elses platform I guess.
"subsidised" is in wrong context. They charge how much they thought it would make sense then people found a way of maximizing the usage under the rules and now they change the rules. I am sure they will put out a product which is exactly OpenClaw/openclaw-like with Claude code soon, and my guess goes even to say that's the reason why they went after the naming... They totally wanted to steal the idea from the moment they saw. As they, and all other ai companies always do. They just steal and contribute nothing back.
I just discovered Pi Coding Agent and found that it's lean System Prompt + a tuned CLAUDE.md brought back a lot of the intelligence that Opus seemed to lose over the last month.
Sucks to be pushed back to Claude Code with opaque system behavior and inconsistency. I bet many would rather pay more for stability than less for gambling on the model intelligence.
Err, yeah, you should neither do any web scraping without respecting robots.txt, nor use ad blockers when using Google. When working with a business, never use Google Docs without paying them. Nah, that's not how the world works and at least not in the software industry.
> Every single one of them oversells their capacity
That sounds like their problem, not ours
> Every single one of them oversells their capacity
Indeed. And this model breaks in several cases that overlaps with the current AI business model:
- marginal cost of incremental usage is too high (Movie Pass)
- adverse selection (all you can eat monthly steak subscriptions)
- demand is synchronized (WeWork)
No, people want transparency. If it was "x tokens per time interval, then you pay extra", the problem wouldn't exist.
Good point. I agree with that. The key point is that heavy users benefit from this model while light users are basically subsidizing them. But it's a distribution when everyone shifts toward heavy usage, prices inevitably go up. The $17/mo pro price is already set to compete with other providers. Raising it would lose customers. Other tiers are also carefully priced to match competitors. So the only move left is to prevent the whole distribution from drifting toward heavier usage. That's exatly what this ban does.
> Every single one of them oversells their capacity
This is (almost) universally true of flat rate subscriptions; but there are usage-billed ones, too (and even those often have an aspect of subsidies).
A great example of the shakeup is when dial-up went from "connect, do the thing, disconnect" to "leave the computer online all the time" - they had to change the billing model because it wasn't built for continuous connections.
> Every single one of them oversells their capacity.
My meal kit delivery service doesn't.
It seems Anthropic thinks they have a much greater moat then they actually do. OpenClaw on a local model is better than any Claude offering, since it can just spin til the task is complete.
I'm pretty sure in this case it's anthropic doing the subsidizing because the api and extra usage rates are extremely expensive compared to the usage you get for the lowest subscription level. I pay $28 CAD per month and I'm pretty sure I'd burn through that in a day or two, and I'm not really a power user, I'm just using it to write code like it says on the tin. I seriously doubt there's a large portion of subscribers with low enough monthly usage that they'd save money by switching to the API.
well that largely depends, lots of saas are running 90% operating profit margins
Still very interesting timing to ban third party harnesses, given the proximity to the Claude Code leak …
And why aren’t OpenCode and others allowed anymore?
You don’t use more tokens than with Claude Code
That is not the correct generalization. Most modern subscriptions have no capacity constraint. Usage based pricing makes more sense for a supply constrained business.
Come on, someone on a Max account has a reason why they are paying $200. I bet many are at least often near the weekly limit, or they‘ll downgrade. If anything, OpenClaw usage is more spread out instead of ingesting whole codebases during office hours.
The Anthropic subs are likely priced at marginal cost (Amp‘s CEO recently said that in a podcast). It just doesn’t serve Anthropic to be operating as the service layer for OpenClaw.
So basically their move is an admission that they can't scale up their capacity accordingly to shifting demand while keeping the current pricing.
Customers have their own value calculations. If they can't use Claude for autonomous agent at reasonable price they will move to providers that are cheaper and more flexible. Autonomous agent adds way more utility than a marginally better LLM (assuming that's even true).
So it's like Sliceline from Silicon Valley (the show)
It's fine, their moat is thin. Frontier models as a service isn't really in the best interest of anyone anyways. Only a matter of time.
What you're saying is conceptually true for subscription services in general, but thats not why they are making this change. There's a 5 hour limit and a weekly limit. Those are hard token limits. Everyone on a plan pays for the max set of tokens in that plan. The limits manage capacity. The solution to that isn't a change of ToS, it's adjusting the limits.
In other words this is about Anthropic subsidizing their own tools to keep people on their platform. OpenClaw is just a good cover story for that. You can maximize plans just as easily w/ /loop. I do it all the time on max 20x. The agent consuming those tokens is irrelevant.
For what it's worth I don't use OpenClaw and don't intend to, but I do use claude -p all the time.