alt Hacker NewsIt'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.
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> They have to be honest about what they can offer for $200.
Isn't that exactly what they just did?
Anthropic didn't miscalculate anything. They calculated what they could charge/subsidize for humans, not automatons. Banning OpenClaw brings usage levels under control.
If you had to pay for APIs yourself for any provider then you'd know that SOTA tokens are not cheap, and Claude Code for $100 is almost a too good to be true bargain for what you can get out of it.
> 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.
I don't think that's accurate for professional users. Personal users, especially those for whom $200/m is a significant cost, will definitely try to get the most out of it.
I know several $200/m user (I'm on the $100 personally), and they've all had the same experience I had when first upgrading to the max package: initially you try to use it as much as you can and feel like you need to keep it busy. But that goes away after a few days and you use it when you have need. The primary point of the max tiers for my peers is to not hit limits during their work if they occasionally use it intensively because it's disrupting to have to wait for X hours to continue.
If you get a benefit from using it, and you bill at $200 an hour, and you work 160+ hours a month, the $200 monthly cost doesn't register as a significant cost and you won't make it determine your usage patterns. I'm sure that'd be different if VC money goes away and it turns out the true price would need to be closer to $5k, but at this point it's similar to your ISP for fiber costing $80 a month. You enjoy the speed for a few days, but then it becomes the new normal.
>They have to be honest about what they can offer for $200
Their expectation must have been a human using the service at a human capacity.
This is different from an automated agent orchestrating a ton of different agents at the same time doing a lot of things.
There is a difference.