alt Hacker NewsAnthropic has been avoiding the hard thing, but they just need to do SOME kind of pricing thing here to shift demand. I expect there is just no amount of tricks that can handle the few hours at peak load. They need "surge pricing".
This seems reasonable surge pricing approach to me: 1. Implement surge pricing for everyone for the peak 2 hours of the day if possible. 2 hours you can work around, 5 hours is too hard. 2. Give existing customers a one time credit for surge 3. Make sure the plans just consume credits at an accelerated rate (e.g. if on the max plan, i just get 1/2 usage during peak hours). 4. Exempt sonnet/haiku from surge (so people can keep using) 5. Make "auto" settings in claude code etc automatically adapt during surge hours, so people don't get surprises by default. 6. For the first 90 days, unofficially waive the fist $100 in surge for every user but notify them. To train users about the surge, and get them used to it without having them actually pay. 7. (I don't think they would do this but this would help) allow users to fall back to using something like GLM 5.1 or Gemma 4 automatically in outages, with a partnership to handle it. Its not ideal, but i would prefer it in "partner mode" than not. IMO they can charge like 10% on top of the partner fees for this if used in other times, but during outages or surge, partner mode is free. But 100% managed by Anthropic so users don't need to set things up and can just use the Anthropic harness.
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They are in a three-way tension between price, quantity/quality and promises of growth to investors (time horizon-sensitive). Nudge one factor too much and the house of cards falls down.
Only on HN will your customers not only tolerate your product once you’ve reached market saturation and started enshittifying it, they’ll write you a whole guide on how to do it!
One of their challenges is pricing of Max 20x. Max 20x is discounted 50% vs Pro and Max 5x. The way Anthropic's pricing currently works the $20(1x) and $100(5x) tiers are paying double for usage vs the heavy-user $200(20x) tier. That sort of non-linearity only makes sense if there is excess capacity. ChatGPT's new Plus/Pro pricing plan did not copy that aspect of Anthropic's pricing structure and kept "sane" linear pricing.
Generally if you give people unused cycles to burn, they'll feel entitled to finding ways to burn them. So someone who is hitting the wall at x5 goes x20 and now has an extra +x10 to burn. Again, that's good if hardware is sitting around idle and you're encouraging innovation and exploration. It can make less sense when resources are scarce.