13 ms·

Anthropic tightens usage limits for Claude Code without telling users

407 points by mfiguiere 1y ago

blibble 1y ago
the day of COGS reckoning for the "AI" industry is approaching fast
- smcameron 1y ago
  COGS == cost of goods sold?
jablongo 1y ago
Id like to hear about the tools and use cases that lead people to hit these limits. How many sub-agents are they spawning? How are they monitoring them?
- Capricorn2481 1y ago
  I'm not on the pro plan, but on $20/mo, I asked Claude some 20 questions on architecture yesterday and it hit my limit. This is going to be happening with every AI service. They are all burning cash and need to dumb it down somehow. Whether that's running worse models or rate limiting.
- rancar2 1y ago
  There was a batchmode pulled from the documentation after the first few days of the Claude Code release. Many of have been trying to be respectful with a stable 5 agent call but some people have pushed those limits much higher as it wasn’t being technically throttle until last week.
  - WJW 1y ago
    Tragedy of the commons strikes again...
- micromacrofoot 1y ago
  I've seen prompts telling it to spawn an agent to review every change it makes... and they're not monitoring anything
- TrueDuality 1y ago
  One with only manual interactions and regular context resets. I have a couple of commands I'll use regularly that have 200-500 words in them but it's almost exclusively me riding that console raw. I'm only on the $100 Max plan and stick to the Sonnet model and I'll run into the hard usage limits after about three hours, that's been down to about two hours recently. The resets are about every four hours.
Forgeties79 1y ago
Ha was just talking about this coming down the pipeline with folks days ago (in so many words) https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=44565481 https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=44565481
Aurornis 1y ago
I played with Claude Code using the basic $20/month plan for a toy side project. I couldn't believe how many requests I could get in. I wasn't using this full-time for an entire workweek, but I thought for sure I'd be running into the $20/month limits quickly. Yet I never did. To be fair, I spent a lot of time cleaning up after the AI and manually coding things it couldn't figure out. It still seemed like an incredible number of tokens were being processed. I don't have concrete numbers, but it felt like I was easily getting $10-20 worth of tokens (compared to raw API prices) out of it every single day. My guess is that they left the limits extremely generous for a while to promote adoption, and now they're tightening them up because it’s starting to overwhelm their capacity. I can't imagine how much vibe coding you'd have to be doing to hit the limits on the $200/month plan like this article, though.
- dawnerd 1y ago
  I hit the limits within an hour with just one request in CC. Not even using opus. It’ll chug away but eventually switch to the nearing limit message. It’s really quite ridiculous and not a good way to upsell to the higher plans without definitive usage numbers.
  - MystK 1y ago
    Use `npx ccusage` if you're interested in how much it would have costed if you paid by API usage.
    - kristianp 1y ago
      https://www.npmjs.com/package/ccusage https://www.npmjs.com/package/ccusage
- cladopa 1y ago
  Thinking is extremely inefficient compared with the usual query in Chat. If you think a lot, you can spend hundreds of dollars easily.
- eddythompson80 1y ago
buremba 1y ago
They're likely burning money so I can't be pissed off yet, but we see the same Cursor as well; the pricing is not transparent. I'm paying for Max, and when I use the tooling to calculate the spend returned by the API, I can see it's almost $1k! I have no idea how much quota I have left until the next block. The pricing returned by the API doesn't make any sense.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- roxolotl 1y ago
  A coworker of mine claimed they've been burning $1k a week this month. Pretty wild it’s only costing the company $200 a month.
  - gerdesj 1y ago
    Crikey. Now I get the business model: I hire someone for say £5K/mo. They then spend $200/mo or is it a $1000/wk on Claude or whatevs. Profit!
    - AtheistOfFail 1y ago
      The model is "outspend others until they're bankrupt". Known as the Uber model or Amazon vs Diapers.com
      - devnullbrain 1y ago
        It's a shame that the LLM era missed out on coinciding with the zero interest rates era. Just imagine the waste we could create.
      - margalabargala 1y ago
        > Amazon vs Diapers.com To be fair that was a little different; Amazon wanted to buy the parent company of Diapers.com so sold at a loss to tank the value of the company so they could buy it cheap.
iwontberude 1y ago
Claude Code is not worth the time sink for anyone that already knows what they are doing. It's not that hard to write boilerplate and standard llm auto-predict was 95% of the way to Claude Code, Continue, Aider, Cursor, etc without the extra headaches. The hangover from all this wasted investment is going to be so painful.
- Sevii 1y ago
  I've spent far too much of my life writing boilerplate and API integrations. Let Claude do it.
  - axpy906 1y ago
    I agree. It’s a lot faster to tell it what I want and work on something else in the meantime. You end up ready code diffs more than writing code but it saves time.
- serf 1y ago
  >Claude Code is not worth the time sink there are like 15~ total pages of documentation. There are two folders , one for the home directory and one for the project root. You put a CLAUDE.md file in either folder which essentially acts like a pre-prompt. There are like 5 'magic phrases' like "think hard", 'make a todo', 'research..' , and 'use agents' -- or any similar set of phrases that trigger that route. Every command can be ran in the 'REPL' environment for instant feedback, it itself can teach you how to use the product, and /help will list every command. The hooks document is a bit incomplete last I checked, but it's a fairly straightforward system, too. That's about it -- now explain vi/vim/emacs/pycharm/vscode in a few sentences for me. The 'time sink' is like 4 hours for someone that isn't learning how to use the computer environment itself.
  - freedomben 1y ago
    Yeah, Claude Code was by far the quickest/easiest for me to get set up. The longest part was just getting my API key
- 1y ago
jmartrican 1y ago
I have the $100 plan and now quickly get downgraded to Sonnet. But so far have not hit any other limits. I use it more on the weekends over several hours, so lets see what this weekend has in store. I suspected that something like this might happen, where the demand will outstrip the supply and squeeze small players out. I still think demand is in its infancy and that many of us will be forced to pay a lot more. Unless of course there are breakthroughs. At work I recently switched to non-reasoning models because I find I get more work done and the quality is good enough. The queue to use Sonnet 3.7 and 4.0 is too long. Maybe the tools will improve reduce token count, e.g. a token reducing step (and maybe this already exists).
- j45 1y ago
  Off hour usage seems to be different for sure. Also there's likely only so much fixed compute available, and it might be getting re allcoated for other uses behind the scene from time to time as more compute arrives.
- edg5000 1y ago
  You are using the "auto-switch back to Sonnet" mode right? Try just selecting Opus without the auto-switch, probably you'll get more Opus and may not run out of it. Anthropic is just being careful because Opus eats compute and they don't want people getting disappointed. But for me it does not run out that quickly. Only when I asked it to work on a 50k+ source code file, which it had to ingest entirely in my case, is when I ran out.
  - jmartrican 1y ago
    Oh wow I didnt even know about that. Yeah it auto switches. I'll change the config.
apwell23 1y ago
oh yea looks like everyone and their grandma is hitting claude code https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/3572 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/3572 Inside info is they are using their servers to prioritize training for sonnet 4.5 to launch at the same time as xAI dedicated coding model. xAI coding logic is very close to sonnet 4 and has anthropic scrambling. xAI sucks at making designs but codes really well.
deleted 1y ago
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38 1y ago
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thr0waway001 1y ago
> One user, who asked not to be identified, said it has been impossible to advance his project since the usage limits came into effect. Vibe limit reached. Gotta start doing some thinking.
- dude250711 1y ago
  He did not pass the vibe check.
- bGl2YW5j 1y ago
  Came to comment on the same quote. I'm surprised, but know I shouldn't be, that we're at this point already.
  - mattigames 1y ago
    I would be a little disappointed if that wasn't the case, after all we have been there quite a while in regards to the art models.
  - mrits 1y ago
    First one was free
- mrits 1y ago
  I honestly feel sorry for these vibe coders. I'm loving AI in a similar way that I loved google or IDE magic. This seems like a far worst version of those developers that tried to build an entire app with Eclipse or Visual Studio GUI drag and drop from the late 90s
  - geoduck14 1y ago
    Why isn't anyone talking about the bevvy of drag-and-drop no colder solutions that have already been in the market? Surely the LLMs are competing with those tools, right?
    - Workaccount2 1y ago
globular-toast 1y ago
This is what really makes me sceptical of these tools. I've tried Claude Code and it does save some time even if I find the process boring and unappealing. But as much as I hate typing, my keyboard is mine and isn't just going to disappear one day, have its price hiked or refuse to work after 1000 lines. I would hate to get used to these tools then find I don't have them any more. I'm all for cutting down on typing but I'll wait until I can run things entirely locally.
- bigiain 1y ago
  > my keyboard is mine and isn't just going to disappear one day, have its price hiked or refuse to work after 1000 lines. I dunno, from my company or boss's perspective, there are definitely days where I've seriously considered just disappearing, demanding a raise, or refusing to work after the 3rd meeting or 17th Jira ticket. And I've seen cow orkers and friends do all three of those over my career. (Perhaps LLMs are closer to replacing human developers that anyone has realized yet?)
- MisterSandman 1y ago
  I guess the argument has time goes on AI will get cheaper and more efficient. …but idk how true that, I think it’s pretty clear that these companies are using the Uber model to attract customers, and the fact that they’re already increasing prices or throttling is kind of insane.
- sneak 1y ago
  Now say it about electricity from the wall. Just because you might not be able to use it next week doesn’t mean the productivity gains today aren’t real.
  - globular-toast 1y ago
    I maintain the ability to walk even though I could use an electric mobility scooter everywhere.
khurs 1y ago
All you people who were happy to pay $100 and $200 a month have ruined it for the rest of us!!
rob 1y ago
I don't think CLI/terminal-based approaches are going to win out in the long run compared to visual IDEs like Cursor but I think Anthropic has something good with Claude Code and I've been loving it lately (after using only Cursor for a while.) Wouldn't be surprised if they end up purchasing Cursor after squeezing them out via pricing and then merging Cursor + Claude Code so you have the best of both worlds under one name.
ladon86 1y ago
I think it was just an outage that unfortunately returned 429 errors instead of something else.
sneilan1 1y ago
So far I’ve had 3-4 Claude code instances constantly working 8-12 hours a day every day. I use it like a stick shift though. When I need a big plan doc, switch to recommended model between opus and sonnet. And for coding, use sonnet. Sometimes I hit the opus limit but I simply switch to sonnet for the day and watch it more closely.
- mpeg 1y ago
  Honest question: what do you do with them? I would be so fascinated to see a video of this kind of workflow… I feel like I use LLMs as much as I can while still being productive (because the code they generate has a lot of slop) and still barely use the agentic CLIs, mostly just tab completion through windsurf, and Claude for specific questions by steering the context manually pasting the relevant stuff
  - sneilan1 1y ago
    I focus more on reading code & prompting claude to write code for me at a high level. I also experiment a lot. I don't write code anymore by hand except in very rare cases. I ask claude for questions about the code to build understanding. I have it produce documentation, which is then consumed into other prompts. Often, claude code will need several minutes on a task so I start another task. My coding throughput on a day to day basis is now the equivalent of about 2-3 people. I also use gemini to try out trading ideas. For example, the other day I had gemini process google's latest quarterly report to create a market value given the total sum of all it's businesses. It valued google at $215. Then I bought long call options on google. Literally vibe day trading. I use chat gpt sora to experiment with art. I've always been fascinated with frank lloyd wright and o4 has gotten good enough to not munge the squares around in the coonley playhouse image so that's been a lot of fun to mess with. I use cheaper models & rag to automate categorizing of my transactions in Tiller. Claude code does the devops/python scripting to set up anything google cloud related so I can connect directly to my budget spreadsheet in google sheets. Then I use llama via openrouter + a complex RAG system to analyze my historical credit card data & come up with accurate categorizations for new transactions. This is only scratching the surface. I now use claude for devops, frontend, backend, fixing issues with embedder models in huggingface candle. The list is endless.
jasonthorsness 1y ago
Is it really worth it to use opus vs. sonnet? sonnet is pretty good on its own.
- MystK 1y ago
  It's definitely worth it if you're on the plans and don't hit the usage limits already. It's subjectively better based on my experience.
Ataraxic 1y ago
I need to see a video of what people are doing to hit the max limits regularly. I find sonnet really useful for coding but I never even hit basic limits. at $20/mo. Writing specs, coming up with documentation, doing wrote tasks for which many examples exist in the database. Iterate on particular services etc. Are these max users having it write the whole codebase w/ rewrites? Isn't it often just faster to fix small things I find incorrect than type up why I think it's wrong in English and have it do a whole big round trip?
- adamtaylor_13 1y ago
  I couldn’t even get it to do simple tasks for me this week on the max plan. It’s not just max users overloading it. It feels like they’re randomly rate limiting users. One day my very first prompt in the morning was blocked. Super strange.
- Ensorceled 1y ago
  > Isn't it often just faster to fix small things I find incorrect than type up why I think it's wrong in English and have it do a whole big round trip? This is my experience: at some point the AI isn't converging to a final solution and it's time to finish the rest by hand.
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    My experience is that if the AI doesn't oneshot it, it's faster to do it myself If you find yourself going back and forth with the AI, you're probably not saving time over a traditional google search Edit: and it basically never oneshots anything correctly
    - pinoy420 1y ago
      [dead]
- nh43215rgb 1y ago
  Are you using claude code for coding with sonnet? Just claude web use alone is indeed fairly relaxed i think.
martinald 1y ago
I'm not sure this is "intentional" per se or just massively overloaded servers because of unexpected demand growth and they are cutting rate limits until they can scale up more. This may become permanent/worse if the demand keeps outstripping their ability to scale. I'd be extremely surprised if Anthropic picked now of all times to decide on COGS optimisation. They potentially can take a significant slice of the entire DevTools market with the growth they are seeing, seems short sighted to me to nerf that when they have oodles of cash in bank and no doubt people hammering at their door to throw more cash at them.
- andix 1y ago
  A lot of people switched away from Cursor within the blink of an eye. Switching IDEs is a big deal for me - it takes a lot of effort, which is why I never switched to Cursor in the first place. I think Claude Code is a much better concept, the coding agent doesn't need to be connected to the IDE at all. Which also means you can switch even faster to a competitor. In that sense, Claude Code may have been a huge footgun. Gaining market share might turn out to be completely worthless.
  - mattnewton 1y ago
    I think in the case of Cursor, they are one of may VScode forks, so a switch is not really very challenging. I agree there is little to keep me on any individual app or model (which is one reason I think cursor's reported 9b valuation is a little crazy!)
    - andix 1y ago
      Only if you're using VS code in the first place. VS code is fine for web dev and js/ts/python. But I really don't like it for Java, C#, C++, SQL, and many more.
      - martinald 1y ago
        Agreed. I do agree with your point that they are very replaceable, but the amount of people I know that still only have tried ChatGPT makes me think that most users are quite lazy once they have a tool. I suspect the (vast?) majority don't bother moving without good reason. So to me it seems to make sense to take as much marketshare in this as possible, rather than saving a few $10/100ms on COGS optimisation, then do the COGS optimisation later. FWIW all LLM stuff is quite easily replaceable, but that's not stopping anyone from trying to aggressively grow marketshare.
adamtaylor_13 1y ago
That’s funny I literally started the $200/month plan this week because I routinely spend $300+/month on API tokens. And I was thinking to myself, “How does this make any sense financially for Anthropic to let me have all of this for $200/month?” And then I kept getting hit with those overloaded api errors so I canceled my plan and went back to API tokens. I still have no idea what they’re doing over there but I’ll happily pay for access. Just stop dangling that damn $200/month in my face if you’re not going to honor it with reasonable access.
- fluidcruft 1y ago
  Why wouldn't you assume that it implies the API rates are massively inflated? I don't do anything really but started playing around last week. I put $5 in tokens in to see how long it would last while I play around. It came out at 30min of compute or whatever dir 3hrs of playing around. So my dumb back of the envelope says $10/hr of compute means $90k per year. Sure GPUs are expensive but are they $90k year expensive? Dunno. It's not like the incremental cost of adding GPUs to the inference side are unmoored from hardware incremental costs.
  - what 1y ago
    How did you come up with 30 min of compute from playing around with it for 3 hours? Did you spend 2.5 hours typing while playing around?
    - fluidcruft 1y ago
      It's what claude code's cli /cost command reported. Like I said I haven't really used this stuff much so a lot of it was reviewing what it was doing and thinking about how to prompt it to do what I wanted it to do. I'm generally pretty skeptical about this stuff but I'm an old fart and decided I should see what the kids are doing rather than yell at clouds and tell people to get off my yard. So far I am able to get it to mostly work acceptably for annoying maintenance tasks (adding docstrings, explain code, rough drafts of tests). Things that I just generally don't have time for. Having it explain my own code from a few years ago to jog my memory about how it works. That sort of thing. Interestingly, it came up with some definitions of abbreviations and slightly different ways to do things using confidential APIs that have been sort of reverse engineered in public but are not fully understood. Which to me was the most interesting. The things it suggested related to that are very plausible and I was trying to decide if it was clever hallucinations or because it's being used/trained on code bases at that company or by others who have better access. So I spent a lot of time googling to see if it had found some publicly available info to confirm. Anyway after I hit $5 I subscribed to pro to continue the playing but /cost won't tell you anything useful after switching to pro. I also wanted to try Gemini clinto compare but I couldn't figure out how to actually give Google my money. Why is Google so impossible to use.
pembrook 1y ago
The funny thing is Claude 4.0 isn't even that 'smart' from a raw intelligence perspective compared to the other flagship models. They've just done the work to tailor it specifically for proper tool using during coding. Once other models catch up, they will not be able to be so stingy on limits. Google has the advantage here given they're running on their own silicon; can optimize for it; and have nearly unlimited cashflows they can burn. I find it amusing nobody here in the comments can understand the scaling laws of compute. It seems like people have a mental model of Uber burned into their head thinking that at some point the price has to go up. AI is not human labor. Over time the price of compute will fall, not rise. Losing money in the short term betting this will happen is not a dumb strategy given it's the most likely scenario. I know everybody really wants this bubble to pop so they can make themselves feel smart for "calling it" (and feel less jealous of the people who got in early) and I'm sure there will be a pop, but in the long term this is all correct.
- macinjosh 1y ago
  Prices for yesterday's frontier models will fall but there will always be the next big model. similar to how game graphics get ever better but ever more demanding at the bleeding edge.
  - lillecarl 1y ago
    Yes but games also look an awful lot better (fidelity wise) than not so many years ago.
- andix 1y ago
  The thing is, all the models are not that 'smart'. None of them is AGI. Currently it's much more important to manage context, split tasks, retry when needed, not getting stuck in an infinite loop, expose the right tools (but not too many), ...
- alphager 1y ago
  Even if Moore's law was still in effect and the computer resources required stayed the same and compute stayed as efficient per watt (neither is true), it would just halve compute costs every 18 months. You're able to read about people hitting $4000 costs/month on the $200 plan upthread. That's 8 years until it's cost effective. Are they really ready to burn money for 8 years?
andix 1y ago
I guess flat fee AI subscriptions are not a thing that is going to work out. Probably better to stay on usage based pricing, and just accept that every API call will be charged to your account.
bgwalter 1y ago
“It just stopped the ability to make progress,” the user told TechCrunch. “I tried Gemini and Kimi, but there’s really nothing else that’s competitive with the capability set of Claude Code right now.” This is probably another marketing stunt. Turn off the flow of cocaine and have users find out how addicted they are. And they'll pay for the purest cocaine, not for second grade.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  It was always gonna be the Uber approach. Cheap and great turns to expensive and mediocre when they have to turn the money spigot on.
  - sneak 1y ago
    Even expensive Uber or expensive Sonnet 4 is still a great deal when you consider the BATNA. Programmers on the level of Sonnet 4 are expensive.
Devadipta 1y ago
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bad_haircut72 1y ago
I went from pro to max because I hve been hitting limits, I could tell they were reducing it because I used to go multiple hours on pro but now its like 3. Congrats Anthropic you got $100 more out of me, at the cost of irrecoverable goodwill
- hellcow 1y ago
  For what it's worth, when Cursor downgraded their Claude limits in the middle of my annual subscription term, I emailed them to ask for a pro-rated refund, and it was granted. You may be able to do something similar with Claude Code. Changing the terms of the deal midway through a subscription to make it much less valuable is a really shady business practice, and I'm not sure it's legal.
ants_everywhere 1y ago
The other day I was doing major refactorings on two projects simultaneously while doing design work for two other projects. It occurred to me to check my API usage for Gemini and I had spent $200 that day already. Users are no doubt working these things even harder than I am. There's no way they can be profitable at $200 a month with unlimited usage. I think we're going to evolve into a system that intelligently allocates tasks based on cost. I think that's part of what openrouter is trying to do, but it's going to require a lot of context information to do the routing correctly.
memothon 1y ago
I made a quick site so you can see what tools are using the most context and help control it, totally free and in your browser. https://claude-code-analysis.pages.dev/ https://claude-code-analysis.pages.dev/
WhyNotHugo 1y ago
I wish models which we can self-host at home would start catching up. Relying on hosted providers like this is a huge risk, as can be seen in this case. I just worry that there’s little incentive for bit corporations to research optimising the “running queries for a single user in a consumer GPU” use case. I wonder if getting funding for such research is even viable at all.
- vineyardmike 1y ago
  We already have really strong models that run on a consumer GPU, and really strong frameworks and libraries to support them. The issue is (1) the extra size supports extra knowledge/abilities for the model. (2) a lot of the open source models are trained in a way to not compete with the paid offerings, or lack the data set of useful models. Specifically, it seems like the tool-use heavy “agentic” work is not being pushed to open models as aggressively as the big closed models. Presumably because that’s where the money is.
- YmiYugy 1y ago
  I think model providers would love to run their models on a single GPU. The latency and throughput of GPU interconnects is orders of magnitudes worse than accessing VRAM. Cutting out the latency would make the models much more efficient to run, they wouldn't have to pay for such expensive networking. If they got to run it on consumer GPUs even better. Consumer GPUs probably cost something like 5-10x less with regards to raw compute than data center ones. New coding optimized models for single GPUs drop all the time. But it's just a really hard problem to make them good and when the large models are still in the barely good enough phase (I wasn't using agents much before Sonnet 4) it's just not realistic to get something useful locally.
- ethan_smith 1y ago
  Check out Llama 3.1 70B Instruct, which now runs on consumer hardware with 24GB VRAM using techniques like unsloth or llama.cpp's new Q4_K_M quantization - surprisingly competitive with Claude for many coding tasks.
- oceanplexian 1y ago
  Deepseek R1 is better than any model released more than 6 months ago. You can plug it into open source equivalents of Claude Code like Goose. And it runs on a Mac Studio which you can buy at any consumer electronics store. The people saying that big tech is going to Gatekeep their IDE or pull the plug on them don’t seem to realize that the ship has already sailed. Good LLMs are here permanently and never going away. You just might have to do slightly more work than whipping out a credit card and buying a subscription product.
tho234i32242234 1y ago
Hardly surprising. AWS Bedrock which seems to be a popular way to get access to Claude etc. while not having to go through another "cloud security audit", will easily run up ~20-30$ bills in half-hour with something like Cline. Anthropic likely is making bank with this and can afford to lose the less-profitable (or even loss-making) business of lone-man developers.
hboon 1y ago
> One user, who asked not to be identified, said it has been impossible to advance his project since the usage limits came into effect. “It just stopped the ability to make progress,” the user told TechCrunch. “I tried Gemini and Kimi, but there’s really nothing else that’s competitive with the capability set of Claude Code right now.” PMF.
- kristianp 1y ago
  Product Market Fit? Yes, seems they have.
  - hboon 1y ago
    Yes. That kind of reaction I quoted is telling.
deadbabe 1y ago
Does anyone not realize they are just using the typical drug dealer type business model? I used to do cocaine and it was a similar vibe. They will turn you into an AI junkie who no longer has motivation to do anything difficult on your own (despite having the skills and knowing how), and then, they will dramatically cut your usage limit and say you’ll need to pay more to use their AI. And you will gladly pay more, because hey you are getting paid a lot and it’s only a few hundred extra. And look at all the time you save! Soon you’re paying $2k a month on AI.
- sneak 1y ago
  A subcontracted dev that can do that much is way more than $2k. I’ve had $800-on-AI months and it was a good deal.
yahoozoo 1y ago
Where’s your Ed at was right?
anonzzzies 1y ago
That must somehow be illegal, at least in the consumer space. I have noticed quicker degrade to sonnet, but don't often hit limits ($200 plan). Seems none of these guys can afford loyalty, so I will be skipping between 'tool of the month' instead of sticking with one. New companies with new VC money are good for a few months and then degrade, so it's not hard to do.
Follow_Cloud 1y ago
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paulhodge 1y ago
There’s been a ton of ‘service overloaded’ errors this week so it makes sense that they had to adjust it. Personally I’ve never hit a usage limit on the $100 plan even when running several Claude tabs at once. I can’t imagine how people can max out the $200 plan.
jay_kyburz 1y ago
Where is my model I can run local and off line? That's when the LLM stuff is going to take off for me.
- gavmor 1y ago
  Haven't you checked out Ollama, yet?
LeicaLatte 1y ago
Customers are always chasing the next big thing in this space. As a programmer who’s worked on mobile UIs and backends using CC, I can say the appeal isn’t really the model itself—it’s the form factor. It’s a decent product, but hardly groundbreaking or essential.
submeta 1y ago
It’s like you buy an M4 MacBook and silently Apple throttles it and makes it an M1. If that happened every tech magazine would write about it, consumer advocates would be in rage. How’s it possible that AI companies sell you a product for 100 USD a month and silently degrade it?
- edg5000 1y ago
  They have fixed capacity but want to provide a reasonable product for all. They've really struggled with defining and enforcing quotas. It seems they have issues predicting what their actual capacity is, how many users they want. Also, there is not much competition. The prices are not really anchored to anything. Hopefully it will improve.
matt3210 1y ago
At some point they’ll need to make money. Expect it to go way up
gitaarik 1y ago
As a independent dev, I haven't had the need to pay for any AI yet. When I run into my limit at one company, I switch to the next one. Not always the same experience, but the next day I can start fresh again.
t14000 1y ago
Title should be: Anthropic caught getting high on their own supply
isusmelj 1y ago
Demand > Supply?
deleted 1y ago
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dyl000 1y ago
opencode with kimi-k2 is my backup just in case claude is down or I hit the limits on the max 20x plan.
charlysl 1y ago
I think that Cursor is doing the same. A couple of weeks ago they removed the 500 prime model requests limit per month in the $20 plan, it seemed like this was going to be good for users, in fact it's worse, my impression is that now the limit is effectively much lower, and you can't check anymore in your account's dashboard how many of these requests you've made over the last month.
StarterPro 1y ago
I was wondering when we'd get to the end of the reduced fare portion of the bubble. With the layoffs, increase in prices, we're going to see a lot more vibe coding to justify the price of ai. With the talented employees laid off, I predict there will be some VERY LARGE code mistake pushed, either banking or travel, and we'll either see the burst, or they'll move on to strictly enterprise/gov opportunities. (see: grok for gov) >Super Free [Introduction, lots of free options] >Reduced Fare [higher prices, smaller pool of free options](We are here) >Premium Only [only paid options, mostly whales]
ramon156 1y ago
What are these people doing to hit their limit this fast? I put $30 on it, use it daily at work, and I still have half of it left. Are Zed agents just that optimized? I doubt it
solosquad 1y ago
They didn’t reduce it they actually increased it. I was using it for 14 hours straight without any issues. I think they did that to stay competitive, but now it seems like it's back to normal.
kordlessagain 1y ago
Hopefully Anthropic is reading these. I want to start by saying that Claude as a model is excellent. The AI performs exceptionally well at problem-solving and code generation across a wide variety of tasks. My feedback focuses specifically on the Claude Desktop application for Windows. Stability and Performance: The application frequently displays confusing error messages in the top-right corner, especially when MCP servers encounter issues or during service maintenance. The interface regularly freezes for 30+ seconds, goes completely blank, then takes another 30 seconds to recover. The application often becomes unresponsive to user input, requiring clicks to reactivate. Despite advertising 50+ tools to the LLM, tools are frequently reported as "not found" on first attempt, then work on retry. User Experience Problems: Loading historical chats takes 5-10 seconds per click, making navigation extremely slow. Chat history is only searchable by auto-generated titles, which are often irrelevant to the actual conversation content. Deleting multiple chats is nearly impossible due to slow loading and poor navigation. No centralized view exists for created artifacts, making them difficult to locate later. Session Management: The application provides insufficient warning about approaching conversation length limits. Previously available warnings have disappeared. The persistent "Claude can't run code...yet" message is misleading given existing tools like REPL and custom MCP implementations. Interface Issues: The support chat UI randomly covers interface elements and lacks message editing capabilities. Service status messages are unclear and don't effectively communicate what's happening. Suggestions for Improvement 1. Implement clear conversation length warnings at 75% and 90% capacity 2. Add an artifacts gallery for easy access to created content 3. Improve chat search with content-based indexing, not just titles 4. Optimize chat loading performance to reduce switching delays 5. Provide better error messaging that clearly explains issues and solutions 6. Add bulk management tools for chat organization and deletion 7. Remove or update misleading messages about code execution capabilities Claude Desktop is a critical tool in my workflow, but these issues significantly impact productivity and user experience. The application has tremendous potential, and addressing these concerns would greatly improve its value proposition. If continued development isn't prioritized, consider open-sourcing the desktop application to allow the community to contribute improvements.
- 93po 1y ago
  big agree on making usage more visible, i have no idea how much i have left of opus, or even sonnet, and the command to check says i have unlimited but that doesnt appear to be the case bc i got cut off of sonnet even on the $100/m plan
boesboes 1y ago
Yeah, i noticed it falls back to sonnet much quicker too. Most days within the first few minutes. And the 529.. it's borderline unusable at times. But the worst part: While claude code, the tools and cli etc, has become much better over the last weeks; it seems the models or prompts have gotten worse. It will do things like add a test, see that it fails, claim it was already broken and out of scope. Or maybe i ask it to implement this, DO NOT use Y. Use Y anyway. Sometimes i ask it to update a test & it decides to revert all changes in the application code. I am very close to cancelling my plan again. Maybe it is a great deal when comparing too api pricing, but that is not a fair comparison; prepaid/pay-as-you-go is always way more expensive. And if they priced it wrong, change the pricing? Degrading a new service you are developing to save cost is even more stupid then the burn money until ??? profit stats imo hehe
ramesh31 1y ago
Probably why they were able to just 10x the token based API limits.
tom_m 1y ago
No surprise. I always thought it was so pathetically low that it couldn't do much meaningful. I'm sure now if I tried it again, it'd be worse.
mdjameel59 1y ago
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ajeetgymlover 1y ago
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407 points by mfiguiere 1y ago

blibble 1y ago

the day of COGS reckoning for the "AI" industry is approaching fast

smcameron 1y ago
COGS == cost of goods sold?

jablongo 1y ago

Id like to hear about the tools and use cases that lead people to hit these limits. How many sub-agents are they spawning? How are they monitoring them?

Capricorn2481 1y ago
I'm not on the pro plan, but on $20/mo, I asked Claude some 20 questions on architecture yesterday and it hit my limit. This is going to be happening with every AI service. They are all burning cash and need to dumb it down somehow. Whether that's running worse models or rate limiting.
rancar2 1y ago
There was a batchmode pulled from the documentation after the first few days of the Claude Code release. Many of have been trying to be respectful with a stable 5 agent call but some people have pushed those limits much higher as it wasn’t being technically throttle until last week.
- WJW 1y ago
  Tragedy of the commons strikes again...
micromacrofoot 1y ago
I've seen prompts telling it to spawn an agent to review every change it makes... and they're not monitoring anything
TrueDuality 1y ago
One with only manual interactions and regular context resets. I have a couple of commands I'll use regularly that have 200-500 words in them but it's almost exclusively me riding that console raw. I'm only on the $100 Max plan and stick to the Sonnet model and I'll run into the hard usage limits after about three hours, that's been down to about two hours recently. The resets are about every four hours.

Forgeties79 1y ago

Ha was just talking about this coming down the pipeline with folks days ago (in so many words) https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=44565481 https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=44565481

Aurornis 1y ago

I played with Claude Code using the basic $20/month plan for a toy side project. I couldn't believe how many requests I could get in. I wasn't using this full-time for an entire workweek, but I thought for sure I'd be running into the $20/month limits quickly. Yet I never did. To be fair, I spent a lot of time cleaning up after the AI and manually coding things it couldn't figure out. It still seemed like an incredible number of tokens were being processed. I don't have concrete numbers, but it felt like I was easily getting $10-20 worth of tokens (compared to raw API prices) out of it every single day. My guess is that they left the limits extremely generous for a while to promote adoption, and now they're tightening them up because it’s starting to overwhelm their capacity. I can't imagine how much vibe coding you'd have to be doing to hit the limits on the $200/month plan like this article, though.

dawnerd 1y ago
I hit the limits within an hour with just one request in CC. Not even using opus. It’ll chug away but eventually switch to the nearing limit message. It’s really quite ridiculous and not a good way to upsell to the higher plans without definitive usage numbers.
- MystK 1y ago
  Use `npx ccusage` if you're interested in how much it would have costed if you paid by API usage.
  - kristianp 1y ago
    https://www.npmjs.com/package/ccusage https://www.npmjs.com/package/ccusage
cladopa 1y ago
Thinking is extremely inefficient compared with the usual query in Chat. If you think a lot, you can spend hundreds of dollars easily.
eddythompson80 1y ago

buremba 1y ago

They're likely burning money so I can't be pissed off yet, but we see the same Cursor as well; the pricing is not transparent. I'm paying for Max, and when I use the tooling to calculate the spend returned by the API, I can see it's almost $1k! I have no idea how much quota I have left until the next block. The pricing returned by the API doesn't make any sense.

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roxolotl 1y ago
A coworker of mine claimed they've been burning $1k a week this month. Pretty wild it’s only costing the company $200 a month.
- gerdesj 1y ago
  Crikey. Now I get the business model: I hire someone for say £5K/mo. They then spend $200/mo or is it a $1000/wk on Claude or whatevs. Profit!
  - AtheistOfFail 1y ago
    The model is "outspend others until they're bankrupt". Known as the Uber model or Amazon vs Diapers.com
    - devnullbrain 1y ago
      It's a shame that the LLM era missed out on coinciding with the zero interest rates era. Just imagine the waste we could create.
    - margalabargala 1y ago
      > Amazon vs Diapers.com To be fair that was a little different; Amazon wanted to buy the parent company of Diapers.com so sold at a loss to tank the value of the company so they could buy it cheap.

iwontberude 1y ago

Claude Code is not worth the time sink for anyone that already knows what they are doing. It's not that hard to write boilerplate and standard llm auto-predict was 95% of the way to Claude Code, Continue, Aider, Cursor, etc without the extra headaches. The hangover from all this wasted investment is going to be so painful.

Sevii 1y ago
I've spent far too much of my life writing boilerplate and API integrations. Let Claude do it.
- axpy906 1y ago
  I agree. It’s a lot faster to tell it what I want and work on something else in the meantime. You end up ready code diffs more than writing code but it saves time.
serf 1y ago
>Claude Code is not worth the time sink there are like 15~ total pages of documentation. There are two folders , one for the home directory and one for the project root. You put a CLAUDE.md file in either folder which essentially acts like a pre-prompt. There are like 5 'magic phrases' like "think hard", 'make a todo', 'research..' , and 'use agents' -- or any similar set of phrases that trigger that route. Every command can be ran in the 'REPL' environment for instant feedback, it itself can teach you how to use the product, and /help will list every command. The hooks document is a bit incomplete last I checked, but it's a fairly straightforward system, too. That's about it -- now explain vi/vim/emacs/pycharm/vscode in a few sentences for me. The 'time sink' is like 4 hours for someone that isn't learning how to use the computer environment itself.
- freedomben 1y ago
  Yeah, Claude Code was by far the quickest/easiest for me to get set up. The longest part was just getting my API key
1y ago

jmartrican 1y ago

I have the $100 plan and now quickly get downgraded to Sonnet. But so far have not hit any other limits. I use it more on the weekends over several hours, so lets see what this weekend has in store. I suspected that something like this might happen, where the demand will outstrip the supply and squeeze small players out. I still think demand is in its infancy and that many of us will be forced to pay a lot more. Unless of course there are breakthroughs. At work I recently switched to non-reasoning models because I find I get more work done and the quality is good enough. The queue to use Sonnet 3.7 and 4.0 is too long. Maybe the tools will improve reduce token count, e.g. a token reducing step (and maybe this already exists).

j45 1y ago
Off hour usage seems to be different for sure. Also there's likely only so much fixed compute available, and it might be getting re allcoated for other uses behind the scene from time to time as more compute arrives.
edg5000 1y ago
You are using the "auto-switch back to Sonnet" mode right? Try just selecting Opus without the auto-switch, probably you'll get more Opus and may not run out of it. Anthropic is just being careful because Opus eats compute and they don't want people getting disappointed. But for me it does not run out that quickly. Only when I asked it to work on a 50k+ source code file, which it had to ingest entirely in my case, is when I ran out.
- jmartrican 1y ago
  Oh wow I didnt even know about that. Yeah it auto switches. I'll change the config.

apwell23 1y ago

oh yea looks like everyone and their grandma is hitting claude code https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/3572 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/3572 Inside info is they are using their servers to prioritize training for sonnet 4.5 to launch at the same time as xAI dedicated coding model. xAI coding logic is very close to sonnet 4 and has anthropic scrambling. xAI sucks at making designs but codes really well.

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thr0waway001 1y ago

> One user, who asked not to be identified, said it has been impossible to advance his project since the usage limits came into effect. Vibe limit reached. Gotta start doing some thinking.

dude250711 1y ago
He did not pass the vibe check.
bGl2YW5j 1y ago
Came to comment on the same quote. I'm surprised, but know I shouldn't be, that we're at this point already.
- mattigames 1y ago
  I would be a little disappointed if that wasn't the case, after all we have been there quite a while in regards to the art models.
- mrits 1y ago
  First one was free
mrits 1y ago
I honestly feel sorry for these vibe coders. I'm loving AI in a similar way that I loved google or IDE magic. This seems like a far worst version of those developers that tried to build an entire app with Eclipse or Visual Studio GUI drag and drop from the late 90s
- geoduck14 1y ago
  Why isn't anyone talking about the bevvy of drag-and-drop no colder solutions that have already been in the market? Surely the LLMs are competing with those tools, right?
  - Workaccount2 1y ago

globular-toast 1y ago

This is what really makes me sceptical of these tools. I've tried Claude Code and it does save some time even if I find the process boring and unappealing. But as much as I hate typing, my keyboard is mine and isn't just going to disappear one day, have its price hiked or refuse to work after 1000 lines. I would hate to get used to these tools then find I don't have them any more. I'm all for cutting down on typing but I'll wait until I can run things entirely locally.

bigiain 1y ago
> my keyboard is mine and isn't just going to disappear one day, have its price hiked or refuse to work after 1000 lines. I dunno, from my company or boss's perspective, there are definitely days where I've seriously considered just disappearing, demanding a raise, or refusing to work after the 3rd meeting or 17th Jira ticket. And I've seen cow orkers and friends do all three of those over my career. (Perhaps LLMs are closer to replacing human developers that anyone has realized yet?)
MisterSandman 1y ago
I guess the argument has time goes on AI will get cheaper and more efficient. …but idk how true that, I think it’s pretty clear that these companies are using the Uber model to attract customers, and the fact that they’re already increasing prices or throttling is kind of insane.
sneak 1y ago
Now say it about electricity from the wall. Just because you might not be able to use it next week doesn’t mean the productivity gains today aren’t real.
- globular-toast 1y ago
  I maintain the ability to walk even though I could use an electric mobility scooter everywhere.

khurs 1y ago

All you people who were happy to pay $100 and $200 a month have ruined it for the rest of us!!

rob 1y ago

I don't think CLI/terminal-based approaches are going to win out in the long run compared to visual IDEs like Cursor but I think Anthropic has something good with Claude Code and I've been loving it lately (after using only Cursor for a while.) Wouldn't be surprised if they end up purchasing Cursor after squeezing them out via pricing and then merging Cursor + Claude Code so you have the best of both worlds under one name.

ladon86 1y ago

I think it was just an outage that unfortunately returned 429 errors instead of something else.

sneilan1 1y ago

So far I’ve had 3-4 Claude code instances constantly working 8-12 hours a day every day. I use it like a stick shift though. When I need a big plan doc, switch to recommended model between opus and sonnet. And for coding, use sonnet. Sometimes I hit the opus limit but I simply switch to sonnet for the day and watch it more closely.

mpeg 1y ago
Honest question: what do you do with them? I would be so fascinated to see a video of this kind of workflow… I feel like I use LLMs as much as I can while still being productive (because the code they generate has a lot of slop) and still barely use the agentic CLIs, mostly just tab completion through windsurf, and Claude for specific questions by steering the context manually pasting the relevant stuff
- sneilan1 1y ago
  I focus more on reading code & prompting claude to write code for me at a high level. I also experiment a lot. I don't write code anymore by hand except in very rare cases. I ask claude for questions about the code to build understanding. I have it produce documentation, which is then consumed into other prompts. Often, claude code will need several minutes on a task so I start another task. My coding throughput on a day to day basis is now the equivalent of about 2-3 people. I also use gemini to try out trading ideas. For example, the other day I had gemini process google's latest quarterly report to create a market value given the total sum of all it's businesses. It valued google at $215. Then I bought long call options on google. Literally vibe day trading. I use chat gpt sora to experiment with art. I've always been fascinated with frank lloyd wright and o4 has gotten good enough to not munge the squares around in the coonley playhouse image so that's been a lot of fun to mess with. I use cheaper models & rag to automate categorizing of my transactions in Tiller. Claude code does the devops/python scripting to set up anything google cloud related so I can connect directly to my budget spreadsheet in google sheets. Then I use llama via openrouter + a complex RAG system to analyze my historical credit card data & come up with accurate categorizations for new transactions. This is only scratching the surface. I now use claude for devops, frontend, backend, fixing issues with embedder models in huggingface candle. The list is endless.

jasonthorsness 1y ago

Is it really worth it to use opus vs. sonnet? sonnet is pretty good on its own.

MystK 1y ago
It's definitely worth it if you're on the plans and don't hit the usage limits already. It's subjectively better based on my experience.

Ataraxic 1y ago

I need to see a video of what people are doing to hit the max limits regularly. I find sonnet really useful for coding but I never even hit basic limits. at $20/mo. Writing specs, coming up with documentation, doing wrote tasks for which many examples exist in the database. Iterate on particular services etc. Are these max users having it write the whole codebase w/ rewrites? Isn't it often just faster to fix small things I find incorrect than type up why I think it's wrong in English and have it do a whole big round trip?

adamtaylor_13 1y ago
I couldn’t even get it to do simple tasks for me this week on the max plan. It’s not just max users overloading it. It feels like they’re randomly rate limiting users. One day my very first prompt in the morning was blocked. Super strange.
Ensorceled 1y ago
> Isn't it often just faster to fix small things I find incorrect than type up why I think it's wrong in English and have it do a whole big round trip? This is my experience: at some point the AI isn't converging to a final solution and it's time to finish the rest by hand.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  My experience is that if the AI doesn't oneshot it, it's faster to do it myself If you find yourself going back and forth with the AI, you're probably not saving time over a traditional google search Edit: and it basically never oneshots anything correctly
  - pinoy420 1y ago
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nh43215rgb 1y ago
Are you using claude code for coding with sonnet? Just claude web use alone is indeed fairly relaxed i think.

martinald 1y ago

I'm not sure this is "intentional" per se or just massively overloaded servers because of unexpected demand growth and they are cutting rate limits until they can scale up more. This may become permanent/worse if the demand keeps outstripping their ability to scale. I'd be extremely surprised if Anthropic picked now of all times to decide on COGS optimisation. They potentially can take a significant slice of the entire DevTools market with the growth they are seeing, seems short sighted to me to nerf that when they have oodles of cash in bank and no doubt people hammering at their door to throw more cash at them.

andix 1y ago
A lot of people switched away from Cursor within the blink of an eye. Switching IDEs is a big deal for me - it takes a lot of effort, which is why I never switched to Cursor in the first place. I think Claude Code is a much better concept, the coding agent doesn't need to be connected to the IDE at all. Which also means you can switch even faster to a competitor. In that sense, Claude Code may have been a huge footgun. Gaining market share might turn out to be completely worthless.
- mattnewton 1y ago
  I think in the case of Cursor, they are one of may VScode forks, so a switch is not really very challenging. I agree there is little to keep me on any individual app or model (which is one reason I think cursor's reported 9b valuation is a little crazy!)
  - andix 1y ago
    Only if you're using VS code in the first place. VS code is fine for web dev and js/ts/python. But I really don't like it for Java, C#, C++, SQL, and many more.
    - martinald 1y ago
      Agreed. I do agree with your point that they are very replaceable, but the amount of people I know that still only have tried ChatGPT makes me think that most users are quite lazy once they have a tool. I suspect the (vast?) majority don't bother moving without good reason. So to me it seems to make sense to take as much marketshare in this as possible, rather than saving a few $10/100ms on COGS optimisation, then do the COGS optimisation later. FWIW all LLM stuff is quite easily replaceable, but that's not stopping anyone from trying to aggressively grow marketshare.

adamtaylor_13 1y ago

That’s funny I literally started the $200/month plan this week because I routinely spend $300+/month on API tokens. And I was thinking to myself, “How does this make any sense financially for Anthropic to let me have all of this for $200/month?” And then I kept getting hit with those overloaded api errors so I canceled my plan and went back to API tokens. I still have no idea what they’re doing over there but I’ll happily pay for access. Just stop dangling that damn $200/month in my face if you’re not going to honor it with reasonable access.

fluidcruft 1y ago
Why wouldn't you assume that it implies the API rates are massively inflated? I don't do anything really but started playing around last week. I put $5 in tokens in to see how long it would last while I play around. It came out at 30min of compute or whatever dir 3hrs of playing around. So my dumb back of the envelope says $10/hr of compute means $90k per year. Sure GPUs are expensive but are they $90k year expensive? Dunno. It's not like the incremental cost of adding GPUs to the inference side are unmoored from hardware incremental costs.
- what 1y ago
  How did you come up with 30 min of compute from playing around with it for 3 hours? Did you spend 2.5 hours typing while playing around?
  - fluidcruft 1y ago
    It's what claude code's cli /cost command reported. Like I said I haven't really used this stuff much so a lot of it was reviewing what it was doing and thinking about how to prompt it to do what I wanted it to do. I'm generally pretty skeptical about this stuff but I'm an old fart and decided I should see what the kids are doing rather than yell at clouds and tell people to get off my yard. So far I am able to get it to mostly work acceptably for annoying maintenance tasks (adding docstrings, explain code, rough drafts of tests). Things that I just generally don't have time for. Having it explain my own code from a few years ago to jog my memory about how it works. That sort of thing. Interestingly, it came up with some definitions of abbreviations and slightly different ways to do things using confidential APIs that have been sort of reverse engineered in public but are not fully understood. Which to me was the most interesting. The things it suggested related to that are very plausible and I was trying to decide if it was clever hallucinations or because it's being used/trained on code bases at that company or by others who have better access. So I spent a lot of time googling to see if it had found some publicly available info to confirm. Anyway after I hit $5 I subscribed to pro to continue the playing but /cost won't tell you anything useful after switching to pro. I also wanted to try Gemini clinto compare but I couldn't figure out how to actually give Google my money. Why is Google so impossible to use.

pembrook 1y ago

The funny thing is Claude 4.0 isn't even that 'smart' from a raw intelligence perspective compared to the other flagship models. They've just done the work to tailor it specifically for proper tool using during coding. Once other models catch up, they will not be able to be so stingy on limits. Google has the advantage here given they're running on their own silicon; can optimize for it; and have nearly unlimited cashflows they can burn. I find it amusing nobody here in the comments can understand the scaling laws of compute. It seems like people have a mental model of Uber burned into their head thinking that at some point the price has to go up. AI is not human labor. Over time the price of compute will fall, not rise. Losing money in the short term betting this will happen is not a dumb strategy given it's the most likely scenario. I know everybody really wants this bubble to pop so they can make themselves feel smart for "calling it" (and feel less jealous of the people who got in early) and I'm sure there will be a pop, but in the long term this is all correct.

macinjosh 1y ago
Prices for yesterday's frontier models will fall but there will always be the next big model. similar to how game graphics get ever better but ever more demanding at the bleeding edge.
- lillecarl 1y ago
  Yes but games also look an awful lot better (fidelity wise) than not so many years ago.
andix 1y ago
The thing is, all the models are not that 'smart'. None of them is AGI. Currently it's much more important to manage context, split tasks, retry when needed, not getting stuck in an infinite loop, expose the right tools (but not too many), ...
alphager 1y ago
Even if Moore's law was still in effect and the computer resources required stayed the same and compute stayed as efficient per watt (neither is true), it would just halve compute costs every 18 months. You're able to read about people hitting $4000 costs/month on the $200 plan upthread. That's 8 years until it's cost effective. Are they really ready to burn money for 8 years?

andix 1y ago

I guess flat fee AI subscriptions are not a thing that is going to work out. Probably better to stay on usage based pricing, and just accept that every API call will be charged to your account.

bgwalter 1y ago

“It just stopped the ability to make progress,” the user told TechCrunch. “I tried Gemini and Kimi, but there’s really nothing else that’s competitive with the capability set of Claude Code right now.” This is probably another marketing stunt. Turn off the flow of cocaine and have users find out how addicted they are. And they'll pay for the purest cocaine, not for second grade.

ceejayoz 1y ago
It was always gonna be the Uber approach. Cheap and great turns to expensive and mediocre when they have to turn the money spigot on.
- sneak 1y ago
  Even expensive Uber or expensive Sonnet 4 is still a great deal when you consider the BATNA. Programmers on the level of Sonnet 4 are expensive.

Devadipta 1y ago

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bad_haircut72 1y ago

I went from pro to max because I hve been hitting limits, I could tell they were reducing it because I used to go multiple hours on pro but now its like 3. Congrats Anthropic you got $100 more out of me, at the cost of irrecoverable goodwill

hellcow 1y ago
For what it's worth, when Cursor downgraded their Claude limits in the middle of my annual subscription term, I emailed them to ask for a pro-rated refund, and it was granted. You may be able to do something similar with Claude Code. Changing the terms of the deal midway through a subscription to make it much less valuable is a really shady business practice, and I'm not sure it's legal.

ants_everywhere 1y ago

The other day I was doing major refactorings on two projects simultaneously while doing design work for two other projects. It occurred to me to check my API usage for Gemini and I had spent $200 that day already. Users are no doubt working these things even harder than I am. There's no way they can be profitable at $200 a month with unlimited usage. I think we're going to evolve into a system that intelligently allocates tasks based on cost. I think that's part of what openrouter is trying to do, but it's going to require a lot of context information to do the routing correctly.

memothon 1y ago

I made a quick site so you can see what tools are using the most context and help control it, totally free and in your browser. https://claude-code-analysis.pages.dev/ https://claude-code-analysis.pages.dev/

WhyNotHugo 1y ago

I wish models which we can self-host at home would start catching up. Relying on hosted providers like this is a huge risk, as can be seen in this case. I just worry that there’s little incentive for bit corporations to research optimising the “running queries for a single user in a consumer GPU” use case. I wonder if getting funding for such research is even viable at all.

vineyardmike 1y ago
We already have really strong models that run on a consumer GPU, and really strong frameworks and libraries to support them. The issue is (1) the extra size supports extra knowledge/abilities for the model. (2) a lot of the open source models are trained in a way to not compete with the paid offerings, or lack the data set of useful models. Specifically, it seems like the tool-use heavy “agentic” work is not being pushed to open models as aggressively as the big closed models. Presumably because that’s where the money is.
YmiYugy 1y ago
I think model providers would love to run their models on a single GPU. The latency and throughput of GPU interconnects is orders of magnitudes worse than accessing VRAM. Cutting out the latency would make the models much more efficient to run, they wouldn't have to pay for such expensive networking. If they got to run it on consumer GPUs even better. Consumer GPUs probably cost something like 5-10x less with regards to raw compute than data center ones. New coding optimized models for single GPUs drop all the time. But it's just a really hard problem to make them good and when the large models are still in the barely good enough phase (I wasn't using agents much before Sonnet 4) it's just not realistic to get something useful locally.
ethan_smith 1y ago
Check out Llama 3.1 70B Instruct, which now runs on consumer hardware with 24GB VRAM using techniques like unsloth or llama.cpp's new Q4_K_M quantization - surprisingly competitive with Claude for many coding tasks.
oceanplexian 1y ago
Deepseek R1 is better than any model released more than 6 months ago. You can plug it into open source equivalents of Claude Code like Goose. And it runs on a Mac Studio which you can buy at any consumer electronics store. The people saying that big tech is going to Gatekeep their IDE or pull the plug on them don’t seem to realize that the ship has already sailed. Good LLMs are here permanently and never going away. You just might have to do slightly more work than whipping out a credit card and buying a subscription product.

tho234i32242234 1y ago

Hardly surprising. AWS Bedrock which seems to be a popular way to get access to Claude etc. while not having to go through another "cloud security audit", will easily run up ~20-30$ bills in half-hour with something like Cline. Anthropic likely is making bank with this and can afford to lose the less-profitable (or even loss-making) business of lone-man developers.

hboon 1y ago

> One user, who asked not to be identified, said it has been impossible to advance his project since the usage limits came into effect. “It just stopped the ability to make progress,” the user told TechCrunch. “I tried Gemini and Kimi, but there’s really nothing else that’s competitive with the capability set of Claude Code right now.” PMF.

kristianp 1y ago
Product Market Fit? Yes, seems they have.
- hboon 1y ago
  Yes. That kind of reaction I quoted is telling.

deadbabe 1y ago

Does anyone not realize they are just using the typical drug dealer type business model? I used to do cocaine and it was a similar vibe. They will turn you into an AI junkie who no longer has motivation to do anything difficult on your own (despite having the skills and knowing how), and then, they will dramatically cut your usage limit and say you’ll need to pay more to use their AI. And you will gladly pay more, because hey you are getting paid a lot and it’s only a few hundred extra. And look at all the time you save! Soon you’re paying $2k a month on AI.

sneak 1y ago
A subcontracted dev that can do that much is way more than $2k. I’ve had $800-on-AI months and it was a good deal.

yahoozoo 1y ago

Where’s your Ed at was right?

anonzzzies 1y ago

That must somehow be illegal, at least in the consumer space. I have noticed quicker degrade to sonnet, but don't often hit limits ($200 plan). Seems none of these guys can afford loyalty, so I will be skipping between 'tool of the month' instead of sticking with one. New companies with new VC money are good for a few months and then degrade, so it's not hard to do.

Follow_Cloud 1y ago

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paulhodge 1y ago

There’s been a ton of ‘service overloaded’ errors this week so it makes sense that they had to adjust it. Personally I’ve never hit a usage limit on the $100 plan even when running several Claude tabs at once. I can’t imagine how people can max out the $200 plan.

jay_kyburz 1y ago

Where is my model I can run local and off line? That's when the LLM stuff is going to take off for me.

gavmor 1y ago
Haven't you checked out Ollama, yet?

LeicaLatte 1y ago

Customers are always chasing the next big thing in this space. As a programmer who’s worked on mobile UIs and backends using CC, I can say the appeal isn’t really the model itself—it’s the form factor. It’s a decent product, but hardly groundbreaking or essential.

submeta 1y ago

It’s like you buy an M4 MacBook and silently Apple throttles it and makes it an M1. If that happened every tech magazine would write about it, consumer advocates would be in rage. How’s it possible that AI companies sell you a product for 100 USD a month and silently degrade it?

edg5000 1y ago
They have fixed capacity but want to provide a reasonable product for all. They've really struggled with defining and enforcing quotas. It seems they have issues predicting what their actual capacity is, how many users they want. Also, there is not much competition. The prices are not really anchored to anything. Hopefully it will improve.

matt3210 1y ago

At some point they’ll need to make money. Expect it to go way up

gitaarik 1y ago

As a independent dev, I haven't had the need to pay for any AI yet. When I run into my limit at one company, I switch to the next one. Not always the same experience, but the next day I can start fresh again.

t14000 1y ago

Title should be: Anthropic caught getting high on their own supply

isusmelj 1y ago

Demand > Supply?

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dyl000 1y ago

opencode with kimi-k2 is my backup just in case claude is down or I hit the limits on the max 20x plan.

charlysl 1y ago

I think that Cursor is doing the same. A couple of weeks ago they removed the 500 prime model requests limit per month in the $20 plan, it seemed like this was going to be good for users, in fact it's worse, my impression is that now the limit is effectively much lower, and you can't check anymore in your account's dashboard how many of these requests you've made over the last month.

StarterPro 1y ago

I was wondering when we'd get to the end of the reduced fare portion of the bubble. With the layoffs, increase in prices, we're going to see a lot more vibe coding to justify the price of ai. With the talented employees laid off, I predict there will be some VERY LARGE code mistake pushed, either banking or travel, and we'll either see the burst, or they'll move on to strictly enterprise/gov opportunities. (see: grok for gov) >Super Free [Introduction, lots of free options] >Reduced Fare [higher prices, smaller pool of free options](We are here) >Premium Only [only paid options, mostly whales]

ramon156 1y ago

What are these people doing to hit their limit this fast? I put $30 on it, use it daily at work, and I still have half of it left. Are Zed agents just that optimized? I doubt it

solosquad 1y ago

They didn’t reduce it they actually increased it. I was using it for 14 hours straight without any issues. I think they did that to stay competitive, but now it seems like it's back to normal.

kordlessagain 1y ago

Hopefully Anthropic is reading these. I want to start by saying that Claude as a model is excellent. The AI performs exceptionally well at problem-solving and code generation across a wide variety of tasks. My feedback focuses specifically on the Claude Desktop application for Windows. Stability and Performance: The application frequently displays confusing error messages in the top-right corner, especially when MCP servers encounter issues or during service maintenance. The interface regularly freezes for 30+ seconds, goes completely blank, then takes another 30 seconds to recover. The application often becomes unresponsive to user input, requiring clicks to reactivate. Despite advertising 50+ tools to the LLM, tools are frequently reported as "not found" on first attempt, then work on retry. User Experience Problems: Loading historical chats takes 5-10 seconds per click, making navigation extremely slow. Chat history is only searchable by auto-generated titles, which are often irrelevant to the actual conversation content. Deleting multiple chats is nearly impossible due to slow loading and poor navigation. No centralized view exists for created artifacts, making them difficult to locate later. Session Management: The application provides insufficient warning about approaching conversation length limits. Previously available warnings have disappeared. The persistent "Claude can't run code...yet" message is misleading given existing tools like REPL and custom MCP implementations. Interface Issues: The support chat UI randomly covers interface elements and lacks message editing capabilities. Service status messages are unclear and don't effectively communicate what's happening. Suggestions for Improvement 1. Implement clear conversation length warnings at 75% and 90% capacity 2. Add an artifacts gallery for easy access to created content 3. Improve chat search with content-based indexing, not just titles 4. Optimize chat loading performance to reduce switching delays 5. Provide better error messaging that clearly explains issues and solutions 6. Add bulk management tools for chat organization and deletion 7. Remove or update misleading messages about code execution capabilities Claude Desktop is a critical tool in my workflow, but these issues significantly impact productivity and user experience. The application has tremendous potential, and addressing these concerns would greatly improve its value proposition. If continued development isn't prioritized, consider open-sourcing the desktop application to allow the community to contribute improvements.

93po 1y ago
big agree on making usage more visible, i have no idea how much i have left of opus, or even sonnet, and the command to check says i have unlimited but that doesnt appear to be the case bc i got cut off of sonnet even on the $100/m plan

boesboes 1y ago

Yeah, i noticed it falls back to sonnet much quicker too. Most days within the first few minutes. And the 529.. it's borderline unusable at times. But the worst part: While claude code, the tools and cli etc, has become much better over the last weeks; it seems the models or prompts have gotten worse. It will do things like add a test, see that it fails, claim it was already broken and out of scope. Or maybe i ask it to implement this, DO NOT use Y. Use Y anyway. Sometimes i ask it to update a test & it decides to revert all changes in the application code. I am very close to cancelling my plan again. Maybe it is a great deal when comparing too api pricing, but that is not a fair comparison; prepaid/pay-as-you-go is always way more expensive. And if they priced it wrong, change the pricing? Degrading a new service you are developing to save cost is even more stupid then the burn money until ??? profit stats imo hehe

ramesh31 1y ago

Probably why they were able to just 10x the token based API limits.

tom_m 1y ago

No surprise. I always thought it was so pathetically low that it couldn't do much meaningful. I'm sure now if I tried it again, it'd be worse.

mdjameel59 1y ago

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ajeetgymlover 1y ago

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