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From Anthropic’s Reddit account: One user consumed tens of thousands in model usage on a $200 plan. Though we're developing solutions for these advanced use ca

From Anthropic’s Reddit account: One user consumed tens of thousands in model usage on a $200 plan. Though we're developing solutions for these advanced use cases, our new rate limits will ensure a more equitable experience for all users while also preventing policy violations like account sharing and reselling access. This is why we can’t have nice things.

tomwphillips 1y ago
I think it might actually be because they're selling services at a loss.
Tokumei-no-hito 1y ago
guy was bragging about it on twitter yesterday. $13,200 of spend for his $200 account. he said he had like 4-5 opus only agents running nonstop and calling each other recursively. clearly that's abusive and should be targeted. but in general idk how else any inference provider can handle this situation. cursor is fucked because they are a whole layer of premium above the at-cost of anthropic / openai etc. so everyone leaves goes to cc. now anthropic is in the same position but they can't cut any premium off. you can't practically put a dollar cap on monthly plans because they are self exposing. if you say 20/mo caps at 500/mo usage then that's the same as 480/500 (95%) discount against raw API call. that's obviously not sustainable. there's a real entitled chanting going on too. i get that it sucks to get used to something and have it taken away but does anyone understand that just the cap/opex alone is unsustainable let alone the RD to make the models and tools. I’m not really sure what can be done besides a constant churn of "fuck [whoever had to implement sustainable pricing], i'm going to [next co who wants to subsidize temporarily in exchange for growth]". i think it's shitty the way it's playing out though. these cos should list these as trial periods and be up front about subsidizing. people can still use and enjoy the model(s) during the trial, and some / most will leave at the end, but at least you don't get the uproar. maybe it would go a long way to be fully transparent about the cap/op/rdex. nobody is expecting a charity, we understand you need a profit margin. but it turns it from the entitled "they're just being greedy" chanting to "ok that makes sense why i need to pay X to have 1+ tireless senior engineers on tap".
- jjmarr 1y ago
  If VCs want to give me free money in exchange for using their product, do you expect me to say no?
  - Tokumei-no-hito 1y ago
    of course not. the buffet said all you can eat, didn't it? i don't expect you to do anything less but engorge your body to the point of hospitalization while 95% of the remaining customers look in horror.
    - jjmarr 1y ago
      This happens all the time at American buffets. Morbidly obese people eat 20 cheeseburgers in one sitting. You should not be operating a buffet if you cannot handle customers like that.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > guy was bragging about it on twitter yesterday. $13,200 of spend for his $200 account. he said he had like 4-5 opus only agents running nonstop and calling each other recursively. Do you have a link? I'm always curious to see these users after working at a startup that was the target of some creative use from some outlier customers.
  - Tokumei-no-hito 1y ago
    sorry i went looking but couldn't find it. asked grok to search too. it wasn't creative use imo, it was extremism for the sake of attention since as far as i could tell they weren't producing anything (i'm sure they would have told everyone). although to be fair, the recursive opus chaining could be considered creative but only if it had a practical application. not the tweet but here's a leaderboard of claude clowns bragging about their spend. maybe you can find their handles and ask them what MRR they hit spending $500k (not a typo) in credits. https://www.viberank.app/ https://www.viberank.app/
Aurornis 1y ago
I worked at a startup that offered an unlimited option. It's amazing how fast you go from thinking nobody could ever use that much of your service to discovering how many of your users are creatively abusing the service. Accounts will start using your service 24/7 with their request rating coming at 95% of your rate limiter setting. They're accessing it from a diverse set of IPs. Depending on the type of service and privacy guarantees you might not be able to see exactly what they're doing, but it's clearly not the human usage pattern you intended. At first you think you can absorb the outliers. Then they start multiplying. You suspect batches of accounts are actually other companies load-splitting their workload across several accounts to stay under your rate limits. Then someone shows a chart of average profit or loss per user, and there's a giant island of these users deep into the loss end of the spectrum consuming dollar amounts approaching the theoretical maximum. So the policy changes. You lose those 'customers' while 90+% of your normal users are unaffected. The rest of the people might experience better performance, lower latencies, or other benefits because the service isn't being bombarded by requests all day long. Basically every startup with high usage limits goes through this.
- 0xbadcafebee 1y ago
  If you launch your service without knowing how much it costs to offer your service at the maximum rate it could be used, then this will definitely happen. Engineering directors need to require performance testing benchmarks and do the math to figure out where the ceiling is. If you happen to be "lucky" enough to scale very fast, you don't want to then bang your customer's heads repeatedly on a ceiling.
- SlowTao 1y ago
  Not only startups, when OneDrive (was still SkyDrive at that point) started to offer unlimited online storage, from memory they said there was about 70 users that had over a petabyte of data each on the system. Essentially people had all their security cameras and PVR units uploading endlessly to the cloud and Microsoft was footing the bill. Then the 1TB limit came in to stop that.
- hahn-kev 1y ago
  This is why we can't have nice things. It's nice to have an unlimited tier where there's no limit but you get your hand slapped when you go beyond reasonable. But people abuse shit like this and now lawyers have to get involved and we can't have the nice thing anymore.
eldenring 1y ago
I don't understand why the current setup for rate limits wouldn't be sufficient to stop this kind of thing.
ookblah 1y ago
okay? why not just ban or create a special pricing for the 1% of less of users obviously abusing it. i get that they had to do this, but to frame it as some kind of community benefit is a little disingenuous. we know you're operating at a loss and trying to figure out a path forward. pointing to the most extreme example as if you can't stop it in it's tracks is a bad argument. its like saying we will now restrict sending of emails for everyone because this one spammer was sending 1000x the amount of an avg or even power user when you should just be solving the actual problem (identifying and stopping those that disrupt).
xdennis 1y ago
>> preventing policy violations like account sharing and reselling access. > This is why we can’t have nice things. We're living in the worst world that Stallman could have predicted. One in which even HN agrees that people shouldn't be allowed to share or resell what they pay for.
TrackerFF 1y ago
It reminds me of how many landlords (where I live) would offer electricity included in rent, years ago, for the smaller apartments. Worked great for years, decades even, until crypto miners caught on - and maxed out the usage. Ruined it for the other 99.99% of renters.

tomwphillips 1y ago

I think it might actually be because they're selling services at a loss.

Tokumei-no-hito 1y ago

guy was bragging about it on twitter yesterday. $13,200 of spend for his $200 account. he said he had like 4-5 opus only agents running nonstop and calling each other recursively. clearly that's abusive and should be targeted. but in general idk how else any inference provider can handle this situation. cursor is fucked because they are a whole layer of premium above the at-cost of anthropic / openai etc. so everyone leaves goes to cc. now anthropic is in the same position but they can't cut any premium off. you can't practically put a dollar cap on monthly plans because they are self exposing. if you say 20/mo caps at 500/mo usage then that's the same as 480/500 (95%) discount against raw API call. that's obviously not sustainable. there's a real entitled chanting going on too. i get that it sucks to get used to something and have it taken away but does anyone understand that just the cap/opex alone is unsustainable let alone the RD to make the models and tools. I’m not really sure what can be done besides a constant churn of "fuck [whoever had to implement sustainable pricing], i'm going to [next co who wants to subsidize temporarily in exchange for growth]". i think it's shitty the way it's playing out though. these cos should list these as trial periods and be up front about subsidizing. people can still use and enjoy the model(s) during the trial, and some / most will leave at the end, but at least you don't get the uproar. maybe it would go a long way to be fully transparent about the cap/op/rdex. nobody is expecting a charity, we understand you need a profit margin. but it turns it from the entitled "they're just being greedy" chanting to "ok that makes sense why i need to pay X to have 1+ tireless senior engineers on tap".

jjmarr 1y ago
If VCs want to give me free money in exchange for using their product, do you expect me to say no?
- Tokumei-no-hito 1y ago
  of course not. the buffet said all you can eat, didn't it? i don't expect you to do anything less but engorge your body to the point of hospitalization while 95% of the remaining customers look in horror.
  - jjmarr 1y ago
    This happens all the time at American buffets. Morbidly obese people eat 20 cheeseburgers in one sitting. You should not be operating a buffet if you cannot handle customers like that.
Aurornis 1y ago
> guy was bragging about it on twitter yesterday. $13,200 of spend for his $200 account. he said he had like 4-5 opus only agents running nonstop and calling each other recursively. Do you have a link? I'm always curious to see these users after working at a startup that was the target of some creative use from some outlier customers.
- Tokumei-no-hito 1y ago
  sorry i went looking but couldn't find it. asked grok to search too. it wasn't creative use imo, it was extremism for the sake of attention since as far as i could tell they weren't producing anything (i'm sure they would have told everyone). although to be fair, the recursive opus chaining could be considered creative but only if it had a practical application. not the tweet but here's a leaderboard of claude clowns bragging about their spend. maybe you can find their handles and ask them what MRR they hit spending $500k (not a typo) in credits. https://www.viberank.app/ https://www.viberank.app/

Aurornis 1y ago

I worked at a startup that offered an unlimited option. It's amazing how fast you go from thinking nobody could ever use that much of your service to discovering how many of your users are creatively abusing the service. Accounts will start using your service 24/7 with their request rating coming at 95% of your rate limiter setting. They're accessing it from a diverse set of IPs. Depending on the type of service and privacy guarantees you might not be able to see exactly what they're doing, but it's clearly not the human usage pattern you intended. At first you think you can absorb the outliers. Then they start multiplying. You suspect batches of accounts are actually other companies load-splitting their workload across several accounts to stay under your rate limits. Then someone shows a chart of average profit or loss per user, and there's a giant island of these users deep into the loss end of the spectrum consuming dollar amounts approaching the theoretical maximum. So the policy changes. You lose those 'customers' while 90+% of your normal users are unaffected. The rest of the people might experience better performance, lower latencies, or other benefits because the service isn't being bombarded by requests all day long. Basically every startup with high usage limits goes through this.

0xbadcafebee 1y ago
If you launch your service without knowing how much it costs to offer your service at the maximum rate it could be used, then this will definitely happen. Engineering directors need to require performance testing benchmarks and do the math to figure out where the ceiling is. If you happen to be "lucky" enough to scale very fast, you don't want to then bang your customer's heads repeatedly on a ceiling.
SlowTao 1y ago
Not only startups, when OneDrive (was still SkyDrive at that point) started to offer unlimited online storage, from memory they said there was about 70 users that had over a petabyte of data each on the system. Essentially people had all their security cameras and PVR units uploading endlessly to the cloud and Microsoft was footing the bill. Then the 1TB limit came in to stop that.
hahn-kev 1y ago
This is why we can't have nice things. It's nice to have an unlimited tier where there's no limit but you get your hand slapped when you go beyond reasonable. But people abuse shit like this and now lawyers have to get involved and we can't have the nice thing anymore.

eldenring 1y ago

I don't understand why the current setup for rate limits wouldn't be sufficient to stop this kind of thing.

ookblah 1y ago

okay? why not just ban or create a special pricing for the 1% of less of users obviously abusing it. i get that they had to do this, but to frame it as some kind of community benefit is a little disingenuous. we know you're operating at a loss and trying to figure out a path forward. pointing to the most extreme example as if you can't stop it in it's tracks is a bad argument. its like saying we will now restrict sending of emails for everyone because this one spammer was sending 1000x the amount of an avg or even power user when you should just be solving the actual problem (identifying and stopping those that disrupt).

xdennis 1y ago

>> preventing policy violations like account sharing and reselling access. > This is why we can’t have nice things. We're living in the worst world that Stallman could have predicted. One in which even HN agrees that people shouldn't be allowed to share or resell what they pay for.

TrackerFF 1y ago

It reminds me of how many landlords (where I live) would offer electricity included in rent, years ago, for the smaller apartments. Worked great for years, decades even, until crypto miners caught on - and maxed out the usage. Ruined it for the other 99.99% of renters.