14 ms·

Stop selling “unlimited”, when you mean “until we change our minds”

• apwell23 1y ago
  anthropic is blaming its users "we wouldn't have to do this if you guys weren't so naughty. No TV for you. "
  • Bluestein 1y ago
    "You will chew on your rock and you will like it!"
  • blitzar 1y ago
    I ate all my vegetables at dinner, you promised tv if I ate all the broccoli.
    • apwell23 1y ago
      you ate too much dessert that we left it out. you were supposed to know not eat too much.
      • blitzar 1y ago
        It was a cupcake, was I meant to lick it and put the rest back?
  • thimabi 1y ago
    That’s just typical for any company that promises unlimited usage and then can’t deliver. The sad truth is that the “unlimited” wording attracts tons of users who will never come close to being a power user making a dent in their profits.
    • mwigdahl 1y ago
      That would be a great argument if they ever promised unlimited usage. They didn't.
• Bluestein 1y ago
  It's like love: "I will love you forever".-
  • zwnow 1y ago
    What people don't realize is that love isn't just having butterflies in your stomach all the time. Love changes over time, and saying I will love you forever is reasonable if sincere. I love all of my friends and I will love them forever. If I say that to my SO I mean it, even if we separate. People just want the initial rush of love until the chemicals fade.
    • Bluestein 1y ago
      Fair enough. Well put.- Was trying to "analogize" to "unlimited".-
    • johnisgood 1y ago
      That is true. Love, to me, is commitment. We no longer feel that rush we felt in the beginning. Things may be calm, which people mistake for boredom, which they mistake for doing something wrong or something is being wrong. People tend to move on after the "honeymoon phase", and keep repeating it ad infinitum. I have exes. I do not hate them, we never separated on bad terms. I do not love them romantically, however. I love my current girlfriend and I am committed to her. I have no intentions giving it up. That said, one must not confuse love with endurance. You cannot just keep on forgiving, always hoping for the best next time. You need to get out (ideally peacefully) after a while. I learned my lesson. In any case, I will continue trying to work things out with my current girlfriend, and we are doing fine, even though we have a lot of baggage and things are difficult sometimes. Of course there are some deal-breakers that I did not care about with one of my exes, I kept on forgiving even after she has cheated on me. It is not something I should have done, yet I did it, because I confused love with endurance. Thoughts? If you want me to, I can elaborate on what I really mean, but I hope it was understandable enough.
      • zwnow 1y ago
        Trust is really important to me and I couldnt forgive a cheater, but that does not mean I won't love the person they are. Sure I would be hurt which is human, and I would definitely cut them out of my life, but there will forever be the part of them that I love. Otherwise I wouldn't have been this hurt.
• Kim_Bruning 1y ago
  One way to look at it: instead of negotiating up front, they fired their top 5% customers.
  • raincole 1y ago
    There is a leaderboard encouraging people to waste as many tokens as possible [0]. I'm quite sure Anthropic is very eager to get rid of these "customers." [0]: https://www.viberank.app/ https://www.viberank.app/
    • the_mitsuhiko 1y ago
      I’m pretty sure the top entries there are fabricated. You can’t burn that much with just a regular max subscription.
      • raincole 1y ago
        Obviously it's easy to cheat (as the token usage is only known by the user and Claude and this leaderboard is a third-party). But the existence of this kind of thing makes me believe people who use a lot of tokens != loyal customers of Claude.
• IlikeKitties 1y ago
  If a company promises "unlimited" I usually don't believe them with very very few exceptions such as unlimited internet on a home internet.
  • dec0dedab0de 1y ago
    not sure if this is a joke, but most home internet plans get throttled after some secret limit.
    • IlikeKitties 1y ago
      Not here in Germany at least as far as i know, though i'm mostly limited by bandwidth anyway. In practical terms maybe if you really use excessive amounts of data on a residential line but i've never heard of anyone hitting those limits and i'm seeding torrents 24/7
    • IncreasePosts 1y ago
      That still sounds unlimited, just like there's a natural limit when you're unthrottled.
      • echoangle 1y ago
        That's not unlimited, or every mobile data plan in the EU would be unlimited too. You only get throttled very aggressively (64 kBit/s mostly) after reaching the quota, but you still can't call it unlimited.
  • ConfusedDog 1y ago
    It was not true years ago when I was using Cox. It said unlimited, but in fact had a upload/download limit. I think download was 500GB/month, upload was far less. I'm using Fios now and apparently it's truly unlimited unless my excessive usage is "unfair" to other users. I guess that kind of language is left to be interpreted by Verizon.
  • bravesoul2 1y ago
    Which is limited by the top speed
• epistasis 1y ago
  I'm trying to cancel my Claude plan right now, because mid-research I got hit with a one hour time out for the first time, and I realized just how little I need the "expensive" research stuff and just want basic language refinement and some basic augmented knowledge search to get more terms to search the web. And all that basic stuff gets cutoff when you hit some invisible barrier that you have no way of controlling or monitoring. But I literally can not cancel. Trying the app says "you signed up on a different platform, go there" but it doesn't tell me which platform that might be. Trying to cancel on mobile web gives several upgrade options but no cancel options. So, do I need to call my credit card? This is the worst dark pattern on subscription I have seen of any service I have ever paid for! Anthropic had a fairly positive image in my head until they cut off my access and are not giving me a way to cancel my plan. Edit: after mucking with the Stripe credit card payment options I found a cancel plan button underneath the list of all invoices. So there is an option, I just had a harder time finding it then I have had with other services. Successfully cancelled!
  • Waterluvian 1y ago
    My credit card web portal has a section for reversing transactions without having to call anyone. Maybe yours does too?
    • lukan 1y ago
      Reversing transactions is not cancelling the service I believe? As long as you don't cancel, you do owe them money. But if they make cancelling intentionally hard, one would likely have a good case in court to still not pay, if one would want to go to court over this.
      • throwaway290 1y ago
        Document the failed unsub process so if they bother to sue you then you win:)
    • pnvdr 1y ago
      nice feature. so its like backcharge via app instead of calling credit card customer care. do you mind sharing the credit card company
• Tactician_mark 1y ago
  Reminds me of the Stop Killing Games movement. If you give people an end date, they can plan around it.
  • nertirs1 1y ago
    Agree, businesses should just provide a real number of services, that they are willing to provide. That allows customers to more effectively compare different service providers and allows providers to avoid the situation, when they have to secretly throttle certain users. But it is so hard to explain to product people, that there is a limit how much certain services can scale and be profitably supported.
• croisillon 1y ago
  funny because i read several sentences in my chatgpt inner voice: "The real damage: You're not frustrating 5% of users—you're breaking trust with the exact people who drive growth and adoption." "It's not rocket science. It’s our way of attracting users. Not bait and switch, but credits to try."
  • svachalek 1y ago
    This wording is becoming like a record scratch, whatever I’m reading I just stop and flinch when I hit one of these. It just needs to be followed up with some vapid praise or weird joke that a robot would find funny.
• redeyedtreefrog 1y ago
  The huge positive publicity boost that Claude Code gained during its unlimited phase was surely easily worth the slight negative publicity it is getting now. This post is just marketing copy by a small competitior that can't afford to do the same thing.
  • poszlem 1y ago
    The sad thing is that you are probably right.
  • Aurornis 1y ago
    > gained during its unlimited phase It was never unlimited. They never advertised unlimited usage. The Max plan clearly said it had higher limits. This fabrication of a backstory is so weird. Why do so many people believe this?
    • redeyedtreefrog 1y ago
      Fair enough, substitute "unlimited" for "extremely high limits that most people very rarely hit"
• mentalgear 1y ago
  E.g.: Apple's new "iCare" offers "unlimited" repairs by subscribing for 20 USD / month! - note: "unlimited" does not mean free. quote source: "Apple Just Found a Way to Sell You Nothing" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytkk5NFZGjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytkk5NFZGjs
  • jajko 1y ago
    Pretty typical of Apple, and the reason for so is its users, whole world knows that Apple can charge premium and sometimes deliver it, sometimes cheaper competition is better or more durable. Don't blame the company, it acts within boundaries allowed by its paying customers, and apple customers are known to be... much less critical of the company and its products to be polite, especially given its premium prices.
    • philistine 1y ago
      > and apple customers are known to be... much less critical of the company This is patently false and has been for the whole existence of Apple. Apple customers are voraciously critical of the company. Just probably not under the delta of importance that you consider.
  • benterix 1y ago
    That's crazy, I misinterpreted just like others, that you pay a monthly but repairs are free. But on re-reading the terms, it turns out this is just pure bullshit. Why would anyone buy this "new iCare"?!
    • tonyhart7 1y ago
      apple fanboy/fangirl
  • diabllicseagull 1y ago
    sounds a lot like any other insurance where the next part of the game is finding reasons why they can't provide the promised repairs. https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2024/11/28/mac-owners-beware-of-the-crushing-limits-of-applecare/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2024/11/28/mac-own...
• nashashmi 1y ago
  I think the difference this time is that there is no lock in with a contract like AT&T customers had when they bought iPhones. Unlimited for startups work better because they have zero idea on load challenges that come in the future. And they don’t have much idea how well their product will be taken in the market. Anthropic got the experience and decided they needed to maximize on reasonableness over customer trust. And they are a startup so we all get this. OTOH there is no such thing as unlimited. Atoms in the universe are finite. Your use is finite. Your time is finite. Your abuse is limited and finite. You are a sucker for believing in the unlimited myth just like think others are suckers for believing in divine intervention or conspiracy theorists are suckers to believe in unlimited power.
  • mystifyingpoi 1y ago
    > OTOH there is no such thing as unlimited Philosophical meandering and blaming the customer for not understanding company's shady marketing is not something I'd consider to be cool.
• Bilal_io 1y ago
  I am not a heavy user of Claude in any way, sometimes I go days without using it. And I've hit the limit a week ago. Now with the limit changing to per week, I am 100% canceling my subscription. I'll likely spend a max of $5 using an API key.
• oellegaard 1y ago
  There is no such thing as unlimited. Everything is subject to fair use and it seems they are now communicating those limits clearly.
  • celticninja 1y ago
    they are communicating the limit exists clearly, they are not `communicating those limits clearly`
• bravesoul2 1y ago
  Only so much energy in the observable universe, after all.
• TrackerFF 1y ago
  When you offer "unlimited", you're immediately exposing yourself to the 0.1% of userbase that will absolutely treat it is unlimited. Whale users/hoarders. This has been a known problem since the dawn of hosting...hell, it goes back to times before computers. One thing I miss for the other users, i.e. the casual users that never use anywhere near of their quota, is rollover. If you haven't used your quota this month, the unused will roll over to the next month.
  • dcminter 1y ago
    One does find it occasionally. My mobile phone plan (in Sweden) currently says that I have 774G left of my 25G/month quota for example :)
    • raverbashing 1y ago
      Still limited. But "unlimited" to most people In the same way your next-door supermarket has effectively "infinite soup cans" for the needs of most people.
      • wat10000 1y ago
        Unlimited means for a flat rate. Pay per use/item, like at the supermarket, isn’t it.
        • raverbashing 1y ago
          Still, you can't get "unlimited" soup cans from your next door supermarket even paying
          • wat10000 1y ago
            Which is why they don’t sell it as “unlimited.” The gripe isn’t that there are limits, it’s that it’s sold as “unlimited” but there are limits.
• sudhirj 1y ago
  Did the Max plan ever promise unlimited anything? I’m on it, and I remember seeing and paying for 20x, not infinity. There is a case to be made that they sold a multiple and are changing x or rate limiting x differently, but the tone seems different from that.
  • mrits 1y ago
    Looking at their pricing page in way back machine looks like they've had "usage limits" terminology for at least the last year
  • bananapub 1y ago
    > Did the Max plan ever promise unlimited anything? no, even their announcement blog[0] said: > With up to 20x higher usage limits in the third paragraph. 0: https://www.anthropic.com/news/max-plan https://www.anthropic.com/news/max-plan
  • davidbarker 1y ago
    No, it's never promised unlimited — it's always had usage limits: 20× the usage of their regular Pro plan, with a limit of 50 sessions per month (a session being a 5-hour window), although I don't know if they ever enforced this. They appear to have removed reference to this 50-session cap in their usage documents. (https://gist.github.com/eonist/5ac2fd483cf91a6e6e5ef33cfbd1ee5e#monthly-session-limit https://gist.github.com/eonist/5ac2fd483cf91a6e6e5ef33cfbd1e...) So even if these mystery people Anthropic reference who did run it "in the background, 24/7", they still would've had to stay within usage limits.
  • Aurornis 1y ago
    I can’t find any indication it was ever sold as unlimited. It always had limits and those limits were not specified as concrete numbers. It’s amazing how much of the internet outrage is based on the idea that it was unlimited and now it’s not. The main HN thread yesterday was full of comments complaining about losing unlimited access. It’s so weird to watch people get angry about thinking they’re losing something they never had. Even Anthropic said less than 5% of accounts would even notice the new limits, yet I’ve seen countless comments raging that “everyone must suffer” due to the actions of a few abusing the system.
• mmillin 1y ago
  Did Anthropic ever use the term unlimited? I understand the general frustration with the pattern, but it seems weird to put unlimited in quotes when it wasn’t the way Claude was sold.
  • seunosewa 1y ago
    Nope.
• mattlondon 1y ago
  I feel like this is where the heavyweights are really going to start throwing their weight around and basically drive the smaller startups out of town. Can you really ever compete when you are renting someone else's GPUs? Can you really ever compete when you are going up against custom silicon built and deployed at scale to run inference at scale (i.e. TPUs built to run Gemini and deployed by the tens-of-thousands in data centers around the globe)? Meta and Google have deep pockets and massive existing world-class infrastructure (at least for Google, Meta probably runs their php Facebook thing on a few VPS dotted around in some random colos /s ) . They've literally written the book on this. It remains to be seen how much more money OpenAI can burn, but we've started to see how much Anthropic can burn if nothing else.
• MOARDONGZPLZ 1y ago
  I would absolutely do this if I ran anthropic. Of course unlimited implicitly means “unlimited without abuse.” There are always these “power users” who run it 25/8 and use all the resources, or sell access to others. To Anthropic: of course the “power users” are also going to be the top 5% of extremely online folks who are going to angrily pen long form tweet storms and this whole thing will die down soon for the other 95% of us. Weather the storm.
  • yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
    > Of course unlimited implicitly means “unlimited without abuse.” So, not unlimited? Like, if the abuse is separate from amount of use (like reselling; it can be against ToS to resell it even in tiny amounts) then sure, but if you're claiming "excessive" use is "abuse", then it is by any reasonable definition not unlimited.
    • carlosjobim 1y ago
      This is the reason why fast food restaurants don't sell unlimited refills for their soda in Europe. People would demand the right to go and get ten sodas there every day of their life, since they had an "unlimited" refill.
    • mwigdahl 1y ago
      It was never sold as unlimited. Max plans have always had both rate limits and 5-hour usage limits.
    • MOARDONGZPLZ 1y ago
      > So, not unlimited? Correct, not “unlimited” as in the dictionary definition of unlimited. Unlimited as in the plain meaning of unlimited as it is commonly used this subject matter area. i.e., Use it reasonably or hit the bricks, pal.
  • ajsnigrutin 1y ago
    So at what point does "normal usage" stop and "abuse" start? How many "queries" per day is that? If there is a clear limit to that (and it seems there is now), then stop saying "unlimited" and start selling "X queries per day". You can even let users pay for aditional queries if needed. (yes i know queries is not a proper term to use here, but the principle stands)
• evaXhill 1y ago
  There is no free lunch when VC money is involved, and the new weekly rate limits in Claude code now are just the latest example of that. I knew there was going to be a rugpull and it definitely changes the psychology of using it when you know you could be locked out for multiple days. Also saying that "Less than 5% of users are affected" = anyone actually USING this tool for real work...
• conartist6 1y ago
  "I firmly believe that AI will not replace developers, but a developer using AI will replace a developer who does not." Ugh, anyone who says that and really believes it can no longer see common sense through the hype goggles. It's just stupid and completely 100% wrong, like saying all musicians will use autotune in the future because it makes the music better. It's the same as betting that there will be no new inventions, no new art, no works of genius unless the creator is taking vitamin C pills. It's one of the most un-serious claims I can imagine making. It automatically marks the speaker as a clown divorced from basic facts about human ability
  • atonse 1y ago
    I disagree. While there are developers that truly build new technology and invent novel solutions, the overwhelming majority of developers who are paid for their work daily do pretty mundane and boring software development. They are implementing business logic, building forms, building tables, etc. And AI already excels at building those sorts of things faster and with cleaner code. I’ve never once seen a model generate code that’s as ugly and unreadable as a lot of the low quality code I’ve seen in my career (especially from Salesforce “devs” for example) And even the ones that do the more creative problem solving can benefit from AI agents helping with research, documentation, data migration scripts, etc.
    • conartist6 1y ago
      I'm one working on novel tech, without AI. I've never been doing more valuable work or been more in command of my craft. Yet the blanket statement is that I will fail and be replaced, and in fact that people like me don't exist! So heck yeah I'll come clap back on that.
      • jennyholzer 1y ago
        Continuing to develop my craft in the 4th straight year of numbskulls claiming that Chat GPT is the end of history has made me extraordinarily confident in my ability to secure lucrative developer work for the rest of my life.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• ozim 1y ago
  Also stop promising you are "open source and free" - "until you get market fit or VC money".
  • rob_c 1y ago
    I'm fairness most projects who do that it tends to end badly for them. Just look at Elastic for a very high profile example
    • cr125rider 1y ago
      Man that’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. I remember the ELK stack
• sasmithjr 1y ago
  I didn't look at the URL at first and was surprised when this turned in to an ad. Oh well! > Stop selling "unlimited", when you mean "until we change our minds" The limits don't go in to affect until August 28th, one month from yesterday. Is there an option to buy the Max plan yearly up front? I honestly don't know; I'm on the monthly plan. If there isn't a yearly purchase option, no one is buying unlimited and then getting bait-and-switched without enough time for them to cancel their sub if they don't like the new limits. > A Different Approach: More AI for Less Money I think it's really funny that the "different approach" is a limited time offer for credits that expire. I don't like that the Claude Max limits are opaque, but if I really need pay-per-use, I can always switch to the API. And I'd bet I still get >$200 in API-equivalents from Claude Code once the limits are in place. If not? I'll happily switch somewhere else. And on the "happily switch somewhere else", I find the "build user dependency" point pretty funny. Yes, I have a few hooks and subagents defined for Claude Code, but I have zero hard dependency on anything Anthropic produces. If another model/tool comes out tomorrow that's better than Claude Code for what I do, I'm jumping ship without a second thought.
  • theshrike79 1y ago
    TBH paying yearly for ANY LLM tool at this time is just pure insanity. The field is moving so fast that whatever was best 6 months ago is completely outdated. And what is top tier today, might be trash in a few months.
    • piker 1y ago
      The second sentence is revealing. The creation of the 787 didn’t make the 747 “trash”.
      • theshrike79 1y ago
        You also couldn't just unsubscribe from the 747 and get a 787 a the same price. Services are not the same thing as physical goods.
        • 1y ago
• blibble 1y ago
  you think it's bad now? wait until their investors get fed up with pouring money down the drain and demand they make a profit from the median user that model training and capex to build the giant DCs and fill them with absurdly priced nvidia chips isn't free as an end user: you will be the one paying for it
• svnt 1y ago
  Shallow marketing piece. “Claude is promising unlimited and it isn’t sustainable.” “For a limited time only pay us $20 and get $80 worth of credits.” Look at what these people on HN said! Come on.
• rob_c 1y ago
  I've a really nice bridge to sell the author...
• esher 1y ago
  "forever free" is another one.
• superasn 1y ago
  I'm not a fan of usage caps either, but that Reddit post [1] (“You deserve harsh limits”) does highlight a perspective worth considering. When some users burn massive amounts of compute just to climb leaderboards or farm karma, it’s not hard to imagine why providers might respond with tighter limits—not because it's ideal, but because that kind of behavior makes platforms harder to sustain and less accessible for everyone else. Because on the other hand a lot of genuine customers are canceling because they get API overload message after paying $200. I still think caps are frustrating and often too blunt, but posts like that make it easier to see where the pressure might be coming from. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1lqrbnc/you_deserve_harsh_limits/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1lqrbnc/you_deser...
  • apwell23 1y ago
    lets not blame shift anthropic bait and switch to 'bad users' . Surely they thought about 'bad users' when they released this product. They can't be that naive. Now that they have captured developer mindshare. users are bad.
    • bananapub 1y ago
      > anthropic bait and switch what was the bait and switch? where in the launch announcement (https://www.anthropic.com/news/max-plan https://www.anthropic.com/news/max-plan) did they suggest it provided unlimited inference?
      • apwell23 1y ago
        so where did 'bad users' come from if users were simply doing what they were allowed to? why is anthropic tweeting about 'naughty users that ruined it for everyone' ?
        • pastor_williams 1y ago
          What are the commons? Why would a tragedy just appear there or of the blue?
• Retr0id 1y ago
  Alternatively, stop locking yourself into a single vendor that can arbitrarily change their pricing or entire product strategy at any moment.
• theturtle 1y ago
  It's always limited, if by nothing more than physics and time. But yeah, the UNLIMITED* ads need to go eat a grenade. _________ *here's where we tell you the limits we said we didn't have
• nathancspencer 1y ago
  Still unlimited enough to manage to write your blog post with it
• Ekaros 1y ago
  I wonder what is the ratio of people who feel like they have to cap any offering they get? That is if you promise them say 1TB of cloud storage, they will fill that with anything, just to feel like they got moneys worth. And how does this compare to case with "Unlimited". Overall will the total used be higher or lower?
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• aeon_ai 1y ago
  The bait-and-switch critique is valid, but the real pragmatic issue is that AI companies are discovering their unit economics don't support flat-rate pricing for compute-intensive services. Try running AWS on a Netflix subscription model. The transparency problem compounds this. The sustainable path forward likely involves either much more transparent/clear usage-based pricing or significantly higher flat rates that actually cover heavy usage.
• ygritte 1y ago
  Does "unlimited" ever mean anything else than "until we change our minds"? Who would expect to get services asymptotically for free forever?
  • bigstrat2003 1y ago
    You're right, and one can go even further: every single service is "until we change our minds", unless you have a contract guaranteeing certain terms for some time period. That's not nefarious, that's just how business works. In my experience when people complain about the terms of business changing, what truly bothers them is the specifics of the change, not the fact that it's changing. In this case I don't use any AI tools (because they suck, frankly), so I don't have enough background to judge if the change is reasonable or not. But I don't think one should really hold it against a business that they change the service offering over time.
• grim_io 1y ago
  No need to gaslight us into this "unlimited" nonsense claim. It was not communicated as unlimited. When all is said and done, the Claude subscription is still an incredible value compared to the alternatives. It changes nothing for my use case.
• BrouteMinou 1y ago
  Well, obviously no! How am I supposed to bait people into my product to screw them up then? Find a better alternative.
• nhinck2 1y ago
  Any business that changes the terms of a subscription service unilaterally should be forced to cancel all current subscriptions and have the users go through the sign up process again.
• phito 1y ago
  We need better local LLMs to stop relying on these predatory companies. Anthropic is not even 5 years old (and Claude 2yo) and already showing their teeth. And to be clear, the users abusing the "unlimited" rates they were offering to do absolutely nothing productive (see vibe-coding subreddits) are no better.
• haritha-j 1y ago
  To be honest, this was inevitable, the pricing is unsustainable. I see it as sort of similar to those days when Uber eats used to offer all of those coupons for free food. I still fondly recall the good old days during my undergrad when Uber eats came into my city and we feasted like kings, because it cost next to nothing to buy a new mobile number. But my point is, we always knew the music was going to stop, we always knew it was unsustainable, we just enjoyed the VC capital funded burritos while they lasted. When I read unlimited, i just automatically assume there's a catch (ISPs in my home country have been offering 'unlimited' internet with a whole plethora of catches for decades now).
• mark_l_watson 1y ago
  I get that many people prefer Claude and Claude Code to Gemini 2.5 Pro and gemini-cli, but things seem more transparent with Google. For short sessions I run gemini-cli in free mode, and when I suspect I might hit the timeout for getting Gemini 2.5 Pro switching to Gemini 2.5 Flash during my session, I set my Gemini key and run and get the Pro model as long as I need it in a session. Gemini did go from a huge free tier to 100 free uses a day, but I expected that. EDIT: let me clarify: I just retired after over 50 very happy years working as a software developer and researcher. My number one priority was always self-improvement: learning new things and new skills that incidentally I could sometimes use to make money for whoever was paying me. AI is awesome for learning and general intellectual pursuits, and pairs nicely with reading quality books, listening to lectures on YouTube, etc.
• picafrost 1y ago
  Claiming that we shouldn't accept bait and switch as normal is denying the fundamental reality of the "hypergrowth" SaaS business model. The beatings will _always_ continue until the bottom-line improves. Price transparency for the average retail user is irrelevant to B2B contracts which is where every SaaS churns their butter.
• neurostimulant 1y ago
  > When developers get "rate limit exceeded" while debugging at 2 AM, they're not thinking about your infrastructure costs—they're shopping for alternatives. What's the alternative when every other vendors (eventually) have the same limit?
• cedws 1y ago
  There’s only one way unlimited plans work: either the seller gets scammed, or the buyer does. When companies sell unlimited plans, they’re making a bet that the average usage across all of those plans will be low enough to turn a profit. These people “abusing” the plan are well within their right to use the API as much as they want. It just didn’t fall into the parameters Anthropic had expected. LLM subscriptions need to go away, why can’t we just pay as we go? It’s the fairest way for everyone.
  • Aeolun 1y ago
    > LLM subscriptions need to go away, why can’t we just pay as we go? It’s the fairest way for everyone. Because Claude Code is absolutely impossible to use without a subscription? I’m fine with being limited, but I’m not with having to pay more than $200/month Anybody that feels they’re not getting enough out of their subscription is welcome to use API instead.
    • Aurornis 1y ago
      > Because Claude Code is absolutely impossible to use without a subscription? Claude Code accepts an API key. You do not need a subscription https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/settings#environment-variables https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/settings#envi...
      • Aeolun 1y ago
        I mean the way it works quickly leads to exorbitant costs. Subscription based pricing with limits keeps everyone honest.
  • redhale 1y ago
    Nothing is stopping you from using the API directly, if you prefer to donate more money to Anthropic. I would not personally, as I can't spend thousands per month on an agentic tool. I hope they figure out limits that work. $100 / $200 is still a great deal. And the predictability means my company will pay for it.
• jstummbillig 1y ago
  This is such a lame take. What exactly is the proposed solution, practically, in a industry where nothing is predictable and everything moves super quickly? Just be conservative and don't try things that can escalate? Let people cook and give them some time find out how to do this. Voice discontent but don't be an asshole.
• dboreham 1y ago
  When uttered by a sales or marketing person, "unlimited" actually means "limited" in a regular person's vocabulary.
• raffael_de 1y ago
  Unlimited as well as life-time pricing schemes more often than not imply an unhealthy and unsustainable shift in mentality towards sell-out. Companies soon after usually go bankrupt, exit scam or are sold.
• quaristice 1y ago
  "Do these sound like the actions of a man who had all he could eat?" - Lionel Hutz
• Dolores12 1y ago
  you call them "power users", i call them abusers. Nice move anthropic, good for everyone.
• sneak 1y ago
  It’s not a bait and switch unless you count the payment made for this specific month. Otherwise it’s just a change in the offering. You can unsubscribe freely. This sort of entitlement puts me off. Prices for things change all of the time.
• baggachipz 1y ago
  Another front page post which is a thinly-veiled advertisement for a competitor's service. The advertising model is as such: Point out user frustration from another product, harp on it, and then casually mention that your product is better for reasons.
• bananapub 1y ago
  the reaction to all of this, and this article in particular, is really very very stupid. you can see here in this Reddit thread from April, when Claude Max was launched, that it was explicitly explained as being limited: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1jvbpek/breaking_anthropic_introduces_claude_max/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1jvbpek/breaking_... Max is described as "5-20x more than Pro", clearly indicating both are limited. here's their launch blog post: https://www.anthropic.com/news/max-plan https://www.anthropic.com/news/max-plan > The new Max plan delivers exactly that. With up to 20x higher usage limits, you can maintain momentum on your most demanding projects with little disruption. obviously everyone wants everything for free, or cheap, and no one wants prices to change in a way that might not benefit them, but the endless whinging from people about how unfair it is that anthropic is limiting access to their products sold as coming with limited access is really extremely tedious even by HN standards. and as pointed out dozens of times in these threads, if your actual worry is running out of usage in a week or month, Anthropic has you covered - you can just pay per token by giving Claude Code an API key. doing that 24/7 will cost ~100x what Max does though, I wonder if that's a useful bit of info about the situation or not?
• CamelCaseName 1y ago
  The problem is resellers that buy a $200 license and then sell 1,000 $10 licenses.
• aitchnyu 1y ago
  Tangential, who will be severely slowed down if you dont have models costing 15 USD/million tokens (Claude Opus), 3$/MT (Claude Sonnet) and had to switch to V3 (0.3$/MT) or cheaper ones?
• juujian 1y ago
  What really gets me is that my use of ai is really uneven. That "5% of users" is me one month of the year. In other words, it's unlimited use, unless I really need it. Not a fair business model for sure.
• techsystems 1y ago
  Unlimited plans are generally grandfathered. I don't know if I came across any company that didn't honour and grandfather the unlimited.
• redhale 1y ago
  This is just an ad for Kilo Code with a very dumb take. Claude Max, to my knowledge, was never marketed as "unlimited". Claude Max gives you WAY more tokens then $100/$200 would buy. When you get rate limited, you have the option to just use the API. Overall, you will have gotten more value than just using the API alone. And you always had, and continue to have, the option of just using the API directly. Go nuts. The author sounds like a petulant child. It's embarrassing, honestly.
  • mwigdahl 1y ago
    I was going to write much the same thing but just upvoted you instead. Max plans are a super great deal, even with these new limits.
• dcre 1y ago
  This is an ad. I’m surprised people are responding like it’s someone’s earnest opinion.
• voxleone 1y ago
  Come to think of it, there could be real benefits — possibly unexpectedly strong ones — in being bold enough to just say: “Unlimited… until we decide otherwise.” Differentiation through honesty: In a market full of fluff, directness stands out. Customers might respect a brand more for telling the truth plainly, even if the truth isn’t ideal. The risk: It could scare off some customers who don’t read the fine print anyway. But that may not be a loss—it might actually filter in the right kind of customer, the one who wants to know what they’re really getting.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• thevueguy 1y ago
  Lol, this article was written with AI. The clues are everywhere. > The real damage: You're not frustrating 5% of users—you're breaking trust with the exact people who drive growth and adoption. > When developers get "rate limit exceeded" while debugging at 2 AM, they're not thinking about your infrastructure costs—they're shopping for alternatives. Notice a pattern here?
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• Bluestein 1y ago
  "You are absolutely right! But first, a word from our sponsors ..."
• shock 1y ago
  Can I create an account with email on Kilo Code or only "Sign in with Google"? I couldn't see such an option.
  • boleary-gl 1y ago
    Would you use GitHub auth?
    • shock 1y ago
      Yes. I would still prefer the old email/pass though, so I don't depend on a 3rd party being online, etc.
• imglorp 1y ago
  Pay by usage (tokens in, tokens out?) is the most transparent. In subscription plans, users who aren't using 100% of their subscription subsidize other users, which is opaque and not really fair.
• scblock 1y ago
  While I agree with the base statement that makes up the title, I cannot get behind the rest of this idea that the heaviest users somehow "matter most". They cost the most, certainly. But how do they matter the most? But hey, this is just a sales pitch from one company I wouldn't trust by taking a dump on another company I wouldn't trust.
• QuiCasseRien 1y ago
  unlimited is a marketing word but once it turns to juridical, it sucks. some say they have to define a huge limit and that's it. Limits are sometime hard to define : - they must be such huge, a user (human) finaly understand it's unlimited else he will compare to competitors - but no such huge because the 0.1% of users will try to reach it A fair word could be the one which categorize the type of use : - human : human has physical limit (e.g: typing word to keyboard / per time). - bot : from 1 arduino to heavyweight hardcore clusting, virtualy no limits.
• sixhobbits 1y ago
  I think it's totally OK to experiment with pricing and rapidly iterate. I dropped my ChatGPT sub for Anthropic because it was great value and Claude Code was a 'game changer' product. I hold them no ill will for rapidly changing pricing models, raising pricing, doing whatever they need to do in what must be a crazy time of finding insane PMF in such a short time BUT the communication is basically inexcusable IMO. I don't know what I'm paying for, I don't know how much I get, their pricing and product pages have completely different information, they completely hide the fact that Opus use is restricted to the Max plan, they don't tell you how much Opus use you get, their help pages and pricing pages look they were written by an intern and pushed directly to prod. I find out about changes on Twitter/HN before I hear about them from Anthropic. I love the Claude Code product, but Anthropic the company is definitely nudging me to go back to OpenAI. This is also why competition is great though - if one company had a monopoly the pricing and UX would be 20x worse.
• begueradj 1y ago
  > Here's how the AI pricing bait-and-switch works: > You can tell how it's intentional with both OpenAI and Anthropic by how they're intentionally made opaque. I cant see a nice little bar with how much I've used versus have left on the given rate limits Well, that's a scam. A legal one.
• mwigdahl 1y ago
  To quote the movie Zoolander: "I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!" Anthropic never sold Max plans as unlimited. There are two tiers, explicitly labeled "5x" and "20x", both referring to the increased usage over what you get with Pro. Did all the people complaining that Anthropic reneged on their "promise" of unlimited usage not read anything about what they were signing up to pay $100 or $200/month for? Or are they not even customers?
• tonyhart7 1y ago
  why they didn't just limit 5% that doing 24/7 useless task to be on leaderboard burning token ???? why the whole users need to suffer???
  • Aurornis 1y ago
    The new limits should only affect that 5% I don’t know why you think everyone is going to suffer.
    • tonyhart7 1y ago
      they are affecting everyone, if this only limit 5% abuser then the whole sub reddit wouldn't under fire yesterday
• tonyhart7 1y ago
  why people on comment talking like its unlimited???? its never promised unlimited in the first place???? they just sells you at 20x more usage limit???? nothing tells me unlimited
• nottorp 1y ago
  What I found interesting from the comments in this thread is not that their services were unlimited or not, and whether it's fair that they added more limits. Just below me as I type there's a comment saying they're refusing to cancel a subscription (may not be below me any more when I finish typing). Somewhere lower there's a comment saying they do not show the full price when you subscribe, but add taxes on top of it and leave you to notice the surprise on your credit card statement. Is there an ethical "AI" service anywhere?
• bayindirh 1y ago
  Companies do what companies do despite promising to not to do this time. News at 11. On a more serious note, I'm sure most of the people can't fathom or even think about the resources they are consuming when using AI tools. This things doesn't use energy, they consume it like how a black hole sucks light. In some cases, your queries can consume your home's daily energy needs in a hour or so.
• nunez 1y ago
  How nobody saw this coming perplexes me.
• ozgung 1y ago
  I believe this goes deeper than a simple bait-and-switch. It’s straight out of Silicon Valley’s venture-backed startup playbook: burn money until the world dominance. That’s one of the reasons non-US or non-SV startups fail to compete. Not because their products or services are inferior, but because they can’t replicate this aggressive pricing strategy. They don’t have deep enough pockets to survive until reaching billions of users. For Claude Code and similar services, we’re still in the very early stages of the market. We’re using AI almost for free right now. It’s clear this isn’t sustainable. The problem is that they couldn’t even sustain it at this earliest stage.
• gloosx 1y ago
  These are very greedy kind of companies which will try to squeeze every penny out of their users eventually. In this LLM-made article, they seem to be... surprised about this?
• josefritzishere 1y ago
  Bait-and-Switch is a form of fraud. It's illegal in some places under certain circumstances. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch
• SpaceNoodled 1y ago
  The parallels between AI slop tools and drugs are ever growing.
• rrrx3 1y ago
  I use my $20/mo plan with Claude Code pretty happily, regularly hitting the limits through the day at a good pace, with nice cool-downs in between while I wait. I promise I’m not being snarky here - I don’t understand how people are burning through their $200/mo plan usage so quickly. Are they spamming prompts? Not using planning mode? I’ve seen a few folks running multiple instances at once… is that more common than I think?
• cadamsdotcom 1y ago
  In Australia they outlawed advertising “unlimited” broadband, because it was a deceptive term. Providers actually meant “slower than a modem after a certain amount of download”. Everyone was better off without the deception. Now we are in the early days of AI. Providers should be honest but won’t until forced to. Because just think about it. Unlimited is untenable. Another example, in the early days of broadband in Australia a friend’s parents were visited by a Telstra manager because he “downloaded more than his entire suburb”. A manager! Really you can’t blame the providers; some users will ruin it for everyone. I am not saying that is anyone specific. But none of this should surprise us. We’ve been here before. Just look back at how other markets developed & you will see patterns that tell you what’s next.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• burnt-resistor 1y ago
  It's always bait-and-switch fraud by a marketing con. Get users hooked before shaking them down. This is the MBA way.
• Nerdx86 1y ago
  There are real capacity limits here. Supply and demand are serious forces. When you have a top tier product, you can do a lot but at some point so many people come that it overloads capacity. Last week I had 3 Claude code opus windows happily burning over $100 worth of API credits simultaneously documenting an old code base. This was after a senior engineer had spent 2 weeks learning how to have new code interact with it. And they were timing out and/or hitting excessive cap while my regular teams account just returned "too busy". Claude 4 is good enough that people will pay whatever they ask as long as it's significantly less than the cost of doing it by hand. The loss leaders will need to fade away to manage the demand, now that there is significant value.
• nektro 1y ago
  this doesn't feel like it was written in good faith
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