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There seem to be a ton of people who don't understand how subscription services work. Every single one of them oversells their capacity. The power users that us

There seem to be a ton of people who don't understand how subscription services work. Every single one of them oversells their capacity. The power users that use the services a lot are subsidized by those who don't use it as much, which tends to be the vast majority of the user base. OpenClaw is an autonomous power user. The growing adoption of this walking attack surface was either going to A) cause the cost of Claude to go up or B) get banned to protect the price of the service for actual users.

rachel_rig 6mo ago
[flagged]
- jesse_dot_id 6mo ago
  They do not advertise a capacity constraint. There is definitely one there, because it's the only way they can offer a reasonable price. Why do you think streaming services suddenly get plagued with technical issues when they host a live event? They are so chronically under-provisioned that they can only guess at the actual amount of compute they need to serve even a fraction of their subscriber base suddenly deciding to watch something at the same time. And their best guess is usually wrong, because even then — even when they know they need to deliver on a live event — they STILL under-provision their compute, or constrain their autoscaling thresholds, in an effort to save money. Is your unlimited 5G plan actually unlimited, or does your download rate drop to dialup speeds after your crest a certain amount of bandwidth usage? Have you ever had an ISP in a populated area? What's the reliability like? Is it worse during certain times of the day?
nightski 6mo ago
It's fine, their moat is thin. Frontier models as a service isn't really in the best interest of anyone anyways. Only a matter of time.
- asgraham 6mo ago
  Are you arguing that eventually a competitor will emerge that does support OpenClaw with a subscription model? Wouldn’t that just be more expensive for the exact same reason Anthropic is banning it?
  - raincole 6mo ago
    You mean whether another competitor will emerge? Right now we have OpenAI.
    - rvz 6mo ago
      The real threat that Anthropic sees as real competitors in the long term, are the AI labs building open weight models, especially the AI labs in China.
  - techgnosis 6mo ago
    Doesn't OpenAI allow this today?
    - mil22 6mo ago
      It's a good way to win market share and build goodwill, but one has to wonder whether this class of usage is marginally profitable for them (or anyone) and how sustainable their lenient policies will be for them long term.
  - tekacs 6mo ago
    OpenAI have literally gone out of their way to explicitly support this sort of thing. As they did with OpenCode. Honestly, this just looks like what Dylan of SemiAnalysis suggested on Dwarkesh – that they've massively under-provisioned capacity / under-spent on infrastructure. That would honestly be a comforting answer if true, because I would gladly take 'we can't afford to do this right now' over 'we are self-preferencing, and the FTC should really take a look at us, even if we're technically not a monopoly right now, since we're the only strongly-instruction-following model in town and we clearly know it'.
- verdverm 6mo ago
  I agree, eventually the open models will be good enough and we can pay for our own infra and cut out the middle man. Also, the smaller frontier are nearly as good today and I expect the mega models will be used primarily for distillation
goosejuice 6mo ago
What you're saying is conceptually true for subscription services in general, but thats not why they are making this change. There's a 5 hour limit and a weekly limit. Those are hard token limits. Everyone on a plan pays for the max set of tokens in that plan. The limits manage capacity. The solution to that isn't a change of ToS, it's adjusting the limits. In other words this is about Anthropic subsidizing their own tools to keep people on their platform. OpenClaw is just a good cover story for that. You can maximize plans just as easily w/ /loop. I do it all the time on max 20x. The agent consuming those tokens is irrelevant. For what it's worth I don't use OpenClaw and don't intend to, but I do use claude -p all the time.
- CubsFan1060 6mo ago
  I don’t really follow what you’re saying. You mention the 5 hour limit. Is your expectation that they have enough capacity so that everyone can hit their 5 hour limit all the time? Or you are proposing that’s how they limit capacity for a subscription? Do you have an example of how this is how they have advertised or sold the plan? I don’t recall ever seeing any advertisement that their plan is simply pre paying for tokens.
- jmalicki 6mo ago
  You aren't paying to be using that limit all of the time. You are paying to be using that limit some of the time. There are 5 hour windows when you are sleeping and can't use it. There are weekend limits. Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that. It's structured so users can have bursts of unlimited usage, and spend ~15% of the theoretical max cap, and that's still cheaper than a subscription for that user. An OpenClaw user can use 6, 7, 8 times what a human subscriber is using.
  - goosejuice 6mo ago
    > Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that. Then it's not priced correctly. As I said, you can do all of this without OpenClaw.. claude code ships with everything you need to maximize the limits.
cowlby 6mo ago
I just discovered Pi Coding Agent and found that it's lean System Prompt + a tuned CLAUDE.md brought back a lot of the intelligence that Opus seemed to lose over the last month. Sucks to be pushed back to Claude Code with opaque system behavior and inconsistency. I bet many would rather pay more for stability than less for gambling on the model intelligence.
- chatmasta 6mo ago
  We use Pi at work (where we pay per token) and I’d love to use it personally too. From what I’ve read, nobody has been banned for using Pi yet… I wonder if Anthropic minds this much as long as it’s still human usage, or if they’re mostly focused on stamping out the autonomous harnesses. Unfortunately Pi is also what OpenClaw uses so it could easily get swept up in the enforcement attention. Or maybe I’ll just get a Codex subscription instead. OpenAI has semi-officially blessed usage of third party harnesses, right?
  - mirashii 6mo ago
    They have, but they also just announced this week that for business and enterprise plans, they’re switching from quotas for codex to token use based pricing, and I would expect that to eventually propagate to all their plans for all the same reasons.
    - chatmasta 6mo ago
      I’d be surprised if that propagated to personal subscription plans, simply because it would put them at a huge competitive disadvantage against Anthropic, which they’ve already signaled they care about by saying they allow third-party harnesses. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they required third-party harnesses to use per-token billing, since that’d put them on par with Anthropic.
      - mirashii 6mo ago
        Turns out the intent to do so was announced on April 2nd as well.
PostOnce 6mo ago
The entire point of AI is for it to do shit autonomously? The whole point is that the users can have it doing shit for them instead of them having to babysit the computer. The fact that users still have to sit there and argue with it erodes their value proposition. The proposition you can pay fewer salaries.
- ozim 6mo ago
  I would argue that „doing shit” should be done by dummy automations. AI should be used to help build that automations or step in when dummy automation breaks. For now too many people will use AI for stuff that deterministic stupid code would be much more efficient.
- nemomarx 6mo ago
  They could probably offer enough tokens for that but it would be at a higher price than the sub, I think. You could still pay fewer salaries at 3k a year or per token enterprise prices or whatever.
- Alexzoofficial 6mo ago
  [flagged]
- manmal 6mo ago
  They want you to do your shit through their own desktop apps.
muyuu 6mo ago
It's one thing to pay $5 or $20 per month, which although it's a substantial difference, people pay that much for the convenience of having stuff ready and available - and it's a completely different thing to pay $200 per month. People don't pay that much for occasional usage and many/most people will organise themselves to use all or most of their weekly allowance when the expense is in that ballpark. If Anthropic miscalculated the amount of tokens, or simply pushed too hard to capture market share, that is a costly mistake because people in this market are very sensitive to price hikes. They have to be honest about what they can offer for $200. Sure, people don't max their subscriptions but when they're large they make the best of it, or they will likely cancel it. The typical subscription works well below capacity because it's cheap enough that the optionality may be worth it. $200 is not the typical subscription.
- rovr138 6mo ago
  >They have to be honest about what they can offer for $200 Their expectation must have been a human using the service at a human capacity. This is different from an automated agent orchestrating a ton of different agents at the same time doing a lot of things. There is a difference.
  - muyuu 6mo ago
    You are correct, but you don't need openclaw to batch your work. People will figure out ways to use their tokens at that fixed price. Sure there is a difference. It's like when most mobile companies wouldn't allow tethering because then people would actually use the service. You can try to stop that, but people will price in those inconveniences. They will simply learn that the fee pays for much less than the token limit and that the company is enforcing some unwritten limits by adding extra limitations to usage. We will see it play out.
  - dimmke 6mo ago
    If people are finding new ways to use AI, they should change how they bill. Banning third party harnesses is bad for a lot of reasons - it looks like they're trying to force people to use their software. Strategically it might make sense - gives them a tiny moat if their models ever slip - but it discourages the breakneck pace of innovation and the long term effect is that their customers (largely highly skilled with computers and building software) will look to decouple themselves. Claude is good but it's not so far better than anything else that they can pull shit like this and people will just deal with it. They already have the regular subscription plans (Pro, Max) and a separate billing process for direct API usage. They could absolutely introduce another type of plan optimized toward this kind of usage or just accept that it's a dumb pipe that is being paid for and having these random arbitrary limitations is just making things more confusing and a bad plan for the future.
bombcar 6mo ago
> Every single one of them oversells their capacity This is (almost) universally true of flat rate subscriptions; but there are usage-billed ones, too (and even those often have an aspect of subsidies). A great example of the shakeup is when dial-up went from "connect, do the thing, disconnect" to "leave the computer online all the time" - they had to change the billing model because it wasn't built for continuous connections.
- mh- 6mo ago
  That's a good analogy. Maybe soon we'll see Claude Code CDs with 700 free hours.
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    AOLLM!
Gregaros 6mo ago
Still very interesting timing to ban third party harnesses, given the proximity to the Claude Code leak …
chunpaiyang 6mo ago
Good point. I agree with that. The key point is that heavy users benefit from this model while light users are basically subsidizing them. But it's a distribution when everyone shifts toward heavy usage, prices inevitably go up. The $17/mo pro price is already set to compete with other providers. Raising it would lose customers. Other tiers are also carefully priced to match competitors. So the only move left is to prevent the whole distribution from drifting toward heavier usage. That's exatly what this ban does.
subarctic 6mo ago
I'm pretty sure in this case it's anthropic doing the subsidizing because the api and extra usage rates are extremely expensive compared to the usage you get for the lowest subscription level. I pay $28 CAD per month and I'm pretty sure I'd burn through that in a day or two, and I'm not really a power user, I'm just using it to write code like it says on the tin. I seriously doubt there's a large portion of subscribers with low enough monthly usage that they'd save money by switching to the API.
JasonHEIN 6mo ago
Err, yeah, you should neither do any web scraping without respecting robots.txt, nor use ad blockers when using Google. When working with a business, never use Google Docs without paying them. Nah, that's not how the world works and at least not in the software industry.
manmal 6mo ago
Come on, someone on a Max account has a reason why they are paying $200. I bet many are at least often near the weekly limit, or they‘ll downgrade. If anything, OpenClaw usage is more spread out instead of ingesting whole codebases during office hours. The Anthropic subs are likely priced at marginal cost (Amp‘s CEO recently said that in a podcast). It just doesn’t serve Anthropic to be operating as the service layer for OpenClaw.
ph4rsikal 6mo ago
So it's like Sliceline from Silicon Valley (the show)
blueblisters 6mo ago
> Every single one of them oversells their capacity Indeed. And this model breaks in several cases that overlaps with the current AI business model: - marginal cost of incremental usage is too high (Movie Pass) - adverse selection (all you can eat monthly steak subscriptions) - demand is synchronized (WeWork)
kamma4434 6mo ago
My impression is that at the moment the value you get out of Claude is simply incredible. As a senior engineer, you get an assistant that never gets tired and can do quite a lot on its own. For me, it’s been an eye-opening experience. I used to have a collaborator called M that had a good general culture, but was not too smart. The calculation going into my mind every time I ask Claude for something is: how much would that cost, in terms of time and effort, to get M to do that? M was a resource that costed many thousand dollars per month, plus the time I spent correcting and directing, while Claude is actually smarter and does what it is asked with a degree of autonomy and common sense that M could never dream of. The flipside of the coin is obvious: Anthropic will find a way to claw back - no pun intended - some of this value by raising the cost of subscription. They would be crazy not to.
- lukewarm707 6mo ago
  value is high but what about the competitors? is claude that good? the last time i tried claude it was sonnet 4.5. it was ok, not worth the api money clearly. but i only use api tokens for llms.
  - port11 6mo ago
    If you look at SWE, Claude models aren’t that special. Other benchmarks come up with different results. But… anecdotally, Claude is just that good. Gemini needs a lot of hand-holding, and it will still tell you it’s done when it achieved half the work. Or say, “this test isn’t passing, I’ll just delete it”. Every now and then I get tired of it and give the same task to Sonnet 4.6; 5 minutes later I’m done. Bug fixed, UI properly working, React hooks not being conditionally rendered, theme variables used properly. It’s wonderful. I’m not sure about large agentic work or deep thinking, but I’m mostly automating away the drudgery of dealing with React Native. I still want to do the deeper work myself, but even there Opus is usually a really good sparing partner.
    - kamma4434 6mo ago
      Matches my experience. I am not sure why, but subjectively it feels better.
wouldbecouldbe 6mo ago
well that largely depends, lots of saas are running 90% operating profit margins
peterkelly 6mo ago
> Every single one of them oversells their capacity That sounds like their problem, not ours
- HotHotLava 6mo ago
  Well, yes, it is. That's why you're seeing them take proactive steps to address the problem, like this new policy.
- seqizz 6mo ago
  Doesn't look like it
- Tzk 6mo ago
  In theory yes, but the overselling does also keep the price low (at least a bit), but also boosts revenue. So when power users use the service too much, the seller will either raise prices, cut features or ban some usage patterns. You can vote with your wallet though. So don’t throw money at them or just deal with it. Plain and simple.
  - ajsnigrutin 6mo ago
    Low for who exactly? You have low-users overpaying and a few openclaw users actually using what they paid for and getting banned for that... that's not really a "low price" for anyone. If they they expect X money for Y tokens, better provide Y tokens for your X money. If they can't provide that, then change the pricing plans. That's not the users problem.
    - frollogaston 6mo ago
      Who exactly, their intended audience. I get my money's worth having Claude Code write code. No interest in OpenClaw.
- raincole 6mo ago
  It's not your problem anymore once you switch from Claude :)
PunchyHamster 6mo ago
No, people want transparency. If it was "x tokens per time interval, then you pay extra", the problem wouldn't exist.
- saintfire 6mo ago
  The API offers that. Pay X per month, get Y tokens. Then you can look at all the graphs of money being deleted by OpenClaw, for transparency. People want a free lunch. If the API was cheaper than the subscription then everyone would use the API. Instead people flock to an, apparently, unsustainable pice at a fixed monthly rate; presumably subsidized by others who don't use their full capacity every month.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
scotty79 6mo ago
So basically their move is an admission that they can't scale up their capacity accordingly to shifting demand while keeping the current pricing. Customers have their own value calculations. If they can't use Claude for autonomous agent at reasonable price they will move to providers that are cheaper and more flexible. Autonomous agent adds way more utility than a marginally better LLM (assuming that's even true).
amelius 6mo ago
> Every single one of them oversells their capacity. My meal kit delivery service doesn't.
croes 6mo ago
And why aren’t OpenCode and others allowed anymore? You don’t use more tokens than with Claude Code
hawk_aa 6mo ago
I run a small third-party harness myself (not OpenClaw, something much smaller). Checked my API key today after this announcement - turns out I was already on a regular API key so it doesnt affect me directly. But the interesting thing is, my actual token usage running agents is way less than people here seem to assume. Most of the time the agent is waiting for tools, reading files, thinking. The bursts are intense but short. I probably use less tokens per hour than someone doing a long manual coding session with lots of back and forth. The real issue for me isnt cost, its that they can just change the rules whenever. I had to drop everything today to verify my setup still works. Thats the tax of building on someone elses platform I guess.
motbus3 6mo ago
"subsidised" is in wrong context. They charge how much they thought it would make sense then people found a way of maximizing the usage under the rules and now they change the rules. I am sure they will put out a product which is exactly OpenClaw/openclaw-like with Claude code soon, and my guess goes even to say that's the reason why they went after the naming... They totally wanted to steal the idea from the moment they saw. As they, and all other ai companies always do. They just steal and contribute nothing back.
casey2 6mo ago
It seems Anthropic thinks they have a much greater moat then they actually do. OpenClaw on a local model is better than any Claude offering, since it can just spin til the task is complete.
Tiereven 6mo ago
They have multiple tiers of service. The whole point of this was to allow "power users" to access more tokens. If someone upgraded to a $200/month Max subscription it's because they're a power user.
- jesse_dot_id 6mo ago
  The thing is that a power user still sleeps.

rachel_rig 6mo ago

[flagged]

jesse_dot_id 6mo ago
They do not advertise a capacity constraint. There is definitely one there, because it's the only way they can offer a reasonable price. Why do you think streaming services suddenly get plagued with technical issues when they host a live event? They are so chronically under-provisioned that they can only guess at the actual amount of compute they need to serve even a fraction of their subscriber base suddenly deciding to watch something at the same time. And their best guess is usually wrong, because even then — even when they know they need to deliver on a live event — they STILL under-provision their compute, or constrain their autoscaling thresholds, in an effort to save money. Is your unlimited 5G plan actually unlimited, or does your download rate drop to dialup speeds after your crest a certain amount of bandwidth usage? Have you ever had an ISP in a populated area? What's the reliability like? Is it worse during certain times of the day?

nightski 6mo ago

It's fine, their moat is thin. Frontier models as a service isn't really in the best interest of anyone anyways. Only a matter of time.

asgraham 6mo ago
Are you arguing that eventually a competitor will emerge that does support OpenClaw with a subscription model? Wouldn’t that just be more expensive for the exact same reason Anthropic is banning it?
- raincole 6mo ago
  You mean whether another competitor will emerge? Right now we have OpenAI.
  - rvz 6mo ago
    The real threat that Anthropic sees as real competitors in the long term, are the AI labs building open weight models, especially the AI labs in China.
- techgnosis 6mo ago
  Doesn't OpenAI allow this today?
  - mil22 6mo ago
    It's a good way to win market share and build goodwill, but one has to wonder whether this class of usage is marginally profitable for them (or anyone) and how sustainable their lenient policies will be for them long term.
- tekacs 6mo ago
  OpenAI have literally gone out of their way to explicitly support this sort of thing. As they did with OpenCode. Honestly, this just looks like what Dylan of SemiAnalysis suggested on Dwarkesh – that they've massively under-provisioned capacity / under-spent on infrastructure. That would honestly be a comforting answer if true, because I would gladly take 'we can't afford to do this right now' over 'we are self-preferencing, and the FTC should really take a look at us, even if we're technically not a monopoly right now, since we're the only strongly-instruction-following model in town and we clearly know it'.
verdverm 6mo ago
I agree, eventually the open models will be good enough and we can pay for our own infra and cut out the middle man. Also, the smaller frontier are nearly as good today and I expect the mega models will be used primarily for distillation

goosejuice 6mo ago

What you're saying is conceptually true for subscription services in general, but thats not why they are making this change. There's a 5 hour limit and a weekly limit. Those are hard token limits. Everyone on a plan pays for the max set of tokens in that plan. The limits manage capacity. The solution to that isn't a change of ToS, it's adjusting the limits. In other words this is about Anthropic subsidizing their own tools to keep people on their platform. OpenClaw is just a good cover story for that. You can maximize plans just as easily w/ /loop. I do it all the time on max 20x. The agent consuming those tokens is irrelevant. For what it's worth I don't use OpenClaw and don't intend to, but I do use claude -p all the time.

CubsFan1060 6mo ago
I don’t really follow what you’re saying. You mention the 5 hour limit. Is your expectation that they have enough capacity so that everyone can hit their 5 hour limit all the time? Or you are proposing that’s how they limit capacity for a subscription? Do you have an example of how this is how they have advertised or sold the plan? I don’t recall ever seeing any advertisement that their plan is simply pre paying for tokens.
jmalicki 6mo ago
You aren't paying to be using that limit all of the time. You are paying to be using that limit some of the time. There are 5 hour windows when you are sleeping and can't use it. There are weekend limits. Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that. It's structured so users can have bursts of unlimited usage, and spend ~15% of the theoretical max cap, and that's still cheaper than a subscription for that user. An OpenClaw user can use 6, 7, 8 times what a human subscriber is using.
- goosejuice 6mo ago
  > Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that. Then it's not priced correctly. As I said, you can do all of this without OpenClaw.. claude code ships with everything you need to maximize the limits.

cowlby 6mo ago

I just discovered Pi Coding Agent and found that it's lean System Prompt + a tuned CLAUDE.md brought back a lot of the intelligence that Opus seemed to lose over the last month. Sucks to be pushed back to Claude Code with opaque system behavior and inconsistency. I bet many would rather pay more for stability than less for gambling on the model intelligence.

chatmasta 6mo ago
We use Pi at work (where we pay per token) and I’d love to use it personally too. From what I’ve read, nobody has been banned for using Pi yet… I wonder if Anthropic minds this much as long as it’s still human usage, or if they’re mostly focused on stamping out the autonomous harnesses. Unfortunately Pi is also what OpenClaw uses so it could easily get swept up in the enforcement attention. Or maybe I’ll just get a Codex subscription instead. OpenAI has semi-officially blessed usage of third party harnesses, right?
- mirashii 6mo ago
  They have, but they also just announced this week that for business and enterprise plans, they’re switching from quotas for codex to token use based pricing, and I would expect that to eventually propagate to all their plans for all the same reasons.
  - chatmasta 6mo ago
    I’d be surprised if that propagated to personal subscription plans, simply because it would put them at a huge competitive disadvantage against Anthropic, which they’ve already signaled they care about by saying they allow third-party harnesses. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they required third-party harnesses to use per-token billing, since that’d put them on par with Anthropic.
    - mirashii 6mo ago
      Turns out the intent to do so was announced on April 2nd as well.

PostOnce 6mo ago

The entire point of AI is for it to do shit autonomously? The whole point is that the users can have it doing shit for them instead of them having to babysit the computer. The fact that users still have to sit there and argue with it erodes their value proposition. The proposition you can pay fewer salaries.

ozim 6mo ago
I would argue that „doing shit” should be done by dummy automations. AI should be used to help build that automations or step in when dummy automation breaks. For now too many people will use AI for stuff that deterministic stupid code would be much more efficient.
nemomarx 6mo ago
They could probably offer enough tokens for that but it would be at a higher price than the sub, I think. You could still pay fewer salaries at 3k a year or per token enterprise prices or whatever.
Alexzoofficial 6mo ago
[flagged]
manmal 6mo ago
They want you to do your shit through their own desktop apps.

muyuu 6mo ago

It's one thing to pay $5 or $20 per month, which although it's a substantial difference, people pay that much for the convenience of having stuff ready and available - and it's a completely different thing to pay $200 per month. People don't pay that much for occasional usage and many/most people will organise themselves to use all or most of their weekly allowance when the expense is in that ballpark. If Anthropic miscalculated the amount of tokens, or simply pushed too hard to capture market share, that is a costly mistake because people in this market are very sensitive to price hikes. They have to be honest about what they can offer for $200. Sure, people don't max their subscriptions but when they're large they make the best of it, or they will likely cancel it. The typical subscription works well below capacity because it's cheap enough that the optionality may be worth it. $200 is not the typical subscription.

rovr138 6mo ago
>They have to be honest about what they can offer for $200 Their expectation must have been a human using the service at a human capacity. This is different from an automated agent orchestrating a ton of different agents at the same time doing a lot of things. There is a difference.
- muyuu 6mo ago
  You are correct, but you don't need openclaw to batch your work. People will figure out ways to use their tokens at that fixed price. Sure there is a difference. It's like when most mobile companies wouldn't allow tethering because then people would actually use the service. You can try to stop that, but people will price in those inconveniences. They will simply learn that the fee pays for much less than the token limit and that the company is enforcing some unwritten limits by adding extra limitations to usage. We will see it play out.
- dimmke 6mo ago
  If people are finding new ways to use AI, they should change how they bill. Banning third party harnesses is bad for a lot of reasons - it looks like they're trying to force people to use their software. Strategically it might make sense - gives them a tiny moat if their models ever slip - but it discourages the breakneck pace of innovation and the long term effect is that their customers (largely highly skilled with computers and building software) will look to decouple themselves. Claude is good but it's not so far better than anything else that they can pull shit like this and people will just deal with it. They already have the regular subscription plans (Pro, Max) and a separate billing process for direct API usage. They could absolutely introduce another type of plan optimized toward this kind of usage or just accept that it's a dumb pipe that is being paid for and having these random arbitrary limitations is just making things more confusing and a bad plan for the future.

bombcar 6mo ago

> Every single one of them oversells their capacity This is (almost) universally true of flat rate subscriptions; but there are usage-billed ones, too (and even those often have an aspect of subsidies). A great example of the shakeup is when dial-up went from "connect, do the thing, disconnect" to "leave the computer online all the time" - they had to change the billing model because it wasn't built for continuous connections.

mh- 6mo ago
That's a good analogy. Maybe soon we'll see Claude Code CDs with 700 free hours.
- bombcar 6mo ago
  AOLLM!

Gregaros 6mo ago

Still very interesting timing to ban third party harnesses, given the proximity to the Claude Code leak …

chunpaiyang 6mo ago

Good point. I agree with that. The key point is that heavy users benefit from this model while light users are basically subsidizing them. But it's a distribution when everyone shifts toward heavy usage, prices inevitably go up. The $17/mo pro price is already set to compete with other providers. Raising it would lose customers. Other tiers are also carefully priced to match competitors. So the only move left is to prevent the whole distribution from drifting toward heavier usage. That's exatly what this ban does.

subarctic 6mo ago

I'm pretty sure in this case it's anthropic doing the subsidizing because the api and extra usage rates are extremely expensive compared to the usage you get for the lowest subscription level. I pay $28 CAD per month and I'm pretty sure I'd burn through that in a day or two, and I'm not really a power user, I'm just using it to write code like it says on the tin. I seriously doubt there's a large portion of subscribers with low enough monthly usage that they'd save money by switching to the API.

JasonHEIN 6mo ago

Err, yeah, you should neither do any web scraping without respecting robots.txt, nor use ad blockers when using Google. When working with a business, never use Google Docs without paying them. Nah, that's not how the world works and at least not in the software industry.

manmal 6mo ago

Come on, someone on a Max account has a reason why they are paying $200. I bet many are at least often near the weekly limit, or they‘ll downgrade. If anything, OpenClaw usage is more spread out instead of ingesting whole codebases during office hours. The Anthropic subs are likely priced at marginal cost (Amp‘s CEO recently said that in a podcast). It just doesn’t serve Anthropic to be operating as the service layer for OpenClaw.

ph4rsikal 6mo ago

So it's like Sliceline from Silicon Valley (the show)

blueblisters 6mo ago

> Every single one of them oversells their capacity Indeed. And this model breaks in several cases that overlaps with the current AI business model: - marginal cost of incremental usage is too high (Movie Pass) - adverse selection (all you can eat monthly steak subscriptions) - demand is synchronized (WeWork)

kamma4434 6mo ago

My impression is that at the moment the value you get out of Claude is simply incredible. As a senior engineer, you get an assistant that never gets tired and can do quite a lot on its own. For me, it’s been an eye-opening experience. I used to have a collaborator called M that had a good general culture, but was not too smart. The calculation going into my mind every time I ask Claude for something is: how much would that cost, in terms of time and effort, to get M to do that? M was a resource that costed many thousand dollars per month, plus the time I spent correcting and directing, while Claude is actually smarter and does what it is asked with a degree of autonomy and common sense that M could never dream of. The flipside of the coin is obvious: Anthropic will find a way to claw back - no pun intended - some of this value by raising the cost of subscription. They would be crazy not to.

lukewarm707 6mo ago
value is high but what about the competitors? is claude that good? the last time i tried claude it was sonnet 4.5. it was ok, not worth the api money clearly. but i only use api tokens for llms.
- port11 6mo ago
  If you look at SWE, Claude models aren’t that special. Other benchmarks come up with different results. But… anecdotally, Claude is just that good. Gemini needs a lot of hand-holding, and it will still tell you it’s done when it achieved half the work. Or say, “this test isn’t passing, I’ll just delete it”. Every now and then I get tired of it and give the same task to Sonnet 4.6; 5 minutes later I’m done. Bug fixed, UI properly working, React hooks not being conditionally rendered, theme variables used properly. It’s wonderful. I’m not sure about large agentic work or deep thinking, but I’m mostly automating away the drudgery of dealing with React Native. I still want to do the deeper work myself, but even there Opus is usually a really good sparing partner.
  - kamma4434 6mo ago
    Matches my experience. I am not sure why, but subjectively it feels better.

wouldbecouldbe 6mo ago

well that largely depends, lots of saas are running 90% operating profit margins

peterkelly 6mo ago

> Every single one of them oversells their capacity That sounds like their problem, not ours

HotHotLava 6mo ago
Well, yes, it is. That's why you're seeing them take proactive steps to address the problem, like this new policy.
seqizz 6mo ago
Doesn't look like it
Tzk 6mo ago
In theory yes, but the overselling does also keep the price low (at least a bit), but also boosts revenue. So when power users use the service too much, the seller will either raise prices, cut features or ban some usage patterns. You can vote with your wallet though. So don’t throw money at them or just deal with it. Plain and simple.
- ajsnigrutin 6mo ago
  Low for who exactly? You have low-users overpaying and a few openclaw users actually using what they paid for and getting banned for that... that's not really a "low price" for anyone. If they they expect X money for Y tokens, better provide Y tokens for your X money. If they can't provide that, then change the pricing plans. That's not the users problem.
  - frollogaston 6mo ago
    Who exactly, their intended audience. I get my money's worth having Claude Code write code. No interest in OpenClaw.
raincole 6mo ago
It's not your problem anymore once you switch from Claude :)

PunchyHamster 6mo ago

No, people want transparency. If it was "x tokens per time interval, then you pay extra", the problem wouldn't exist.

saintfire 6mo ago
The API offers that. Pay X per month, get Y tokens. Then you can look at all the graphs of money being deleted by OpenClaw, for transparency. People want a free lunch. If the API was cheaper than the subscription then everyone would use the API. Instead people flock to an, apparently, unsustainable pice at a fixed monthly rate; presumably subsidized by others who don't use their full capacity every month.
- deleted 6mo ago
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scotty79 6mo ago

So basically their move is an admission that they can't scale up their capacity accordingly to shifting demand while keeping the current pricing. Customers have their own value calculations. If they can't use Claude for autonomous agent at reasonable price they will move to providers that are cheaper and more flexible. Autonomous agent adds way more utility than a marginally better LLM (assuming that's even true).

amelius 6mo ago

> Every single one of them oversells their capacity. My meal kit delivery service doesn't.

croes 6mo ago

And why aren’t OpenCode and others allowed anymore? You don’t use more tokens than with Claude Code

hawk_aa 6mo ago

I run a small third-party harness myself (not OpenClaw, something much smaller). Checked my API key today after this announcement - turns out I was already on a regular API key so it doesnt affect me directly. But the interesting thing is, my actual token usage running agents is way less than people here seem to assume. Most of the time the agent is waiting for tools, reading files, thinking. The bursts are intense but short. I probably use less tokens per hour than someone doing a long manual coding session with lots of back and forth. The real issue for me isnt cost, its that they can just change the rules whenever. I had to drop everything today to verify my setup still works. Thats the tax of building on someone elses platform I guess.

motbus3 6mo ago

"subsidised" is in wrong context. They charge how much they thought it would make sense then people found a way of maximizing the usage under the rules and now they change the rules. I am sure they will put out a product which is exactly OpenClaw/openclaw-like with Claude code soon, and my guess goes even to say that's the reason why they went after the naming... They totally wanted to steal the idea from the moment they saw. As they, and all other ai companies always do. They just steal and contribute nothing back.

casey2 6mo ago

It seems Anthropic thinks they have a much greater moat then they actually do. OpenClaw on a local model is better than any Claude offering, since it can just spin til the task is complete.

Tiereven 6mo ago

They have multiple tiers of service. The whole point of this was to allow "power users" to access more tokens. If someone upgraded to a $200/month Max subscription it's because they're a power user.

jesse_dot_id 6mo ago
The thing is that a power user still sleeps.