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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 sleepi

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 7mo 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.
- brookst 7mo ago
  No, it is priced correctly. Just because outliers can be money-losing doesn’t mean you should raise the price for everyone.
  - goosejuice 7mo ago
    > Just because outliers can be money-losing doesn’t mean you should raise the price for everyone. If they are losing money then it's not priced correctly. That's what I responded to. Yes, subscriptions work as you say. Plenty of people under utilize subscriptions from prime, to credit cards, to netflix. But if they lost money overall, they too would raise prices. Because that's how economics works. Shortage of capacity, high demand, raise prices until equilibrium. There's other knobs beyond ToS. They just didn't choose those options.
    - jmalicki 7mo ago
      Yes, they chose the knob of ToS, because that was the way to price it correctly.
      - goosejuice 7mo ago
        The market will determine if it was the correct choice. I don't think it's an obviously bad choice on their part.
    - crote 7mo ago
      > If they are losing money then it's not priced correctly. Just a few years ago this was the standard business model for startups: attract VC money, offer plans at a loss, capture a huge market, boil the frog with incremental price increases to become profitable. Companies like Uber wouldn't have been anywhere near as successful if they had been forced to make a profit from day one.
    - esrauch 7mo ago
      I think "offer unlimited but TOS ban behaviors that would cost too much to support" is actually a very normal way that things work instead of "raise prices until equilibrium is reached", including in credit cards. Credit cards do simply ban people they think are "rewards churning" based on a completely subjective TOS policy for example. Raising prices is a bad strategy if you have a smaller base that costs enormously larger than the rest. "A million users that cost $1 and one user that costs $10 million, charge everyone $10 equilibrium", you're screwing over almost all of your users. The $20/month sub price is basically just not trying to capture the openclaw users, it doesn't make sense that all of the vanilla Claude users should subsidize them (and in fact it wouldn't even work because they will just go to Gemini or ChatGPT if your cheapest paid plan was very expensive to try to subsidize the other users)
      - goosejuice 7mo ago
        Yes, it's an unsurprising strategic choice. It's just sloppy PR that places the blame on OpenClaw somehow being irresponsible, when the actual rationale has little to do with that.
    - brookst 7mo ago
      Usage will be roughly a bell curve. Losing money on the extreme upper end is NOT a reason to raise prices for everyone, because that will decrease overall revenue (see: price elasticity). ToS is the right knob here. When 0.05% of your customers use your product in a way that increases your costs 10,000%, you find ways to stop that. You don’t amortize the cost increase across everyone else.
- Yokohiii 7mo ago
  It is priced incorrectly, but that is intentional. You can't create a tiered paid plan for the whole world that fits everyone. You can't create nuanced extra plans to satisfy all the outliers. It's an bet to keep the customers and still having a good margin. Think of ecom, returns are a big struggle for any large company because they are unpredictable and subject to abuse, shipping fees are just an sophisticated guess to cover that cost. Not a subscription, same mechanics. The only thing here to criticize is, if it's a good thing to make everything a subscription and disguise the real cost.
  - fluoridation 7mo ago
    >You can't create a tiered paid plan for the whole world that fits everyone. I mean, you can. Electricity is already sold that way. Subscribers with uncharacteristic usage spikes don't get blackouts, they get a slightly larger bill, and perhaps get moved up a tier.
    - Yokohiii 7mo ago
      Very valid. My comment was fixated around the fact that big tech has the addiction to have subscriptions for everything. It's common that you provide generic subscription plans for the masses and supply "call us" custom plans for the specific (usually corporate) needs. If anthropic doesn't provide that or vibe coders are too cheap to do that, then those are issues, but the subscription models are itself valid. It is certainly misleading to a degree, but we've stopped complaining about this a while ago.
      - fluoridation 7mo ago
        It's pretty stupid because as others in this thread have pointed out it's already not a flat plan. Even from their side it makes zero sense to bill things this way rather than based on usage. It's not like a VPS where your VM shares the hardware, which consumes electricity more or less regardless of what you use the machine for.
        7mo ago
- skywhopper 7mo ago
  Yes, and they are in control of Claude Code, so they are fine with that. If it causes problems they can tweak it. If OpenClaw causes problems they can’t.
stavros 7mo ago
How can an OpenClaw user use 6 times what a human subscriber is using when I'm four hours into the week and 15% of my weekly limit is already used up, just by coding? OpenClaw can't use 600% of my weekly limits.
- echelon 7mo ago
  Without data, this is just a bunk excuse to defend the walled garden practices. With data, it's an engineering target. They could just 429 badly behaved clients.
  - stavros 7mo ago
    They already 429 everyone! That's the crazy thing. They already have strict limits that we all keep hitting regularly.
- coldtea 7mo ago
  >How can an OpenClaw user use 6 times what a human subscriber is using when I'm four hours into the week and 15% of my weekly limit is already used up, just by coding? Perhaps because your Claude agent usage is not representative of the average user, and closer to the average OpenClaw user levels...
- mikkupikku 7mo ago
  Man, I run 3-5 sessions an evening for 5-6 hours, and longer on weekends and feel like I'm barely using what I paid for. I've only hit five hour limits a small number of times. Genuinely baffled when I hear people blow through tokens apparently several times faster than me. Are you going out of your way to design complex subagent workflows or something? I just let claude code use subagents when it wants to but don't give it any extra direction to use them.
- Kim_Bruning 7mo ago
  Not sure what tier you're on. Basically; spin up in the morning eats a lot of tokens because the cache is cold. This has actually gotten worse now that Opus supports a 1Mt context. So: compact before closing up for the night (reduces the size of the cache that needs to be spun up); and the default cache life is 5 minutes, so keep a heartbeat running when you step away from the keyboard to keep the cache warm. Also, things like web-research eat context like crazy. Keep those separate, and ask for an md report with the key findings to feed into your main. This is not exhaustive list and it's potentially subtly wrong sometimes. But it's a good band-aid. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616297 Know what's funny? Openclaw might actually burn less tokens than a naive claude code user; if configured correctly. %-/
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
j45 7mo ago
Efficient token use will be the new code/vim golf. Whether it's human token use, or future OpenClaws
- reilly3000 7mo ago
  It’s the new cloud cost vector, where cutting 2K from context on a busy service saves $xxxxx. Terse.
- xtracto 7mo ago
  I've mention before that we should have a look at Telegraph/telegram speak. There was a HUGE industry in word efficiency at that time. There are hundreds of books. I even think an LLM trained to communicate using telegram style might even be faster and way cheaper.
  - mannicken 7mo ago
    > I've mention before that we should have a look at Telegraph/telegram speak. .- -. -.. / .. --..-- / ..-. --- .-. / --- -. . --..-- / .-- . .-.. -.-. --- -- . / --- ..- .-. / -. . .-- / - . .-.. . --. .-. .- -- -....- -... .- ... . -.. / --- ...- . .-. .-.. --- .-. -.. ...
    - xtracto 7mo ago
      .--. .-. .- .. ... . -.. / -... .
  - quietsegfault 7mo ago
    Why use many word when few do trick?
  - djfergus 7mo ago
    Reminds me of the terminus agent/harness on the terminal-bench coding benchmark - they just send send keystrokes to a tmux session. They score pretty well. https://www.tbench.ai/news/terminus https://www.tbench.ai/news/terminus
- 7mo ago
dimmke 7mo ago
I feel like Anthropic is going down a bad path here with billing things this way. Especially as local LLM continues to develop so fast. I downgraded from my $200 a month plan to my $20 plan and hit limits constantly. I try to use the API access I purchased separately, and it doesn't work with Claude Code (something about the 1 million context requiring extra usage) so I have to use it Continue. Then I get instantly rate limited when it's trying to read 1-2 files. It just sucks. This whole landscape is still emerging, but if this is what it's like now, pre enshittification, when these companies have shitloads of money - it's going to be so much worse when they start to tighten the screws. Right now my own incentive is to stop being dependent on Claude for as much as I can as quickly as I can.
- harrall 7mo ago
  This is how free drink refills, airplane tickets, Internet service, unlimited data plans, insurance, flat rate shipping, monthly transit passes, Netflix, Apple Music, gym memberships, museum memberships, car wash plans, amusement park passes, all you can eat buffets, news subscriptions, and many more work. Either you get a flat rate fee based on certain allowed usage patterns or everyone has to be billed à la carte.
  - dimmke 7mo ago
    This is a different case - those all have limitations based on human behavior (it's not necessary or possible to constantly be washing your car the entire month when you pay for unlimited washes) - that doesn't exist here. The types of plans available should reflect that reality. If gyms faced a situation where people would go and spend 18 hours working out every day for a month, they would probably change how they billed things. Your comparisons are all also "unlimited" situations to Claude's very much limited situation. You can't buy a plan for Claude that is marketed as being unlimited. They're already selling people metered usage. They're just also adding restrictions on top of that.
    - coldtea 7mo ago
      They sell metered usage while having the implied expectation that most wont use it fully. Power users and users of stuff like OpenClaw don't match that idea. So they further restricted the metered caps, which were only offered to NOT be reached by that many. Simple as that.
mech422 7mo ago
you can write automated MCP tools that run within claude code, and could theoretically generate as high a load as any other automated/3rd party agent. You can also do loops that burn tokens incredibly fast. This is allowed with no caveats (I use MCP's basically to test what I'd like to try with the API...) So this explanation just seems a lil hollow.
- PlasmaPower 7mo ago
  Yes, but very few people are actually doing that compared to OpenClaw. If everyone else was doing that, they'd be cracking down on it too.
- fyrecean 7mo ago
  While you can write an automated tool to consume all their tokens, I strongly suspect most users, like myself, are not doing that. So even if Anthropic loses money on a power user, they profit overall and keep public sentiment high by not alienating users with restrictions. It's an optimization problem of making a profit off the average used while staying low enough to attract customers, even if that means some users cost more than they pay. More users spinning up OpenClaw means that balance starts to shift towards more users maxing their tokens, thus the average increases, so I think their explanation makes sense still.
  - mech422 7mo ago
    >>So even if Anthropic loses money on a power user, they profit overall and keep public sentiment high by not alienating users with restrictions So they profit overall if I use all my tokens either way? Again, I understand usage limits - I just don't understand why some usage is 'good' and some 'bad' if I'm using the same either way. >>More users spinning up OpenClaw I'm pretty sure that's a small percentage of overall users, and probably skewed towards the very people that would be recommending/implementing you model for work/businesses. Seems like that would be the group you are encouraging/cultivating ?
- alwa 7mo ago
  When you can’t enforce everything at once, you go where the most acute problems are. I imagine when your MCP avenue of abuse catches on—like this other category of harnesses did—to such a scale as to become a problem impacting us folk trying to go about our business… when that’s where the problems shift, I imagine (and hope) Anthropic will crack down on that vector too. To keep the service usable for us ordinary meatbags. I’m glad they give us the leeway to experiment, and I’m also glad they weed the garden from time to time. To switch metaphors, I’m deeply frustrated when my very modest, commuter-grade use gets run off the figurative highway by figurative hot-rodders. It’s been extra-529y this week, and it’s about time they reined it in a little. You’re always welcome to pay-as-you-go for as many tokens as you’d like to burn on their infrastructure… or to compute against any of the wide array of ever-improving open models on commodity compute providers…
jen20 7mo ago
> You aren't paying to be using that limit all of the time. The erosion of the norm of things doing what they advertise rather than being weasel-worded BS is particularly unfortunate, and leads to claims like this.
lherron 7mo ago
I think maybe you are not familiar with what /loop and the Claude cron tools do. https://code.claude.com/docs/en/scheduled-tasks https://code.claude.com/docs/en/scheduled-tasks
- throwthrowuknow 7mo ago
  I think maybe you still don’t understand that not everyone will max out their usage, regardless of the methods available.
  - muyuu 7mo ago
    People don't pay double the $100 account in fixed recurrent payments if they don't intend to use a lot more than they would use in the $100 subscription. Perhaps people at Anthropic should ask Sonnet (or Kimi, it's much better value) how power laws and pareto distributions work? You are advertising for people who can justify a virtually unlimited amount of tokens, why is it surprising that they would use as many as you're offering them in the plan? PS: interesting that you'd use a throwaway account to post this
- gregjw 7mo ago
  I need a hypothetical use case for things like this, I don't get how so many people have so much desire for use of features like this.
  - goosejuice 7mo ago
    https://martinfowler.com/articles/harness-engineering.html https://martinfowler.com/articles/harness-engineering.html it's being talked about everywhere. If you manage developers or product folk, do you allow them to work when you're not looking over their shoulder? All developers can be managers/team leads now. You plan, you delegate, you review. You're welcome to not do this, surely that's appropriate in quite a few areas of work, but many of us are because we can get more work done than if we we're micromanaging every line of code change. For startups, where a bit of quality can suffer in favor of finding market fit, this is huge.
daynthelife 7mo ago
> Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that. No, there is a weekly limit as well. Maxing out a single 5h window uses ~10% of the weekly limit
- MaxikCZ 7mo ago
  I fill my week limit in a few days :(
  - KellyCriterion 7mo ago
    Do you do process XLS or similar data? Ive seen using any other files than code files eats much more faster
- riteshkew1001 7mo ago
  [flagged]
teekert 7mo ago
I've met people that fill a box of sushi to take home at the end of their “all you can eat” session because “they paid for it”. Shrug.
- KeplerBoy 7mo ago
  Yes and the staff will tell them to stop that or charge them extra for it.
  - teekert 7mo ago
    Yes and they will hide their sushi-grabbing because somewhere deep inside they know it's not part of the deal, while at the same time still strongly feeling that they have indeed paid for it. Ah, to be human!
    - jhrmnn 7mo ago
      The cooperative and competitive sides of our soul fighting it out in a single situation
    - abustamam 7mo ago
      I'd argue they hide their takeaway because of what GP comment said — not because of anything innate, but because a staff member will not let them. I grew up in an Asian household of six. We definitely took food home at AYCE places. My parents definitely knew it wasn't OK, but they felt like they were gaming the system (like a dubious life hack of sorts) and saving money, so they were actually quite proud of it, bragging to friends how much they were able to get. To be human indeed!
      - deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
      - ohhman11 7mo ago
        I assume it's not unusual for thieves to brag about their scores.
manmal 7mo ago
Tell me you are not using Anthropic without telling me. Bursts of unlimited usage was never the case. And I bet their infrastructure doesn’t like bursts as much as more spread out activity.
kay_o 7mo ago
> Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that. This typically results in a ban for TOS violations after a few windows in a row on a claude subscription
- sdoering 7mo ago
  I have maxed out my 5 hour limits and my weekly limits fairly regularly, when I did a bunch of editing work on long form writing next to having CC run a few coding tasks over the xmas holidys - I only slept a few hours at night an timed those roughly (by chance) with my limits. I neither got a warning or a ban or anything - and that was with the double token amount during those days. So I don't see human usage being something they ban for TOS violation, like you describe. But as always YMMV.
  - kay_o 7mo ago
    Was this on a new (few months) or significantly older account?
    - sdoering 7mo ago
      I am on a pro Plan for I don't even really remember and on a Max plan for I feel about 7 or so months.
  - mikkupikku 7mo ago
    It wouldn't really surprise me if their automatic systems are, one way or another, looking for that sleep period. Those ostensibly human users who use the service with no breaks for sleep would be naturally suspect.
    - goosejuice 7mo ago
      What are they going to ban you for? Using their products? If Anthropic didn't want you to use their LLMs around the clock they wouldn't publish the features on their consumer app to do just that.
reactordev 7mo ago
Train a generation to min/max stats and then put them in a time box limit and then explain to them why “this is normal”. The issue is, and always will be, competing views on what these services are for. Most, see them as augments of their normal everyday workflow. Others see it as the tool that allows their creativity to flow as fast as their thoughts do. The problem is the service is more than capable of catering to both but the creative vibe commander will hit those limits far faster. Simply telling them to “take a break” is a kin to those video game screen nags that developers were forced to put into games to remind people to pee.
zozbot234 7mo ago
> 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. They could easily structure their limits to enforce that kind of pattern fairly on both human and automated users. They could e.g. force a cooldown period between your daily activity bursts, by decreeing that continued heavy use on a 24h basis would count exponentially more towards your limit. That would be transparent and force the claws to lighten their load below that of a typical human user. We're talking about a company that's worth hundreds of billions of dollars and targeting highly sophisticated enterprise users, not consumers; it's just not credible that they'd be technically unable to set that up.
- asdfaoeu 7mo ago
  Or alternatively just pay based on what you use? I.e. $/tokens.
  - Wowfunhappy 7mo ago
    They offer that, API pricing. Or "extra usage" which they're saying you can still use for OpenClaw. It's really expensive!
    - sroussey 7mo ago
      Everyone want to take their subsidies from the consumer subs and use them to avoid paying the real costs. Even the API pricing is subsidized by investors. When that stop, pricing will escalate.
      - jmalicki 7mo ago
        Is API pricing subsidized on a unit basis? Most estimates I've seen have shown that API usage seems to be at least unit profitable (paying for infra and electricity, not R&D)
        Clide20x_gal_26 7mo ago
abdelkrimb 7mo ago
I don't believe that Anthropic looses money when heavy users consume the max amount of tokens. do you have any proof of your statement ?
- 6Az4Mj4D 7mo ago
  If we do same work via Subscription and API , the subscription is way cheaper. So if we compare them yes they loose money.
- roegerle 7mo ago
  none of them are making any money yet. they all lose.
- Wowfunhappy 7mo ago
  Obviously, Anthropic is a private company, so nobody here is going to know their financials (who is at liberty to share them). I'm not GP, but I think it's reasonable to assume the subscription is priced based on average usage, and that's a major reason it's so much cheaper than API prices.
emidln 7mo ago
At least on a personal max account, I can't max every window. There is also weekly limit. If I max every window, I run out of tokens halfway through the week.
- narmiouh 7mo ago
  I think the gp understands that, he is stating that openclaw (has cron that runs every 30 seconds) will use up the last drop of juice the plan offers - aka ultimate power user.
  - goosejuice 7mo ago
    And the point being made is that can be done using only Anthropic provided tools. Ask claude to set up crontab for you and be proactive. It will happily do so. This spring/summer you'll find all the same stuff they OpenClaw has in a Claude product. Most of it is already there just not packed neatly for a non technical user.
    - prepend 7mo ago
      And it sounds like that will require additional fees.
dvfjsdhgfv 7mo ago
> You are paying to be using that limit some of the time. This makes zero sense. I'm paying to use that limit all of the time. If that's too much for Anthropic, they are free to lower the limits or increase the price. Claiming otherwise would be false advertising.
- zaphar 7mo ago
  They did? What do you think that email to the user was about?
  - goosejuice 7mo ago
    They lowered limits opaquely before this. They "announced it" in a twitter by a tech lead. This time it was in an email on a Friday to only some customers.
motbus3 7mo ago
If you maximise the usage of your quota you are not doing anything wrong. They just tricked people I to thinking they quota was higher than it was really was and when people found a way of maximizing that, they had to cut it.

goosejuice 7mo 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.

brookst 7mo ago
No, it is priced correctly. Just because outliers can be money-losing doesn’t mean you should raise the price for everyone.
- goosejuice 7mo ago
  > Just because outliers can be money-losing doesn’t mean you should raise the price for everyone. If they are losing money then it's not priced correctly. That's what I responded to. Yes, subscriptions work as you say. Plenty of people under utilize subscriptions from prime, to credit cards, to netflix. But if they lost money overall, they too would raise prices. Because that's how economics works. Shortage of capacity, high demand, raise prices until equilibrium. There's other knobs beyond ToS. They just didn't choose those options.
  - jmalicki 7mo ago
    Yes, they chose the knob of ToS, because that was the way to price it correctly.
    - goosejuice 7mo ago
      The market will determine if it was the correct choice. I don't think it's an obviously bad choice on their part.
  - crote 7mo ago
    > If they are losing money then it's not priced correctly. Just a few years ago this was the standard business model for startups: attract VC money, offer plans at a loss, capture a huge market, boil the frog with incremental price increases to become profitable. Companies like Uber wouldn't have been anywhere near as successful if they had been forced to make a profit from day one.
  - esrauch 7mo ago
    I think "offer unlimited but TOS ban behaviors that would cost too much to support" is actually a very normal way that things work instead of "raise prices until equilibrium is reached", including in credit cards. Credit cards do simply ban people they think are "rewards churning" based on a completely subjective TOS policy for example. Raising prices is a bad strategy if you have a smaller base that costs enormously larger than the rest. "A million users that cost $1 and one user that costs $10 million, charge everyone $10 equilibrium", you're screwing over almost all of your users. The $20/month sub price is basically just not trying to capture the openclaw users, it doesn't make sense that all of the vanilla Claude users should subsidize them (and in fact it wouldn't even work because they will just go to Gemini or ChatGPT if your cheapest paid plan was very expensive to try to subsidize the other users)
    - goosejuice 7mo ago
      Yes, it's an unsurprising strategic choice. It's just sloppy PR that places the blame on OpenClaw somehow being irresponsible, when the actual rationale has little to do with that.
  - brookst 7mo ago
    Usage will be roughly a bell curve. Losing money on the extreme upper end is NOT a reason to raise prices for everyone, because that will decrease overall revenue (see: price elasticity). ToS is the right knob here. When 0.05% of your customers use your product in a way that increases your costs 10,000%, you find ways to stop that. You don’t amortize the cost increase across everyone else.
Yokohiii 7mo ago
It is priced incorrectly, but that is intentional. You can't create a tiered paid plan for the whole world that fits everyone. You can't create nuanced extra plans to satisfy all the outliers. It's an bet to keep the customers and still having a good margin. Think of ecom, returns are a big struggle for any large company because they are unpredictable and subject to abuse, shipping fees are just an sophisticated guess to cover that cost. Not a subscription, same mechanics. The only thing here to criticize is, if it's a good thing to make everything a subscription and disguise the real cost.
- fluoridation 7mo ago
  >You can't create a tiered paid plan for the whole world that fits everyone. I mean, you can. Electricity is already sold that way. Subscribers with uncharacteristic usage spikes don't get blackouts, they get a slightly larger bill, and perhaps get moved up a tier.
  - Yokohiii 7mo ago
    Very valid. My comment was fixated around the fact that big tech has the addiction to have subscriptions for everything. It's common that you provide generic subscription plans for the masses and supply "call us" custom plans for the specific (usually corporate) needs. If anthropic doesn't provide that or vibe coders are too cheap to do that, then those are issues, but the subscription models are itself valid. It is certainly misleading to a degree, but we've stopped complaining about this a while ago.
    - fluoridation 7mo ago
      It's pretty stupid because as others in this thread have pointed out it's already not a flat plan. Even from their side it makes zero sense to bill things this way rather than based on usage. It's not like a VPS where your VM shares the hardware, which consumes electricity more or less regardless of what you use the machine for.
      - 7mo ago
skywhopper 7mo ago
Yes, and they are in control of Claude Code, so they are fine with that. If it causes problems they can tweak it. If OpenClaw causes problems they can’t.

stavros 7mo ago

How can an OpenClaw user use 6 times what a human subscriber is using when I'm four hours into the week and 15% of my weekly limit is already used up, just by coding? OpenClaw can't use 600% of my weekly limits.

echelon 7mo ago
Without data, this is just a bunk excuse to defend the walled garden practices. With data, it's an engineering target. They could just 429 badly behaved clients.
- stavros 7mo ago
  They already 429 everyone! That's the crazy thing. They already have strict limits that we all keep hitting regularly.
coldtea 7mo ago
>How can an OpenClaw user use 6 times what a human subscriber is using when I'm four hours into the week and 15% of my weekly limit is already used up, just by coding? Perhaps because your Claude agent usage is not representative of the average user, and closer to the average OpenClaw user levels...
mikkupikku 7mo ago
Man, I run 3-5 sessions an evening for 5-6 hours, and longer on weekends and feel like I'm barely using what I paid for. I've only hit five hour limits a small number of times. Genuinely baffled when I hear people blow through tokens apparently several times faster than me. Are you going out of your way to design complex subagent workflows or something? I just let claude code use subagents when it wants to but don't give it any extra direction to use them.
Kim_Bruning 7mo ago
Not sure what tier you're on. Basically; spin up in the morning eats a lot of tokens because the cache is cold. This has actually gotten worse now that Opus supports a 1Mt context. So: compact before closing up for the night (reduces the size of the cache that needs to be spun up); and the default cache life is 5 minutes, so keep a heartbeat running when you step away from the keyboard to keep the cache warm. Also, things like web-research eat context like crazy. Keep those separate, and ask for an md report with the key findings to feed into your main. This is not exhaustive list and it's potentially subtly wrong sometimes. But it's a good band-aid. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616297 Know what's funny? Openclaw might actually burn less tokens than a naive claude code user; if configured correctly. %-/

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

j45 7mo ago

Efficient token use will be the new code/vim golf. Whether it's human token use, or future OpenClaws

reilly3000 7mo ago
It’s the new cloud cost vector, where cutting 2K from context on a busy service saves $xxxxx. Terse.
xtracto 7mo ago
I've mention before that we should have a look at Telegraph/telegram speak. There was a HUGE industry in word efficiency at that time. There are hundreds of books. I even think an LLM trained to communicate using telegram style might even be faster and way cheaper.
- mannicken 7mo ago
  > I've mention before that we should have a look at Telegraph/telegram speak. .- -. -.. / .. --..-- / ..-. --- .-. / --- -. . --..-- / .-- . .-.. -.-. --- -- . / --- ..- .-. / -. . .-- / - . .-.. . --. .-. .- -- -....- -... .- ... . -.. / --- ...- . .-. .-.. --- .-. -.. ...
  - xtracto 7mo ago
    .--. .-. .- .. ... . -.. / -... .
- quietsegfault 7mo ago
  Why use many word when few do trick?
- djfergus 7mo ago
  Reminds me of the terminus agent/harness on the terminal-bench coding benchmark - they just send send keystrokes to a tmux session. They score pretty well. https://www.tbench.ai/news/terminus https://www.tbench.ai/news/terminus
7mo ago

dimmke 7mo ago

I feel like Anthropic is going down a bad path here with billing things this way. Especially as local LLM continues to develop so fast. I downgraded from my $200 a month plan to my $20 plan and hit limits constantly. I try to use the API access I purchased separately, and it doesn't work with Claude Code (something about the 1 million context requiring extra usage) so I have to use it Continue. Then I get instantly rate limited when it's trying to read 1-2 files. It just sucks. This whole landscape is still emerging, but if this is what it's like now, pre enshittification, when these companies have shitloads of money - it's going to be so much worse when they start to tighten the screws. Right now my own incentive is to stop being dependent on Claude for as much as I can as quickly as I can.

harrall 7mo ago
This is how free drink refills, airplane tickets, Internet service, unlimited data plans, insurance, flat rate shipping, monthly transit passes, Netflix, Apple Music, gym memberships, museum memberships, car wash plans, amusement park passes, all you can eat buffets, news subscriptions, and many more work. Either you get a flat rate fee based on certain allowed usage patterns or everyone has to be billed à la carte.
- dimmke 7mo ago
  This is a different case - those all have limitations based on human behavior (it's not necessary or possible to constantly be washing your car the entire month when you pay for unlimited washes) - that doesn't exist here. The types of plans available should reflect that reality. If gyms faced a situation where people would go and spend 18 hours working out every day for a month, they would probably change how they billed things. Your comparisons are all also "unlimited" situations to Claude's very much limited situation. You can't buy a plan for Claude that is marketed as being unlimited. They're already selling people metered usage. They're just also adding restrictions on top of that.
  - coldtea 7mo ago
    They sell metered usage while having the implied expectation that most wont use it fully. Power users and users of stuff like OpenClaw don't match that idea. So they further restricted the metered caps, which were only offered to NOT be reached by that many. Simple as that.

mech422 7mo ago

you can write automated MCP tools that run within claude code, and could theoretically generate as high a load as any other automated/3rd party agent. You can also do loops that burn tokens incredibly fast. This is allowed with no caveats (I use MCP's basically to test what I'd like to try with the API...) So this explanation just seems a lil hollow.

PlasmaPower 7mo ago
Yes, but very few people are actually doing that compared to OpenClaw. If everyone else was doing that, they'd be cracking down on it too.
fyrecean 7mo ago
While you can write an automated tool to consume all their tokens, I strongly suspect most users, like myself, are not doing that. So even if Anthropic loses money on a power user, they profit overall and keep public sentiment high by not alienating users with restrictions. It's an optimization problem of making a profit off the average used while staying low enough to attract customers, even if that means some users cost more than they pay. More users spinning up OpenClaw means that balance starts to shift towards more users maxing their tokens, thus the average increases, so I think their explanation makes sense still.
- mech422 7mo ago
  >>So even if Anthropic loses money on a power user, they profit overall and keep public sentiment high by not alienating users with restrictions So they profit overall if I use all my tokens either way? Again, I understand usage limits - I just don't understand why some usage is 'good' and some 'bad' if I'm using the same either way. >>More users spinning up OpenClaw I'm pretty sure that's a small percentage of overall users, and probably skewed towards the very people that would be recommending/implementing you model for work/businesses. Seems like that would be the group you are encouraging/cultivating ?
alwa 7mo ago
When you can’t enforce everything at once, you go where the most acute problems are. I imagine when your MCP avenue of abuse catches on—like this other category of harnesses did—to such a scale as to become a problem impacting us folk trying to go about our business… when that’s where the problems shift, I imagine (and hope) Anthropic will crack down on that vector too. To keep the service usable for us ordinary meatbags. I’m glad they give us the leeway to experiment, and I’m also glad they weed the garden from time to time. To switch metaphors, I’m deeply frustrated when my very modest, commuter-grade use gets run off the figurative highway by figurative hot-rodders. It’s been extra-529y this week, and it’s about time they reined it in a little. You’re always welcome to pay-as-you-go for as many tokens as you’d like to burn on their infrastructure… or to compute against any of the wide array of ever-improving open models on commodity compute providers…

jen20 7mo ago

> You aren't paying to be using that limit all of the time. The erosion of the norm of things doing what they advertise rather than being weasel-worded BS is particularly unfortunate, and leads to claims like this.

lherron 7mo ago

I think maybe you are not familiar with what /loop and the Claude cron tools do. https://code.claude.com/docs/en/scheduled-tasks https://code.claude.com/docs/en/scheduled-tasks

throwthrowuknow 7mo ago
I think maybe you still don’t understand that not everyone will max out their usage, regardless of the methods available.
- muyuu 7mo ago
  People don't pay double the $100 account in fixed recurrent payments if they don't intend to use a lot more than they would use in the $100 subscription. Perhaps people at Anthropic should ask Sonnet (or Kimi, it's much better value) how power laws and pareto distributions work? You are advertising for people who can justify a virtually unlimited amount of tokens, why is it surprising that they would use as many as you're offering them in the plan? PS: interesting that you'd use a throwaway account to post this
gregjw 7mo ago
I need a hypothetical use case for things like this, I don't get how so many people have so much desire for use of features like this.
- goosejuice 7mo ago
  https://martinfowler.com/articles/harness-engineering.html https://martinfowler.com/articles/harness-engineering.html it's being talked about everywhere. If you manage developers or product folk, do you allow them to work when you're not looking over their shoulder? All developers can be managers/team leads now. You plan, you delegate, you review. You're welcome to not do this, surely that's appropriate in quite a few areas of work, but many of us are because we can get more work done than if we we're micromanaging every line of code change. For startups, where a bit of quality can suffer in favor of finding market fit, this is huge.

daynthelife 7mo ago

> Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that. No, there is a weekly limit as well. Maxing out a single 5h window uses ~10% of the weekly limit

MaxikCZ 7mo ago
I fill my week limit in a few days :(
- KellyCriterion 7mo ago
  Do you do process XLS or similar data? Ive seen using any other files than code files eats much more faster
riteshkew1001 7mo ago
[flagged]

teekert 7mo ago

I've met people that fill a box of sushi to take home at the end of their “all you can eat” session because “they paid for it”. Shrug.

KeplerBoy 7mo ago
Yes and the staff will tell them to stop that or charge them extra for it.
- teekert 7mo ago
  Yes and they will hide their sushi-grabbing because somewhere deep inside they know it's not part of the deal, while at the same time still strongly feeling that they have indeed paid for it. Ah, to be human!
  - jhrmnn 7mo ago
    The cooperative and competitive sides of our soul fighting it out in a single situation
  - abustamam 7mo ago
    I'd argue they hide their takeaway because of what GP comment said — not because of anything innate, but because a staff member will not let them. I grew up in an Asian household of six. We definitely took food home at AYCE places. My parents definitely knew it wasn't OK, but they felt like they were gaming the system (like a dubious life hack of sorts) and saving money, so they were actually quite proud of it, bragging to friends how much they were able to get. To be human indeed!
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    - ohhman11 7mo ago
      I assume it's not unusual for thieves to brag about their scores.

manmal 7mo ago

Tell me you are not using Anthropic without telling me. Bursts of unlimited usage was never the case. And I bet their infrastructure doesn’t like bursts as much as more spread out activity.

kay_o 7mo ago

> Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that. This typically results in a ban for TOS violations after a few windows in a row on a claude subscription

sdoering 7mo ago
I have maxed out my 5 hour limits and my weekly limits fairly regularly, when I did a bunch of editing work on long form writing next to having CC run a few coding tasks over the xmas holidys - I only slept a few hours at night an timed those roughly (by chance) with my limits. I neither got a warning or a ban or anything - and that was with the double token amount during those days. So I don't see human usage being something they ban for TOS violation, like you describe. But as always YMMV.
- kay_o 7mo ago
  Was this on a new (few months) or significantly older account?
  - sdoering 7mo ago
    I am on a pro Plan for I don't even really remember and on a Max plan for I feel about 7 or so months.
- mikkupikku 7mo ago
  It wouldn't really surprise me if their automatic systems are, one way or another, looking for that sleep period. Those ostensibly human users who use the service with no breaks for sleep would be naturally suspect.
  - goosejuice 7mo ago
    What are they going to ban you for? Using their products? If Anthropic didn't want you to use their LLMs around the clock they wouldn't publish the features on their consumer app to do just that.

reactordev 7mo ago

Train a generation to min/max stats and then put them in a time box limit and then explain to them why “this is normal”. The issue is, and always will be, competing views on what these services are for. Most, see them as augments of their normal everyday workflow. Others see it as the tool that allows their creativity to flow as fast as their thoughts do. The problem is the service is more than capable of catering to both but the creative vibe commander will hit those limits far faster. Simply telling them to “take a break” is a kin to those video game screen nags that developers were forced to put into games to remind people to pee.

zozbot234 7mo ago

> 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. They could easily structure their limits to enforce that kind of pattern fairly on both human and automated users. They could e.g. force a cooldown period between your daily activity bursts, by decreeing that continued heavy use on a 24h basis would count exponentially more towards your limit. That would be transparent and force the claws to lighten their load below that of a typical human user. We're talking about a company that's worth hundreds of billions of dollars and targeting highly sophisticated enterprise users, not consumers; it's just not credible that they'd be technically unable to set that up.

asdfaoeu 7mo ago
Or alternatively just pay based on what you use? I.e. $/tokens.
- Wowfunhappy 7mo ago
  They offer that, API pricing. Or "extra usage" which they're saying you can still use for OpenClaw. It's really expensive!
  - sroussey 7mo ago
    Everyone want to take their subsidies from the consumer subs and use them to avoid paying the real costs. Even the API pricing is subsidized by investors. When that stop, pricing will escalate.
    - jmalicki 7mo ago
      Is API pricing subsidized on a unit basis? Most estimates I've seen have shown that API usage seems to be at least unit profitable (paying for infra and electricity, not R&D)
      - Clide20x_gal_26 7mo ago

abdelkrimb 7mo ago

I don't believe that Anthropic looses money when heavy users consume the max amount of tokens. do you have any proof of your statement ?

6Az4Mj4D 7mo ago
If we do same work via Subscription and API , the subscription is way cheaper. So if we compare them yes they loose money.
roegerle 7mo ago
none of them are making any money yet. they all lose.
Wowfunhappy 7mo ago
Obviously, Anthropic is a private company, so nobody here is going to know their financials (who is at liberty to share them). I'm not GP, but I think it's reasonable to assume the subscription is priced based on average usage, and that's a major reason it's so much cheaper than API prices.

emidln 7mo ago

At least on a personal max account, I can't max every window. There is also weekly limit. If I max every window, I run out of tokens halfway through the week.

narmiouh 7mo ago
I think the gp understands that, he is stating that openclaw (has cron that runs every 30 seconds) will use up the last drop of juice the plan offers - aka ultimate power user.
- goosejuice 7mo ago
  And the point being made is that can be done using only Anthropic provided tools. Ask claude to set up crontab for you and be proactive. It will happily do so. This spring/summer you'll find all the same stuff they OpenClaw has in a Claude product. Most of it is already there just not packed neatly for a non technical user.
  - prepend 7mo ago
    And it sounds like that will require additional fees.

dvfjsdhgfv 7mo ago

> You are paying to be using that limit some of the time. This makes zero sense. I'm paying to use that limit all of the time. If that's too much for Anthropic, they are free to lower the limits or increase the price. Claiming otherwise would be false advertising.

zaphar 7mo ago
They did? What do you think that email to the user was about?
- goosejuice 7mo ago
  They lowered limits opaquely before this. They "announced it" in a twitter by a tech lead. This time it was in an email on a Friday to only some customers.

motbus3 7mo ago

If you maximise the usage of your quota you are not doing anything wrong. They just tricked people I to thinking they quota was higher than it was really was and when people found a way of maximizing that, they had to cut it.