4 ms·

> 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 Ope

> 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.

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.