7 ms·

This is how free drink refills, airplane tickets, Internet service, unlimited data plans, insurance, flat rate shipping, monthly transit passes, Netflix, Apple

by harrall 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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.
  - dimmke 6mo ago
    >Power users and users of stuff like OpenClaw don't match that idea. Then they should figure out how to structure an offering that accommodates this type of usage not just blanket ban it
    - satvikpendem 6mo ago
      Why "should" they? There's no reason they would especially when their competitor now owns OpenClaw.
      - dimmke 6mo ago
        Because a big part of Anthropic's story is that they build based on how people actually use AI. Power users aren't just annoying edge cases, they're signal. Throttling them and calling it done is inconsistent with that.
        satvikpendem 6mo ago
        Sorry to tell you but generally any company's "story" is all marketing and PR, if it interferes with their making money, which it does in this case, that company will not hesitate to leave it behind.
        bergheim 6mo ago
        Oh the billion bollar vc backed pre ipo companys story was this? Omg and they somehow are not delivering up to your standards? Damn they better get their act together lest people like you will whine on twitter about them losing their way
        lelanthran 6mo ago
        > Power users aren't just annoying edge cases, they're signal. You got that right; in this case they are signalling that AI token providers are not going to be able to run at a profit anytime soon. Not sure if that helps or hurts your argument, though.
        2000UltraDeluxe 6mo ago
        > Power users aren't just annoying edge cases, they're signal. Not all power users. Some re-invent the wheel and/or do things inefficiently, and in most cases there's no business incentive to adapt the service to fit the usage patterns of those users, or of other users that deviate from the norm in regards to resource usage.
- fluoridation 6mo ago
  >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. Not the best example. The upkeep cost of a gym is pretty flat regardless of how much people use the facilities. Two people can't use a single machine at the same time make it wear out twice as fast. The price of memberships is not correlated to usage, it's inversely correlated to the number of memberships sold.
  - dimmke 6mo ago
    >Two people can't use a single machine at the same time make it wear out twice as fast The machine doesn't care about the number of people using it. If it's constantly being used, it will wear out faster. You are conflating "we price based on expected under-utilization" with "costs don't scale with usage." Those are different things. The inverse correlation you talk about isn't relevant here - People buy gym memberships intending to go, feel good about the intention, and then don't follow through. The business model is built on that gap. That's pretty specific to fitness and a handful of similar industries where aspiration drives purchase. Anthropic doesn't sell based on a "golly gee I hope people dont use this" gap - they sell compute. Different business.
    - fluoridation 6mo ago
      >If it's constantly being used, it will wear out faster. Yeah, but there's an absolute limit to that, beyond which the cost doesn't keep increasing. Beyond that point, the QoS goes down (queues). >You are conflating "we price based on expected under-utilization" with "costs don't scale with usage." I'm not conflating anything, I'm responding to what you said: >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. Why would a gym need to change how they bill things if all their customers were aiming for maximal utilization, when their costs would barely see any change? I doubt your typical gym operates on razor-thin margins.
      - dimmke 6mo ago
        Gym costs absolutely scale with usage. Equipment wears faster under heavier use. Cleaning and maintenance staff hours scale with how much the facility is used. Consumables like towels, soap, and chalk go faster. HVAC runs harder. The reason gyms can offer flat-rate pricing is that they bet on under-utilization, not that costs are flat. Setting that aside, even if we accept your argument that gym costs barely scale with usage, then that makes gyms a bad comparison case for Anthropic, whose costs directly scale with usage. You can't use the gym model to defend Anthropic's pricing decisions if the two cost structures are nothing alike. I'm arguing that both gyms and Anthropic have usage costs that scale with usage, but gym business model assumes a large margin of under-utilization and there's a hard cap to "power user" - I think both of those extremes don't apply to Anthropic's situation. Under-utilizers aren't paying for AI they have a free tier. There's also a natural ceiling on how much any one person can use a gym. There's no equivalent constraint on API usage.
- jyrkesh 6mo ago
  "Unlimited" has always been a lie. There is no free lunch. There are always limits. I've had to unwind "unlimited" within startups that oversold. I've been bit by ISPs, storage providers, music streamers, fuckin _Ubers_, now AI subscription services, that all dealt in "unlimited". None of them delivered in the long run. I'd be mad at Anthropic if it weren't for the fact that my experience now can see this sort of thing from a mile away. There are a lot folks, even on HN, that haven't been around for as long. I understand the outrage. I've been there. But these computers cost money to run, and companies don't operate at a loss in the fullness of time. Once you know that unlimited trends towards limited, the real question is whether we're equipped as a society to deal with the fact that the capital-L Labor input to the economic equation is about to be replaced with a Capital input for which only a handful of companies have a non-zero value.
  - chrismorgan 6mo ago
    On your 1.5Mbps link, you could theoretically download 500GB per month. A huge amount, but I believe it was often genuinely allowed, because their uplinks could cope with it. Unlimited could genuinely be unlimited. But now you might get things like “unlimited” 1Gbps… which reverts to 10Mbps (1% speed) or worse after 3.6TB (eight hours). And so your new theoretical maximum is about 6.8TB per month rather than 330TB.
  - duskdozer 6mo ago
    You can both know that "unlimited" means "limited" and also be pissed that they market it as such and try to conceal the actual limits.
    - alsetmusic 6mo ago
      > You can both know that "unlimited" means "limited" and also be pissed that they market it as such and try to conceal the actual limits. Reminds me of when ATT had a fake 5G decoration on phones. "AT&T won’t remove fake 5G logo even after ad board says it’s misleading"[0] You can just get away with lying. That's the level of enforcement that exists against unethical behavior in business today. 0. https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/20/21265048/att-5g-e-misleading-advertising-recommendation-narb https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/20/21265048/att-5g-e-mislead...
taneq 6mo ago
The commons? Tragic.
TeMPOraL 6mo ago
à la carte is honest; overprovisioning just slows progress by preventing demand from creating pressure to innovate proper solutions.
Aerroon 6mo ago
Rent doesn't work that way... yet. Imagine if it did though, people would be arguing: "Well, you're not expected to be able to live in that home the entire month that you paid for!"
rvba 6mo ago
Internet service and unlimited data plans work like this though.

by harrall 6mo ago

dimmke 6mo 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 6mo 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.
- dimmke 6mo ago
  >Power users and users of stuff like OpenClaw don't match that idea. Then they should figure out how to structure an offering that accommodates this type of usage not just blanket ban it
  - satvikpendem 6mo ago
    Why "should" they? There's no reason they would especially when their competitor now owns OpenClaw.
    - dimmke 6mo ago
      Because a big part of Anthropic's story is that they build based on how people actually use AI. Power users aren't just annoying edge cases, they're signal. Throttling them and calling it done is inconsistent with that.
      - satvikpendem 6mo ago
        Sorry to tell you but generally any company's "story" is all marketing and PR, if it interferes with their making money, which it does in this case, that company will not hesitate to leave it behind.
      - bergheim 6mo ago
        Oh the billion bollar vc backed pre ipo companys story was this? Omg and they somehow are not delivering up to your standards? Damn they better get their act together lest people like you will whine on twitter about them losing their way
      - lelanthran 6mo ago
        > Power users aren't just annoying edge cases, they're signal. You got that right; in this case they are signalling that AI token providers are not going to be able to run at a profit anytime soon. Not sure if that helps or hurts your argument, though.
      - 2000UltraDeluxe 6mo ago
        > Power users aren't just annoying edge cases, they're signal. Not all power users. Some re-invent the wheel and/or do things inefficiently, and in most cases there's no business incentive to adapt the service to fit the usage patterns of those users, or of other users that deviate from the norm in regards to resource usage.
fluoridation 6mo ago
>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. Not the best example. The upkeep cost of a gym is pretty flat regardless of how much people use the facilities. Two people can't use a single machine at the same time make it wear out twice as fast. The price of memberships is not correlated to usage, it's inversely correlated to the number of memberships sold.
- dimmke 6mo ago
  >Two people can't use a single machine at the same time make it wear out twice as fast The machine doesn't care about the number of people using it. If it's constantly being used, it will wear out faster. You are conflating "we price based on expected under-utilization" with "costs don't scale with usage." Those are different things. The inverse correlation you talk about isn't relevant here - People buy gym memberships intending to go, feel good about the intention, and then don't follow through. The business model is built on that gap. That's pretty specific to fitness and a handful of similar industries where aspiration drives purchase. Anthropic doesn't sell based on a "golly gee I hope people dont use this" gap - they sell compute. Different business.
  - fluoridation 6mo ago
    >If it's constantly being used, it will wear out faster. Yeah, but there's an absolute limit to that, beyond which the cost doesn't keep increasing. Beyond that point, the QoS goes down (queues). >You are conflating "we price based on expected under-utilization" with "costs don't scale with usage." I'm not conflating anything, I'm responding to what you said: >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. Why would a gym need to change how they bill things if all their customers were aiming for maximal utilization, when their costs would barely see any change? I doubt your typical gym operates on razor-thin margins.
    - dimmke 6mo ago
      Gym costs absolutely scale with usage. Equipment wears faster under heavier use. Cleaning and maintenance staff hours scale with how much the facility is used. Consumables like towels, soap, and chalk go faster. HVAC runs harder. The reason gyms can offer flat-rate pricing is that they bet on under-utilization, not that costs are flat. Setting that aside, even if we accept your argument that gym costs barely scale with usage, then that makes gyms a bad comparison case for Anthropic, whose costs directly scale with usage. You can't use the gym model to defend Anthropic's pricing decisions if the two cost structures are nothing alike. I'm arguing that both gyms and Anthropic have usage costs that scale with usage, but gym business model assumes a large margin of under-utilization and there's a hard cap to "power user" - I think both of those extremes don't apply to Anthropic's situation. Under-utilizers aren't paying for AI they have a free tier. There's also a natural ceiling on how much any one person can use a gym. There's no equivalent constraint on API usage.
jyrkesh 6mo ago
"Unlimited" has always been a lie. There is no free lunch. There are always limits. I've had to unwind "unlimited" within startups that oversold. I've been bit by ISPs, storage providers, music streamers, fuckin _Ubers_, now AI subscription services, that all dealt in "unlimited". None of them delivered in the long run. I'd be mad at Anthropic if it weren't for the fact that my experience now can see this sort of thing from a mile away. There are a lot folks, even on HN, that haven't been around for as long. I understand the outrage. I've been there. But these computers cost money to run, and companies don't operate at a loss in the fullness of time. Once you know that unlimited trends towards limited, the real question is whether we're equipped as a society to deal with the fact that the capital-L Labor input to the economic equation is about to be replaced with a Capital input for which only a handful of companies have a non-zero value.
- chrismorgan 6mo ago
  On your 1.5Mbps link, you could theoretically download 500GB per month. A huge amount, but I believe it was often genuinely allowed, because their uplinks could cope with it. Unlimited could genuinely be unlimited. But now you might get things like “unlimited” 1Gbps… which reverts to 10Mbps (1% speed) or worse after 3.6TB (eight hours). And so your new theoretical maximum is about 6.8TB per month rather than 330TB.
- duskdozer 6mo ago
  You can both know that "unlimited" means "limited" and also be pissed that they market it as such and try to conceal the actual limits.
  - alsetmusic 6mo ago
    > You can both know that "unlimited" means "limited" and also be pissed that they market it as such and try to conceal the actual limits. Reminds me of when ATT had a fake 5G decoration on phones. "AT&T won’t remove fake 5G logo even after ad board says it’s misleading"[0] You can just get away with lying. That's the level of enforcement that exists against unethical behavior in business today. 0. https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/20/21265048/att-5g-e-misleading-advertising-recommendation-narb https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/20/21265048/att-5g-e-mislead...

taneq 6mo ago

The commons? Tragic.

TeMPOraL 6mo ago

à la carte is honest; overprovisioning just slows progress by preventing demand from creating pressure to innovate proper solutions.

Aerroon 6mo ago

Rent doesn't work that way... yet. Imagine if it did though, people would be arguing: "Well, you're not expected to be able to live in that home the entire month that you paid for!"

rvba 6mo ago

Internet service and unlimited data plans work like this though.