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Anthropic’s “Head of Growth” claims this is a “test”: https://x.com/TheAmolAvasare/status/2046724659039932830 https://x.com/TheAmolAvasare/status/20467246590399
by rideontime 6mo ago
Anthropic’s “Head of Growth” claims this is a “test”: https://x.com/TheAmolAvasare/status/2046724659039932830 https://x.com/TheAmolAvasare/status/2046724659039932830
This does not explain the changes to documentation.
- 100ms 6mo agoHe goes way beyond saying it's a test, he's legitimising the change in the follow-up rationale
- toraway 6mo agoWait what, so they're testing giving new users misleading information about included services in each tier as an upsell tactic?
- Arcuru 6mo agoNo, they're testing removing it from the Pro tier for new subscribers.
- nemomarx 6mo agoNo I think the test is that some new sign ups won't get Claude code in that tier if they pick it and they're seeing if users will still pay for it without it?
- fluidcruft 6mo agoI think the test is that new sign-ups won't have it and will the loss of five new Pro subscriptions be offset by more than one new Max subscribers. Plenty of Pro subscribers never touch claude-code.
- QuadmasterXLII 6mo agoAlthough the ones that never touch claude code are a free $20 a month, the ones that do are potentially a seventy to eighty dollar twenty dollars a month . it’s not instantly obvious which customers you prefer (revenue vs cash negative growth- on second thought obviously they prefer the second)
- nemomarx 6mo agoThey've preferred the second so far, but they might have a fair reason to see if they can keep growing with the first one instead or cut down on some loss leading, right?
- HarHarVeryFunny 6mo agoThat's how i read it too - they want to test if people will still pay for pro plan if it doesn't include Claude Code. At the same time they are also saying that if you subscribe having been told it does include Claude Code, they may still change their mind later and take it away!
- gip 6mo agoIt could be an A/B test to see whether people without an existing subscription care about Claude Code (CC) at all. If they sign up then CC is disabled (or not as it is not really an issue to offer more). Capturing that info would definitely be useful to a growth team.
- Nevermark 6mo agoThey need to give the non-code service a different name. And a slightly lower price. If it succeeds they can adjust pricing later. Otherwise they are messing with their new and old customers heads, regarding a service with a name that ought to be reliably interpretable. And seriously messing with their own credibility. Wrong kind of A/B test. This is incompetence which i would normally discount. But Anthropic seems to be falling all over themselves to irritate customers.
- red-iron-pine 6mo agoA/B test to see how people react to changing the offerings 5000 angry users who leave? maybe keep it. 500000 users leave? pretend it was just documentation mis-prints or an oversight, etc.
- fluidcruft 6mo agoHow can you run the A/B test with mismatched documentation?
- applfanboysbgon 6mo agoIt is honestly truly fucking incredible how corps still find new, innovative ways to enshittify. Regular enshittification won't cut it, they have to exercise their artistic creativity. Who the fuck comes up with the idea that what services you get with your subscription are random? It's mind-boggling that some percentage of people visiting the website will be presented with an inferior version of the same subscription for the same price. I'm not even mad (despite my colorful wording), I don't use Claude, just impressed with the bold new territory being explored here.
- amarcheschi 6mo agoClaude subscription became non deterministic too
- jrgd 6mo agoI find the whole thing a bit sad but you made me smile. Thank you.
- parineum 6mo ago> It is honestly truly fucking incredible how corps still find new, innovative ways to enshittify. Regular enshittification won't cut it, they have to exercise their artistic creativity. I had a bit of an epiphany the other day thinking about these VC companies offering products to the public at unsustainable prices. It's classic anticompetitive behavior. You imagine anticompetitive behavior to come from a monopoly because they can afford to burn money to drive competition out before they bring prices back to profitable but the whole VC burn is the same thing. People talk about it a lot without really saying it explicitly when they talk about moats. The only moat Anthropic and OpenAI have is money and they utilize it by offering products below cost. The two companies are just trying to outlast the other one until they are the only one left. So it's not really enshitification as much as you were previously getting the deal of a lifetime.
- nemomarx 6mo agoIn physical markets we call this kinda thing dumping and it's often regulated. Maybe offering SaaS or compute at below profitable rates should be investigatable too, to avoid killing competitors too easily?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- maxall4 6mo ago> on ~2% of new prosumer signups. I, and everyone else I have asked, see this new updated sales UI; sounds like more than 2%.
- naet 6mo agoYeah I flat out don't believe the 2% thing. It's possible that I was the 1 out of 50 who checked the page and saw that Claude code was removed... but it really seems like everyone I shared it with saw the same thing which is incredibly unlikely. Also I am an existing subscriber and checked the price page while logged in, so I shouldn't be counted in "2% of new subscribers" at all...
- adam_patarino 6mo agoEither they vibe coded a test that was extremely broken. Or they vibe wrote some bullshit to try and back pedal.
- sriku 6mo agoThis test would be a good way to lose existing subscribers perhaps.
- techblueberry 6mo agoPresumably they want to lose existing subscribers because it’s way too expensive to keep them at $20.
- Esophagus4 6mo agoIs it? I’m curious because I thought they were raising prices to pay for exorbitant training costs, not because subscribers are expensive on a unit basis. I thought inference was cheap so there was little marginal cost of a new subscriber.
- dodobirdlord 6mo agoThis was more or less true until everyone and their dog started running agents in a 24/7 busyloop as a bit.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- adastra22 6mo agoYou’re not doing that on a $20/mo plan.
- tonfreed 6mo agoThis reeks of the start of enshittification. Very doubtful it was a "test"
- charliebwrites 6mo agoJust checked. I continue to have Claude Code with my Pro plan This is concerning though. If I lose my current usage allotment at this price point I will likely switch to codex
- muyuu 6mo agoPresumably for new subs.
- trashface 6mo agoThat works until openai does the same thing. Pretty clear as an industry they want to establish a new price floor for non-trivial coding use.
- mystraline 6mo agoYep, and the price point theyre looking at is 95% of an engineer. Once they get people hooked, deskilled, and paying, the money ratchet only tightens. And the companies KNOW that theyre replacing engineers, or trying to. So each engineer replaced is X salary a year they now have available, so make it back in SaaS LLM tokens.
- CuriouslyC 6mo agoThank god for the Chinese labs. Keeping us (relatively) honest.
- xiphias2 6mo agoThat's what Claude is testing I guess (people often don't do what they say they do when it comes to pricing)
- dear_prudence 6mo agoThey confirmed that it does not affect existing users
- theshrike79 6mo agoThe cheapest plan for both Claude and Codex is the sweet spot IMO. It also forces you to keep your workflow mostly harness-independent because Claude supports next to no standards and Codex does some.
- simonw 6mo agoThey later said: https://twitter.com/TheAmolAvasare/status/2046725498592722972 https://twitter.com/TheAmolAvasare/status/204672549859272297... > When we do land on something, if it affects existing subscribers you'll get plenty of notice before anything changes. Will hear it from us, not a screenshot on X or Reddit. If you don't want things like this spreading through screenshots of X and Reddit, don't run "tests" like this in the first place! (Also "if it affects existing subscribers" is a cop-out, I need to know the pricing of Claude Code for NEW subscribers if I'm going to adopt it at a company with a growing team, or recommend it to other people, write tutorials etc.)
- rsynnott 6mo agoA screenshot is, however, apparently good enough for _new_ subscribers.
- minimaxir 6mo agoA/B tests only work if the subjects don't realize they are in a A/B test.
- inetknght 6mo agoSolution: don't A/B test your users. A/B testing people without their informed consent is immoral, unethical, and should be illegal.
- vehemenz 6mo agoDepends entirely on the stakes and whether personal data is involved
- inetknght 6mo ago> Depends entirely on the stakes and whether personal data is involved Sure. Let me just A/B test whether or not you'll respond positively or negatively to having your news delivered via push notification or delayed by 10 minutes. I'm sure you would appreciate being tested on without your consent, just so that I can make an extra quick buck at your expense. Nothing amoral or unethical about it.
- thousand_nights 6mo ago> So we're looking at different options to keep delivering a great experience for users. his title should be changed to Head of Corporate Bullshitting
- ramesh31 6mo ago>"his title should be changed to Head of Corporate Bullshitting" They're hitting the physical limits of energy production and chip supply for inference capacity. There's literally nothing that can be done but reduce usage to spread it around for now.
- thousand_nights 6mo agothere's nothing stopping them from saying that, which is my point which you missed
- solenoid0937 6mo agowhy do they need to say it? It's obvious
- ochronus 6mo agoNo, it's not, except for a small percentage of the userbase.
- epenn 6mo agoHopefully the negative responses in that thread + the conversation here on HN might help them realize that totally removing Code access for Pro users isn't a good look. And with no free trial period on top of that, nobody is going to want to pay $100+ just to check it out. I can't imagine the conversion rate of that test being positive.
- Esophagus4 6mo agoA few enterprise customers I know are upgrading to the higher plan now that their limits have been nuked. I imagine Anthropic is trying to see how many users they can push to higher tiers with these new squeezes. I hate to say it but I imagine it will work. It’s going to suck for me, because I had gotten used to ridiculously cheap tokens, but I guess the era of subsidized tokens is over.
- solenoid0937 6mo agoMost real businesses are on API billing, not Max.
- lelanthran 6mo agoNone of the companies I deal with (~40) are on the API. Some where, but that experiment lasted a month. Until they go public, we are all just guessing.
- sroussey 6mo agoCC has such egregious API subsidies that it’s hard to not to leverage it unless the license tells an enterprise otherwise. Love the subsidized pricing while it lasts.
- lelanthran 6mo ago> CC has such egregious API subsidies that it’s hard to not to leverage it unless the license tells an enterprise otherwise. It's hard to tell, honestly - about half the HN population will tell you that all the token providers are running inference at a profit when using the API and only the subscriptions are subsidised, while the other half will tell you that everything, including both the API and the subscriptions, are subsidised (i.e. running at a loss).
- dnw 6mo agoSomehow a ton of people are caught in the variant.
- joecool1029 6mo agoRandom data point: Guest passes apparently still include Claude Code in their Pro trial. If they are running a test this is a really sloppy way to do it.
- karmasimida 6mo agoI am confused, how is this a test? So some users get Claude Code while others don’t, when they are both paying 20 dollars … ? Wat
- nemomarx 6mo agoIt's a test on sign ups, not on users, so "will they sign up without X feature for the same price" yes
- isodev 6mo agoI don’t get the surprise or discontent. People hooking themselves up to a paid SaaS that only two vendors can offer (Anthropic and OpenAI), no competition or regulation to speak of… of course they’ll do whatever they want with their plans. Hope you can still resume working on your projects without AI.
- m3kw9 6mo agoLosing trust on them not rug pulling users
- isodev 6mo agoIf one doesn't want rug-pulls, one signals their policy makers to create regulation to prevent it. Otherwise it's just... uncapped capitalism or what's the name
- duskdozer 6mo agoIf anyone was paying any attention to how corporations run, I don't see how they could have believed this would go any differently. Seriously.
- harambae 6mo ago> Hope you can still resume working on your projects without AI. How often does technology really move backwards? I can already run a decent local model on a spec’d out MacBook and for better or worse electronics/computers moves one direction (with minor supply chain hiccups along the way notwithstanding)
- m3kw9 6mo agoFk around and now they will find out
- nimchimpsky 6mo ago[dead]
- camillomiller 6mo agoSoooo Sam Altman replied “ok boomer” to that message. Wtf?