4 ms·

Ha. Yes. "Speedrunning enshittification" is the phrase that's been in my head. The flat-rate plans were the top of the slippery slope to enshittification, rea

by jp57 5mo ago

Ha. Yes. "Speedrunning enshittification" is the phrase that's been in my head. The flat-rate plans were the top of the slippery slope to enshittification, really. If everyone were on metered billing there'd be no reason for all these opaque and sneaky attempts to limit usage. People would pay for what they get and get what they pay for.

applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
There is nothing wrong with flat-rate plans. I work at an LLM-serving startup, and am aware of at least three competitors, that (a) provide flat rate subs (b) are extremely profitable and (c) are bootstrapped, ie. not beholden to investors (there are also many other competitors but I can't ascertain their profitability or investment status). You simply need to price the flat-rate sub at a price that's profitable when averaged out over all of your users, both light and heavy, and prevent fully automated usage by the power users. That's it. This is immensely more user-friendly, and I doubt you'd get any traction at all if you didn't do this. Even if you pay more for the sub, having unlimited (non-automated) usage frees a mental barrier to using the product. If you have to pay for every request you make, it introduces a hesitation to do anything - it makes the user hesitant to experiment, hesitant to prompt for anything of slightly less significance, anxious about the exact token consumption of every prompt, and so on. It's not enjoyable to use when you're being penny pinched for every prompt. Anthropic's problem, of course, is that they are not bootstrapped. They don't have a business model that can compete with startups running DeepSeek or GLM on their own hardware. Non-frontier startups got to skip the whole "tens of billions of dollars in debt" step of creating a frontier model from scratch, and still get to run a model that is perhaps 80%-85% as good as Anthropic's, which is good enough for millions of customers. So Anthropic is desperate, backed into a corner, and doing anything and everything they can to try to right their sinking ship, no matter how scummy.
- vintermann 5mo ago
  > prevent fully automated usage by the power users. But being a power user and fully automating things is the whole appeal.
- Oras 5mo ago
  LLM serving startup => bootstrapped => extremely profitable Mind sharing a link?
  - applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
    I do mind, since I enjoy speaking freely without concern of my opinions being linked to my employment. I assure you companies like this exist. Profiting off of inference is not the hard part, it's frontier training that is prohibitively expensive. You're free to disregard my commentary if you want, of course.
    - simoncion 5mo ago
      > Profiting off of inference is not the hard part, it's frontier training that is prohibitively expensive. And given that Anthropic does both, it must make up its training costs by selling inference. jp57 was pretty clearly talking about Anthropic's flat-rate plans, rather than the flat-rate plans of companies that get to skip the most expensive part of the process.
      - applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
        I understand that very well, yes. The point I'm making is that I don't think Anthropic or OpenAI would have ever gotten significant traction if they didn't have flat-rate plans, because flat-rate plans themselves are not inherently predatory or part of the enshittification slope but actually extremely UX-friendly. Perhaps in another timeline, if their product was actually valuable enough to pay this price for, they could have simply provided a $50 plan as the standard level to provide enough margin to account for training costs as well. But as I see it DeepSeek is an existential threat to them, and they are now stuck between a rock and a hard place, because their product is devalued by its existence and if the frontier labs were to gate access with $50 plans they would get their lunch eaten even more quickly. It turns out there are downsides to burning inconceivably large stacks of other people's money.
        simoncion 5mo ago
- pkulak 5mo ago
  I also assume that forcing usage to spread out, via those 5-hour windows, has cost advantages.
- fwipsy 5mo ago
  Anthropic isn't backed into a corner. They have plenty of enterprise subscriptions. Individual user experience (especially billing) is suffering because it's not a priority in comparison. If they were as desperate as you described, they would try selling access to mythos.
  - applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
    The fact that they are adding code specifically to charge individual consumers more reeks of desperation. This isn't "individual users are suffering because they're lower priority and neglected", this is "individual users are being actively squeezed because Anthropic is desperate for every penny it can get".
    - fwipsy 5mo ago
      This is such a stupid way to charge customers more. How many Claude code users use OpenClaw? Cheating customers is like burning down your house to keep warm. Anthropic aren't that stupid. I guarantee that this was some half-baked vibe-coded anti abuse system.
      - selectively 5mo ago
        Many users abuse subscriptions in violation of the TOS to run tools like OpenClaw is automated ways. It's an anti-abuse measure. Makes perfect sense. Anthropic's business model is the API business. The $200 subs are a paid demo of the API. Go slam the API with OpenClaw all you want, if you can afford it.
  - 3748595995 5mo ago
    We'll see how many enterprise subs they retain 5 years
- bdangubic 5mo ago
  > prevent fully automated usage by the power users this is a non-starter
  - applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
    Fully automated usage on a flat-rate plan is an economic non-starter.

by jp57 5mo ago

applfanboysbgon 5mo ago

There is nothing wrong with flat-rate plans. I work at an LLM-serving startup, and am aware of at least three competitors, that (a) provide flat rate subs (b) are extremely profitable and (c) are bootstrapped, ie. not beholden to investors (there are also many other competitors but I can't ascertain their profitability or investment status). You simply need to price the flat-rate sub at a price that's profitable when averaged out over all of your users, both light and heavy, and prevent fully automated usage by the power users. That's it. This is immensely more user-friendly, and I doubt you'd get any traction at all if you didn't do this. Even if you pay more for the sub, having unlimited (non-automated) usage frees a mental barrier to using the product. If you have to pay for every request you make, it introduces a hesitation to do anything - it makes the user hesitant to experiment, hesitant to prompt for anything of slightly less significance, anxious about the exact token consumption of every prompt, and so on. It's not enjoyable to use when you're being penny pinched for every prompt. Anthropic's problem, of course, is that they are not bootstrapped. They don't have a business model that can compete with startups running DeepSeek or GLM on their own hardware. Non-frontier startups got to skip the whole "tens of billions of dollars in debt" step of creating a frontier model from scratch, and still get to run a model that is perhaps 80%-85% as good as Anthropic's, which is good enough for millions of customers. So Anthropic is desperate, backed into a corner, and doing anything and everything they can to try to right their sinking ship, no matter how scummy.

vintermann 5mo ago
> prevent fully automated usage by the power users. But being a power user and fully automating things is the whole appeal.
Oras 5mo ago
LLM serving startup => bootstrapped => extremely profitable Mind sharing a link?
- applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
  I do mind, since I enjoy speaking freely without concern of my opinions being linked to my employment. I assure you companies like this exist. Profiting off of inference is not the hard part, it's frontier training that is prohibitively expensive. You're free to disregard my commentary if you want, of course.
  - simoncion 5mo ago
    > Profiting off of inference is not the hard part, it's frontier training that is prohibitively expensive. And given that Anthropic does both, it must make up its training costs by selling inference. jp57 was pretty clearly talking about Anthropic's flat-rate plans, rather than the flat-rate plans of companies that get to skip the most expensive part of the process.
    - applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
      I understand that very well, yes. The point I'm making is that I don't think Anthropic or OpenAI would have ever gotten significant traction if they didn't have flat-rate plans, because flat-rate plans themselves are not inherently predatory or part of the enshittification slope but actually extremely UX-friendly. Perhaps in another timeline, if their product was actually valuable enough to pay this price for, they could have simply provided a $50 plan as the standard level to provide enough margin to account for training costs as well. But as I see it DeepSeek is an existential threat to them, and they are now stuck between a rock and a hard place, because their product is devalued by its existence and if the frontier labs were to gate access with $50 plans they would get their lunch eaten even more quickly. It turns out there are downsides to burning inconceivably large stacks of other people's money.
      - simoncion 5mo ago
pkulak 5mo ago
I also assume that forcing usage to spread out, via those 5-hour windows, has cost advantages.
fwipsy 5mo ago
Anthropic isn't backed into a corner. They have plenty of enterprise subscriptions. Individual user experience (especially billing) is suffering because it's not a priority in comparison. If they were as desperate as you described, they would try selling access to mythos.
- applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
  The fact that they are adding code specifically to charge individual consumers more reeks of desperation. This isn't "individual users are suffering because they're lower priority and neglected", this is "individual users are being actively squeezed because Anthropic is desperate for every penny it can get".
  - fwipsy 5mo ago
    This is such a stupid way to charge customers more. How many Claude code users use OpenClaw? Cheating customers is like burning down your house to keep warm. Anthropic aren't that stupid. I guarantee that this was some half-baked vibe-coded anti abuse system.
    - selectively 5mo ago
      Many users abuse subscriptions in violation of the TOS to run tools like OpenClaw is automated ways. It's an anti-abuse measure. Makes perfect sense. Anthropic's business model is the API business. The $200 subs are a paid demo of the API. Go slam the API with OpenClaw all you want, if you can afford it.
- 3748595995 5mo ago
  We'll see how many enterprise subs they retain 5 years
bdangubic 5mo ago
> prevent fully automated usage by the power users this is a non-starter
- applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
  Fully automated usage on a flat-rate plan is an economic non-starter.