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They're subsidizing their tokens as long as you use their software. That's a fair exchange, I never understood why people took issue with it. If you don't want

by internet2000 3mo ago

They're subsidizing their tokens as long as you use their software. That's a fair exchange, I never understood why people took issue with it. If you don't want to get locked in to Claude Code, you can pay more. Just like you can pay more for an unlocked non-carrier subsidized phone. (Which I personally do.)

lfuller 3mo ago
In Canada at least it’s not legal to charge for unlocking a carrier-locked phone as it’s considered anti-competitive.
cyberax 3mo ago
This method of bundling should be illegal in general, as it stiffles competition.
- jack_pp 3mo ago
  How does it stifle competition / innovation? You can use other harnesses, pay API for anthropic models or cheap chinese models. You're just upset that you don't get to use their VC money the way you want to use it lol. It either is a good deal or it isn't, if it is just say, thanks free VC money, if it isn't say fuck you.
  - thfuran 3mo ago
    Any service or product delivered at a loss seems pretty plainly anti-competetive. Whether it is actually subsidized to that extent, I’m not sure.
    - dcrazy 3mo ago
      The entire LLMaaS industry is priced below cost. Even if the marginal cost of electricity and bandwidth to produce one token is less than the price of that token, the amortized infrastructure and R&D costs make the entire venture unprofitable. If pricing below cost were illegal, it would essentially make starting up a business—any business—impossible.
      - wqaatwt 3mo ago
        You can’t calculate what that cost is though regardless. If the gross margin is positive you can’t confidently challenge their longterm growth projections however optimistic or unrealistic they are.
    - simianwords 3mo ago
      you have no evidence that it is served at a loss
    - xoa 3mo ago
      >Any service or product delivered at a loss seems pretty plainly anti-competitive. You have to get into the weeds though on what exactly counts as a "product delivered". Like, Apple doesn't charge for new versions of macOS. But are "Macs" separate stacks together or are they the fusion of hardware and software, and if so on what levels? There are all sorts of products surrounding us that are running software that we still treat as unified objects after all, right down to smart light bulbs or a "plain" lithium battery pack which still requires controllers to manage charging and USB negotiation etc. Chips and software are in tons and tons of "basic" hardware stuff yet we just buy the object as a singular entity. I'm not saying that dumping can't be a thing but the lines aren't always clear cut either. You also have to get into bog standard business scaling issues and profit vs investment. If you take on debt to invest in capital that you believe will lower per unit costs if you build enough volume and then turn a profit, you're "selling at a loss" but that's how tons of business works, that's why there is risk right? Doesn't seem good to discourage that. It seems more fruitful to approach things from the perspective of monopolies, competition, corporate governance etc in general, granted not that a lot of governments have been great about that either in recent history.
      - mishellaneous 3mo ago
        this is a good point. > It seems more fruitful to approach things from the perspective of monopolies, competition, corporate governance etc in general where to go to learn more about these topics?
    - wqaatwt 3mo ago
      Well if their gross margins are positive (I really doubt they aren’t) there isn’t much of a case to be made. You can expect meaningful R&D and capital investments to pay off short term and you can’t make any meaningful projections either to determine if they are dumping or not.
  - bee_rider 3mo ago
    Because the US models haven’t had to compete on the actual price of providing the unsubsidized service, the Chinese models are probably ahead of us in terms of what can actually be delivered profitably (which is a pretty bad result given the level of investment).
  - cyberax 3mo ago
    It would make it impossible for makers of 3rd-party harnesses to compete with Claude Code. This principle is not just limited to LLMs. > You're just upset that you don't get to use their VC money the way you want to use it lol. I don't particularly care about Claude or harnesses.
    - jack_pp 3mo ago
      the fact that there are 10+ harnesses means you are wrong. Also, if other harnesses need to work without the literal SOTA then they need to be better than Claude Code. If their incentive is to reduce token usage then again, they will evolve to be better than CC
- dcrazy 3mo ago
  Do you also think all you can eat buffets should be illegal? What about early bird specials? Free soda with a large fry? Happy hour wings? Where does the “bundling” end?
  - butlike 3mo ago
    1.) All you can eat buffets ARE the product, not a loss leader, so there's no bundle there. 2.) Early bird specials, again, aren't loss leaders. They're a way to get sales on the left side of the bell curve. The restaurant food is still the product, not a subsidy. 3.) Free soda with large fry doesn't actually exist (though it sounds like it should, right?) 4.) Happy hour wings (again, see #2) None of these are bundling so I don't really get why you bothered to comment
    - jefftk 3mo ago
      > Free soda with large fry doesn't actually exist I just searched and found free medium fries with a large soda at McD if you order through the app. Seems like bundling to me, and you have to use their particular app.
      - cyberax 3mo ago
        Sure, and perhaps it should be prohibited. But it's also a matter of impact. But it's just hard to care too much about a commoditized product and an app with tons of competition. And McDonald's is not keeping any competitors away by locking their fries offer behind their app.
JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
If that were the only issue, I’d say Anthropic were fine. Dario took the tremendous goodwill his row with Hegseth gave him and blew it. The major problems are Anthropic’s back-end instability and front-end kludginess (Electron!) revealing the gap between Anthropic’s capability and marketing, and Dario bizarrely copying Altman’s 2023 fire-and-brimstone playbook that had already massively backfired.
- trollbridge 3mo ago
  Using Electron in this day and age shows a particular lack of effort, considering how easy it is to use an agent harness to build native versions of apps. I mean, we're a tiny little business and we somehow find the bandwidth to do it.
  - JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
    It shows Anthropic doesn’t trust its agents to write native apps. That cuts cleanly against its marketing. And if the Electron app were flawless, that would be one thing. It isn’t. It’s buggy, feature light, constantly updating and slow.
    - threatofrain 3mo ago
      Anthropic being a big company means they could trivially hire an iOS team. The failure to make a good native app is a business decision. Claude or not, leadership could've snapped their fingers, allocated the budget, and fixed the frontend UX by now if it were important enough.
      - jefftk 3mo ago
        > Anthropic being a big company means they could trivially hire an iOS team Anthropic is primarily limited by how fast they can identify and onboard people who will be a good fit. Allocating that to ios would trade off against allocating that staffing growth elsewhere (ex: reliability, making the next generation model even better).
dukky 3mo ago
Part of the point is that they've added all sorts of caveats - `claude -p` used to be "using their software", but isn't anymore, even though it's just invoking the same harness non-interactively
- dukky 3mo ago
  https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-claude-agent-sdk-with-your-claude-plan https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau... Looks like they actually walked this bit back
  - nickthegreek 3mo ago
    And their constant flipflopping is why they lost their Goodwill with me. It was too much work just to make sure I wasn't breaking their AUP week to week. They will say one thing and then directly contradict it in a social media post. I was constantly losing features that were the reasons I signed up with them.
  - bakies 3mo ago
    "pausing" not walking back, I've already shifted to other harnesses
Forgeties79 3mo ago
You shouldn't have to pay your carrier to unlock your phone and in many countries it's actually illegal. >if you don't want to get locked in to Claude Code All of these companies are built around eventually locking you in then selling to some other company. "Just pay more" is not a real solution. Once the competition dies down and there are only a handful of companies (if we are even lucky enough for that) with viable LLM products, your ability to jump ship is going to diminish. It always does. There is no way they aren't working on better lock in tactics.
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
  > and there are only a handful of companies (if we are even lucky enough for that) with viable LLM products, your ability to jump ship is going to diminish The global LLM market seems trending towards fragmentation. And lock-in appears to be diminishing, not increasing, particularly for companies that set up a multi-model workflow.
  - Forgeties79 3mo ago
    >The global LLM market seems trending towards fragmentation. Wait until investors stop giving out money out of FOMO. Google/Facebook/etc. gonna swoop in on anyone who is remotely viable and independent anyway
    - JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
      > Wait until investors stop giving out money out of FOMO OpenRouter isn’t subsidizing much. No subsidy would mean the subscriptions go away in favor of API only. That doesn’t really speak at all to either of your points regarding consolidation or lock-in.
      - deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
rvz 3mo ago
> They're subsidizing their tokens as long as you use their software. That's a fair exchange, I never understood why people took issue with it. Except they themselves cannot afford it and as the article also mentioned, their level of service and uptime is atrocious for the price they are offering. Their unpredictable pricing model is designed to make it easy for you to lose more money without you knowing. Unannounced model switching, nerfing old/new models, classifiers detecting 'unsafe' instructions to downgrade the selected model and overcharging API prices and locking subscriptions to a broken vibe-coded harness. You don't get anything by defending Anthropic, given their past behavior.
- aetherson 3mo ago
  Okay, if it's bad for the price they're offering, use the more expensive API. If they themselves can't afford it I don't know what you want here.
- harry19023 3mo ago
  Yes, the subsidized loss leader product is evolving fast. If you want stable costs, the API plan is right there. You simultaneously say they cannot afford the API pricing but also claim they are overcharging, it sounds like you just want to get mad ad Anthropic.
  - rvz 3mo ago
    > If you want stable costs, the API plan is right there. Why don't you ask Microsoft [0], Tesla [1] and Alibaba [2] on why they believe it is not only expensive, but it also a security risk for them? Like I said, You don't get anything for defending Anthropic and they are not going to hire you into their sales team. > You simultaneously say they cannot afford the API pricing but also claim they are overcharging, it sounds like you just want to get mad ad Anthropic. Read it again. "Except they themselves cannot afford it" They is "Anthropic" given that I said "themselves". Who are the ones that cannot afford to subsidize tokens forever due to the even cheaper Chinese alternatives. They all know that the answer is open weight models and why Anthropic cannot raise prices and why the above companies are ditching them for open weight models. [0] https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-cancels-claude-code-licenses-shifting-developers-to-github-copilot-cli-a-move-likely-driven-by-financial-motives https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-cancels-c... [1] https://letsdatascience.com/news/tesla-limits-employee-ai-spending-to-200-weekly-e43eda9d https://letsdatascience.com/news/tesla-limits-employee-ai-sp... [2] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/alibaba-bans-anthropics-claude-code-after-an-alleged-hidden-china-detection-backdoor-is-uncovered-employees-told-to-switch-to-qoder-as-the-rift-between-the-firms-widens https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
tikhonj 3mo ago
I mean, it has definite Borg Bill Gates vibes, doesn't it? It's totally reasonable for tech folks to be leery of a company using a strong market position from one system (Windows/Claude) to push mediocre complementary software (IE/CC).
- keeda 3mo ago
  That analogy only works partially, because when IE6 was released, it was the best browser by far. IE only became terrible once MSFT actively stopped developing it, and other browsers kept getting better. On the other hand, Claude Code was the best coding agent when it was released, but there's no way Anthropic is going to let its cash cow stagnate. Like, I think pretty much all of Anthropic's revenue spike in the last few months was driven by the tokenmaxxing mania. My take is most of Claude Code's problems originate from insufficient compute capacity and all kinds of workarounds they're doing to mitigate that fundamental limitation.
mrtksn 3mo ago
The issue with this kind of subsidy is that it is designed to lock you in and not as a loss leader. In other words, it is not like giving free nuts at bar to make you drink more beer but more like Nestle giving baby formula so that the babies get use to that instead of mothers milk
- HDThoreaun 3mo ago
  I think the subscription is also designed as a loss leader. The ai labs know the real money is in enterprise, and that enterprises mostly don’t want to use the most expensive option. How do they convince enterprises to sign up for their expensive api then? Give it to the employees for cheap so they tell bosses they want Claude code at work.
- dannyw 3mo ago
  There are lots of ethical concerns around baby formula that’s not prevalent in the case of AI subscription token subsidies. Also, not everyone uses their plan to the usage limits; the idea of a prepaid bundle being better value if you commit is not novel.
harry19023 3mo ago
Agreed. The level of entitlement around how we all deserve to use a product in a category that didn't even exist 12 months ago with increasing performance at the same price forever is insane.
- andrewmutz 3mo ago
  I also think that the people who are complaining loudest about Anthropics pricing and changes are the customers Anthropic is least interested in retaining. From my experience people who complain loudly about the price tend to be people who are either (1) working primarily on hobby projects so are unwilling to pay much for Claude Code or (2) using astronomical amount of tokens through elaborately orchestrated multi-agent setups that only make sense when someone else is paying the bill.
  - wqaatwt 3mo ago
    Short term yes. But there is a reason why IDEs, game engine and other development tools have very high cheap or free versions for this market segment. Since these users end up having a huge influence on what companies they work at / end up working at spend their money on. Of course LLMs are a commodity at this point but if someone is using Codex, Pi etc. at home it becomes more likely they won’t be picking Claude Code at their day job either.
- cmrdporcupine 3mo ago
  C'mon, get real. The monthly subscription costs on these services are several multiples what software engineers have formerly paid for development tools. I have worked in shops that made it difficult for me just to get a paid for RustRover or CLion license, and had to out of pocket it. The monthly sub for Claude or Codex is equivalent to the total license cost for that. It's not entitled to expect your $200/month tooling expense to have a level of reliability and consistency. If your employer is paying for it, fine. I am my own employer. I don't fancy becoming dependent on tooling that costs me as much as my family's whole monthly mobile plan and then having it degrade in unpredictable ways or rug pull me on quota. Or have geo-political drama as part of its release cycle.
areoform 3mo ago
.
- efromvt 3mo ago
  I'm not sure the security/safety stuff is entirely in their control at this point, though you can argue that they are indirectly responsible through encouraging regulation via their positions on safety/risk.
mdavid626 3mo ago
I want only their model, the rest is just garbage. I used Opus with pi.dev, worked perfectly fine. Fast and does exactly what it needs to do. Claude Code is slow, sluggish, buggy. Why are you forcing me to use it? Why should I pay an order of magnitude more to use pi.dev? That doesn't sound reasonable to me.
- helsinkiandrew 3mo ago
  > Why should I pay an order of magnitude more to use pi.dev? The monthly plans are heavily subsidized by the API users - why should Anthropic subsidize your use of pi.dev?
  - croes 3mo ago
    Where is the difference when I hit my 5 hour limit or weekly limit with Claude Code compared to PI or OpenCode?
    - internet2000 3mo ago
      If you do it outside of Claude Code, you're not using their software, which is the intended outcome of the subsidy.
      - croes 3mo ago
        Why? What additional benefit do they get if I use their tools? Every request goes to their LLM either way
        Degorath 3mo ago
        Well, they are wishing to lock you into their ecosystem, so that switching would be a high-friction decision. And then they can simply raise prices without you leaving.
  - wqaatwt 3mo ago
    I’m not sure why are people throwing the word “subsidizing” so much. Do we know that they are actually losing money on subscriptions? Because if not that’s just normal market segmentation since enterprise users are willing to pay many times mores than private individuals. Anthropic isn’t setting is’s price based on cost + fixed profit margin they are charging as much as each market is willing to bear..
croes 3mo ago
Because the subscription aren’t flat rates, they have a limit. What does it matter which tool I use when I hit the limit? And even if you pay-as-you-go Anthropic seems to prefer their own tools https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48788599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48788599
- gck1 3mo ago
  > What does it matter which tool I use when I hit the limit? A third party harness may have a misconfiguration of prompt caching, leading to more load on Anthropic's servers, they could also have wildly different usage patterns (Hermes, openclaw etc), also making it hard to predict the load. If you constrain everyone to use your own harness, at least you're in control of that. The first point is sort of funny though, because their own harness had a misconfigured prompt caching for several months during the times where they were crying about third party harnesses (/resume was busting cache all the time).

lfuller 3mo ago

In Canada at least it’s not legal to charge for unlocking a carrier-locked phone as it’s considered anti-competitive.

cyberax 3mo ago

This method of bundling should be illegal in general, as it stiffles competition.

jack_pp 3mo ago
How does it stifle competition / innovation? You can use other harnesses, pay API for anthropic models or cheap chinese models. You're just upset that you don't get to use their VC money the way you want to use it lol. It either is a good deal or it isn't, if it is just say, thanks free VC money, if it isn't say fuck you.
- thfuran 3mo ago
  Any service or product delivered at a loss seems pretty plainly anti-competetive. Whether it is actually subsidized to that extent, I’m not sure.
  - dcrazy 3mo ago
    The entire LLMaaS industry is priced below cost. Even if the marginal cost of electricity and bandwidth to produce one token is less than the price of that token, the amortized infrastructure and R&D costs make the entire venture unprofitable. If pricing below cost were illegal, it would essentially make starting up a business—any business—impossible.
    - wqaatwt 3mo ago
      You can’t calculate what that cost is though regardless. If the gross margin is positive you can’t confidently challenge their longterm growth projections however optimistic or unrealistic they are.
  - simianwords 3mo ago
    you have no evidence that it is served at a loss
  - xoa 3mo ago
    >Any service or product delivered at a loss seems pretty plainly anti-competitive. You have to get into the weeds though on what exactly counts as a "product delivered". Like, Apple doesn't charge for new versions of macOS. But are "Macs" separate stacks together or are they the fusion of hardware and software, and if so on what levels? There are all sorts of products surrounding us that are running software that we still treat as unified objects after all, right down to smart light bulbs or a "plain" lithium battery pack which still requires controllers to manage charging and USB negotiation etc. Chips and software are in tons and tons of "basic" hardware stuff yet we just buy the object as a singular entity. I'm not saying that dumping can't be a thing but the lines aren't always clear cut either. You also have to get into bog standard business scaling issues and profit vs investment. If you take on debt to invest in capital that you believe will lower per unit costs if you build enough volume and then turn a profit, you're "selling at a loss" but that's how tons of business works, that's why there is risk right? Doesn't seem good to discourage that. It seems more fruitful to approach things from the perspective of monopolies, competition, corporate governance etc in general, granted not that a lot of governments have been great about that either in recent history.
    - mishellaneous 3mo ago
      this is a good point. > It seems more fruitful to approach things from the perspective of monopolies, competition, corporate governance etc in general where to go to learn more about these topics?
  - wqaatwt 3mo ago
    Well if their gross margins are positive (I really doubt they aren’t) there isn’t much of a case to be made. You can expect meaningful R&D and capital investments to pay off short term and you can’t make any meaningful projections either to determine if they are dumping or not.
- bee_rider 3mo ago
  Because the US models haven’t had to compete on the actual price of providing the unsubsidized service, the Chinese models are probably ahead of us in terms of what can actually be delivered profitably (which is a pretty bad result given the level of investment).
- cyberax 3mo ago
  It would make it impossible for makers of 3rd-party harnesses to compete with Claude Code. This principle is not just limited to LLMs. > You're just upset that you don't get to use their VC money the way you want to use it lol. I don't particularly care about Claude or harnesses.
  - jack_pp 3mo ago
    the fact that there are 10+ harnesses means you are wrong. Also, if other harnesses need to work without the literal SOTA then they need to be better than Claude Code. If their incentive is to reduce token usage then again, they will evolve to be better than CC
dcrazy 3mo ago
Do you also think all you can eat buffets should be illegal? What about early bird specials? Free soda with a large fry? Happy hour wings? Where does the “bundling” end?
- butlike 3mo ago
  1.) All you can eat buffets ARE the product, not a loss leader, so there's no bundle there. 2.) Early bird specials, again, aren't loss leaders. They're a way to get sales on the left side of the bell curve. The restaurant food is still the product, not a subsidy. 3.) Free soda with large fry doesn't actually exist (though it sounds like it should, right?) 4.) Happy hour wings (again, see #2) None of these are bundling so I don't really get why you bothered to comment
  - jefftk 3mo ago
    > Free soda with large fry doesn't actually exist I just searched and found free medium fries with a large soda at McD if you order through the app. Seems like bundling to me, and you have to use their particular app.
    - cyberax 3mo ago
      Sure, and perhaps it should be prohibited. But it's also a matter of impact. But it's just hard to care too much about a commoditized product and an app with tons of competition. And McDonald's is not keeping any competitors away by locking their fries offer behind their app.

JumpCrisscross 3mo ago

If that were the only issue, I’d say Anthropic were fine. Dario took the tremendous goodwill his row with Hegseth gave him and blew it. The major problems are Anthropic’s back-end instability and front-end kludginess (Electron!) revealing the gap between Anthropic’s capability and marketing, and Dario bizarrely copying Altman’s 2023 fire-and-brimstone playbook that had already massively backfired.

trollbridge 3mo ago
Using Electron in this day and age shows a particular lack of effort, considering how easy it is to use an agent harness to build native versions of apps. I mean, we're a tiny little business and we somehow find the bandwidth to do it.
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
  It shows Anthropic doesn’t trust its agents to write native apps. That cuts cleanly against its marketing. And if the Electron app were flawless, that would be one thing. It isn’t. It’s buggy, feature light, constantly updating and slow.
  - threatofrain 3mo ago
    Anthropic being a big company means they could trivially hire an iOS team. The failure to make a good native app is a business decision. Claude or not, leadership could've snapped their fingers, allocated the budget, and fixed the frontend UX by now if it were important enough.
    - jefftk 3mo ago
      > Anthropic being a big company means they could trivially hire an iOS team Anthropic is primarily limited by how fast they can identify and onboard people who will be a good fit. Allocating that to ios would trade off against allocating that staffing growth elsewhere (ex: reliability, making the next generation model even better).

dukky 3mo ago

Part of the point is that they've added all sorts of caveats - `claude -p` used to be "using their software", but isn't anymore, even though it's just invoking the same harness non-interactively

dukky 3mo ago
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-claude-agent-sdk-with-your-claude-plan https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau... Looks like they actually walked this bit back
- nickthegreek 3mo ago
  And their constant flipflopping is why they lost their Goodwill with me. It was too much work just to make sure I wasn't breaking their AUP week to week. They will say one thing and then directly contradict it in a social media post. I was constantly losing features that were the reasons I signed up with them.
- bakies 3mo ago
  "pausing" not walking back, I've already shifted to other harnesses

Forgeties79 3mo ago

You shouldn't have to pay your carrier to unlock your phone and in many countries it's actually illegal. >if you don't want to get locked in to Claude Code All of these companies are built around eventually locking you in then selling to some other company. "Just pay more" is not a real solution. Once the competition dies down and there are only a handful of companies (if we are even lucky enough for that) with viable LLM products, your ability to jump ship is going to diminish. It always does. There is no way they aren't working on better lock in tactics.

JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
> and there are only a handful of companies (if we are even lucky enough for that) with viable LLM products, your ability to jump ship is going to diminish The global LLM market seems trending towards fragmentation. And lock-in appears to be diminishing, not increasing, particularly for companies that set up a multi-model workflow.
- Forgeties79 3mo ago
  >The global LLM market seems trending towards fragmentation. Wait until investors stop giving out money out of FOMO. Google/Facebook/etc. gonna swoop in on anyone who is remotely viable and independent anyway
  - JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
    > Wait until investors stop giving out money out of FOMO OpenRouter isn’t subsidizing much. No subsidy would mean the subscriptions go away in favor of API only. That doesn’t really speak at all to either of your points regarding consolidation or lock-in.
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]

rvz 3mo ago

> They're subsidizing their tokens as long as you use their software. That's a fair exchange, I never understood why people took issue with it. Except they themselves cannot afford it and as the article also mentioned, their level of service and uptime is atrocious for the price they are offering. Their unpredictable pricing model is designed to make it easy for you to lose more money without you knowing. Unannounced model switching, nerfing old/new models, classifiers detecting 'unsafe' instructions to downgrade the selected model and overcharging API prices and locking subscriptions to a broken vibe-coded harness. You don't get anything by defending Anthropic, given their past behavior.

aetherson 3mo ago
Okay, if it's bad for the price they're offering, use the more expensive API. If they themselves can't afford it I don't know what you want here.
harry19023 3mo ago
Yes, the subsidized loss leader product is evolving fast. If you want stable costs, the API plan is right there. You simultaneously say they cannot afford the API pricing but also claim they are overcharging, it sounds like you just want to get mad ad Anthropic.
- rvz 3mo ago
  > If you want stable costs, the API plan is right there. Why don't you ask Microsoft [0], Tesla [1] and Alibaba [2] on why they believe it is not only expensive, but it also a security risk for them? Like I said, You don't get anything for defending Anthropic and they are not going to hire you into their sales team. > You simultaneously say they cannot afford the API pricing but also claim they are overcharging, it sounds like you just want to get mad ad Anthropic. Read it again. "Except they themselves cannot afford it" They is "Anthropic" given that I said "themselves". Who are the ones that cannot afford to subsidize tokens forever due to the even cheaper Chinese alternatives. They all know that the answer is open weight models and why Anthropic cannot raise prices and why the above companies are ditching them for open weight models. [0] https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-cancels-claude-code-licenses-shifting-developers-to-github-copilot-cli-a-move-likely-driven-by-financial-motives https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-cancels-c... [1] https://letsdatascience.com/news/tesla-limits-employee-ai-spending-to-200-weekly-e43eda9d https://letsdatascience.com/news/tesla-limits-employee-ai-sp... [2] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/alibaba-bans-anthropics-claude-code-after-an-alleged-hidden-china-detection-backdoor-is-uncovered-employees-told-to-switch-to-qoder-as-the-rift-between-the-firms-widens https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

tikhonj 3mo ago

I mean, it has definite Borg Bill Gates vibes, doesn't it? It's totally reasonable for tech folks to be leery of a company using a strong market position from one system (Windows/Claude) to push mediocre complementary software (IE/CC).

keeda 3mo ago
That analogy only works partially, because when IE6 was released, it was the best browser by far. IE only became terrible once MSFT actively stopped developing it, and other browsers kept getting better. On the other hand, Claude Code was the best coding agent when it was released, but there's no way Anthropic is going to let its cash cow stagnate. Like, I think pretty much all of Anthropic's revenue spike in the last few months was driven by the tokenmaxxing mania. My take is most of Claude Code's problems originate from insufficient compute capacity and all kinds of workarounds they're doing to mitigate that fundamental limitation.

mrtksn 3mo ago

The issue with this kind of subsidy is that it is designed to lock you in and not as a loss leader. In other words, it is not like giving free nuts at bar to make you drink more beer but more like Nestle giving baby formula so that the babies get use to that instead of mothers milk

HDThoreaun 3mo ago
I think the subscription is also designed as a loss leader. The ai labs know the real money is in enterprise, and that enterprises mostly don’t want to use the most expensive option. How do they convince enterprises to sign up for their expensive api then? Give it to the employees for cheap so they tell bosses they want Claude code at work.
dannyw 3mo ago
There are lots of ethical concerns around baby formula that’s not prevalent in the case of AI subscription token subsidies. Also, not everyone uses their plan to the usage limits; the idea of a prepaid bundle being better value if you commit is not novel.

harry19023 3mo ago

Agreed. The level of entitlement around how we all deserve to use a product in a category that didn't even exist 12 months ago with increasing performance at the same price forever is insane.

andrewmutz 3mo ago
I also think that the people who are complaining loudest about Anthropics pricing and changes are the customers Anthropic is least interested in retaining. From my experience people who complain loudly about the price tend to be people who are either (1) working primarily on hobby projects so are unwilling to pay much for Claude Code or (2) using astronomical amount of tokens through elaborately orchestrated multi-agent setups that only make sense when someone else is paying the bill.
- wqaatwt 3mo ago
  Short term yes. But there is a reason why IDEs, game engine and other development tools have very high cheap or free versions for this market segment. Since these users end up having a huge influence on what companies they work at / end up working at spend their money on. Of course LLMs are a commodity at this point but if someone is using Codex, Pi etc. at home it becomes more likely they won’t be picking Claude Code at their day job either.
cmrdporcupine 3mo ago
C'mon, get real. The monthly subscription costs on these services are several multiples what software engineers have formerly paid for development tools. I have worked in shops that made it difficult for me just to get a paid for RustRover or CLion license, and had to out of pocket it. The monthly sub for Claude or Codex is equivalent to the total license cost for that. It's not entitled to expect your $200/month tooling expense to have a level of reliability and consistency. If your employer is paying for it, fine. I am my own employer. I don't fancy becoming dependent on tooling that costs me as much as my family's whole monthly mobile plan and then having it degrade in unpredictable ways or rug pull me on quota. Or have geo-political drama as part of its release cycle.

areoform 3mo ago

efromvt 3mo ago
I'm not sure the security/safety stuff is entirely in their control at this point, though you can argue that they are indirectly responsible through encouraging regulation via their positions on safety/risk.

mdavid626 3mo ago

I want only their model, the rest is just garbage. I used Opus with pi.dev, worked perfectly fine. Fast and does exactly what it needs to do. Claude Code is slow, sluggish, buggy. Why are you forcing me to use it? Why should I pay an order of magnitude more to use pi.dev? That doesn't sound reasonable to me.

helsinkiandrew 3mo ago
> Why should I pay an order of magnitude more to use pi.dev? The monthly plans are heavily subsidized by the API users - why should Anthropic subsidize your use of pi.dev?
- croes 3mo ago
  Where is the difference when I hit my 5 hour limit or weekly limit with Claude Code compared to PI or OpenCode?
  - internet2000 3mo ago
    If you do it outside of Claude Code, you're not using their software, which is the intended outcome of the subsidy.
    - croes 3mo ago
      Why? What additional benefit do they get if I use their tools? Every request goes to their LLM either way
      - Degorath 3mo ago
        Well, they are wishing to lock you into their ecosystem, so that switching would be a high-friction decision. And then they can simply raise prices without you leaving.
- wqaatwt 3mo ago
  I’m not sure why are people throwing the word “subsidizing” so much. Do we know that they are actually losing money on subscriptions? Because if not that’s just normal market segmentation since enterprise users are willing to pay many times mores than private individuals. Anthropic isn’t setting is’s price based on cost + fixed profit margin they are charging as much as each market is willing to bear..

croes 3mo ago

Because the subscription aren’t flat rates, they have a limit. What does it matter which tool I use when I hit the limit? And even if you pay-as-you-go Anthropic seems to prefer their own tools https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48788599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48788599

gck1 3mo ago
> What does it matter which tool I use when I hit the limit? A third party harness may have a misconfiguration of prompt caching, leading to more load on Anthropic's servers, they could also have wildly different usage patterns (Hermes, openclaw etc), also making it hard to predict the load. If you constrain everyone to use your own harness, at least you're in control of that. The first point is sort of funny though, because their own harness had a misconfigured prompt caching for several months during the times where they were crying about third party harnesses (/resume was busting cache all the time).