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Where Anthropic f'ed up was treating their monetization the way they treat model training. Turns out that success in experimentation is not transferrable. They

by a1371 1mo ago

Where Anthropic f'ed up was treating their monetization the way they treat model training. Turns out that success in experimentation is not transferrable. They have tried to find the highest that the market pays for sota models; however, on the consumer side, this is just too confusing and unsettling: "You can only use Fable for a week as a part of your plan" "Be ready! You have to start paying per token!" "Nevermind! we extended it for a couple more weeks" "Wait, now it's up to half your usage" "Ok, now its..." Most people want to not care. We want our AI like electricity -- Kind of just there no matter how easy/hard is for the supply. You don't want your electricity company to be on the brink of cutting you off any second. That's Anthropic. You don't feel they want to give you a dependable service for an, albeit premium, price. It's a constant bargaining game. That forces people to look beyond the walled garden. There, they find models that are fine... and without the shenanigans.

irishcoffee 1mo ago
It’s almost like they’re trying to sell a solution looking for a problem! Startup lesson #1, don’t do that.
ls612 1mo ago
The fact is that demand for tokens at electric bill rates so far outstrips what can be supplied currently not just with frontier models, but with open weights cheap models too. Running an always on Deepseek flash agent would cost three figures a month at API prices.
- dannyw 1mo ago
  Total costs sure, electricity only costs no. My two DGX Sparks run DS4 Flash at about 50tok/s concurrency=1 which is more than suitable; at about 150W total wall power when generating. That’s about A$16 a month in electricity if I ran it 7x24x30.
fluidcruft 1mo ago
Yeah, I agree with this. The constant state of "...will the rug be pulled?!?" does discourage relying on it as a model and building a workflow on it. Anthropic used to just be a reliable thing you could play with. Now it's this constant source of anxiety. It also didn't help that the government yanked it which adds another source of anxiety since OpenAI is on much better terms with the administration and the administration seems corrupt enough that they would mess with Anthropic if they got a big enough donation from OpenAI. But anyway after Sol entered the picture, I don't think Anthropic can get away with this as much and I also think they're going to face a massive backlash from Max subscribers if they do end up ending the +50% promotion at the end of the month because Sol is a Fable peer and priced very competitively.
- adriand 1mo ago
  As soon as I started using Fable I was like, okay, this is probably as good a model as I will need for software engineering going forward. I still feel that way. I don’t need a better model, I need a faster Fable. The thing I miss most about programming is flow, and the constant bouncing between terminal tabs sucks. I’d love to do one thing at a time, with Fable, quickly.
  - codazoda 1mo ago
    You may or may not like agents mode. I also hate flipping tabs, but I enjoy using agent mode with well named sessions. I still stick with a single session until I must move to another, then I leave them around for a few days until I’m sure I won’t need to pick up where I left off again. Command: claude agents
    - pastel8739 1mo ago
      I don’t think they were complaining about literally flipping tabs but rather just needing to context switch so often. This doesn’t sound like it helps with that.
  - jmalicki 1mo ago
    There is GPT 5.6 Sol on Cerebras if you want to try that experience for an ungodly sum of money (not getting into GPT 5.6 Sol vs Fable, but only one is available on Cerebras) for an 11x speedup.
    - hakimg 1mo ago
      OpenAI also have 5.6 fast mode for a 2.5x speedup for 2x cost and is available on standard plans.
  - kbrannigan 1mo ago
    remember 4 year ago we use to : have stack overflow open, documentation, obscure forums plus other tabs. An ide open with 20 tabs open each file a component, a class or an interface We also use to hold entire codebases in our brain.
dannyw 1mo ago
I agree they’ve done a bit too many pricing / usage promotions and A/B tests. The period was also marked with many billing bugs, like spending people’s usage credits for included Fable for a few hours (gave me a huge shock), but to their credit they refunded it.
- hparadiz 1mo ago
  They are fumbling the bag hard. AI's utility is for general purpose. The floor is rapidly improving from below them. With chatgpt I'm uploading all my day to day stuff. Meanwhile Claude is only for occasional super hard tech problems which are rapidly improving with being solvable easily by Sol. So what's the value add? Their disrespect for their users is also another problem. You only get one shot to make a good impression.
  - 8cvor6j844qw_d6 1mo ago
    > With chatgpt I'm uploading all my day to day stuff. Same, it's been a while since I logged into Claude web. ChatGPT web usage being separate from Codex usage limit is a nice touch unlike Claude.
    - hparadiz 1mo ago
      If I got cut off from asking chatgpt what the status of a spreadsheet is for handling my personal bills due to my rate limit from coding work I would not be coding on it at all. Glad someone over there realized this obvious fact.
      - mgkimsal 1mo ago
        I'd go further and say chatgpt offering continuing service just with degraded model keeps me in their 'free web use' tier. I have API keys for coding stuff, but for most of my day to day use of public llm, I know I won't get 'blocked' using ChatGPT. Yes, the model may change, and I'll get 'worse' output, but usually I can't tell the difference. Using Claude for day to day stuff, I get completely locked out after so many hours. Again, I have API keys for Claude as well, and use it for 'pro' work, but day to day chat stuff... it's not my daily driver.
YetAnotherNick 1mo ago
I don't think Anthropic wants a stable experience on their consumer subscription plans. It is just used for customer acquisition who will then ask their employer to pay for enterprise plan(assuming most employer care about data control) which is based on tokens. Most coders don't pay for tokens themselves. It's just on reddit and HN you would think that everybody does.
- cactusplant7374 1mo ago
  Dario said in an interview that they originally wanted to be an enterprise only company.
  - andai 1mo ago
    What changed their mind?
    - gensym 1mo ago
      I would guess that it's hard to compete with Google without a consumer component. Most enterprises already have contracts and policies with Google, so anything driven from the top-down is likely to prefer Google. (And failing that, there was a real risk for OpenAI to be the default for enterprises.) To defeat that, you need to frontline employees the chance to experience better tooling and models which is where the subsidized subscriptions come in.
      - trollbridge 1mo ago
        Or AWS, or Microsoft, etc who have all the other stuff enterprises want.
- codebje 1mo ago
  I pay for my tokens for my own projects, at least when the ones Google seems willing to keep throwing at me for free don't cut it. I'd think that's not too uncommon, especially here where there's likely a high ratio of hobby coders (whether also professionals or otherwise).
rob 1mo ago
As Anthropic does this, OpenAI Is giving everybody resets like every other day now on Twitter. I'm strongly considering biting the bullet and just ditching my $200/month Claude Code plan for the Codex one instead, especially because I keep running into my weekly limits (even sticking to Opus.)
- technotony 1mo ago
  Where do you get those? I got about 5 resets in July but none since then
  - wild_egg 1mo ago
    You should have just got a reset today at least. There are several sites around for tracking them now. I use this one: https://codex-resets.com https://codex-resets.com
  - mondojesus 1mo ago
    I got a reset today and also one of those reset tokens which I'll probably use sometime this week.
- Petersipoi 1mo ago
  I ditched Claude Code $200/month a couple of months ago in favor of Codex $200/month. The value is night and day. 1. No 5 hour usage limit 2. Weekly usage gets reset CONSTANTLY. It's crazy. The longest I've ever seen it go without a reset is maybe 5 days? 3. I don't feel like OpenAI is constantly trying to fuck with me. Unlike Anthropic. I would way rather have Sol all day every data, consistently, than a slightly better Fable for like, 1 prompt every 5 hours, and only when Anthropic decides to not treat me like a cyber criminal. Believe in yourself as much as Claude believes your CRUD app is going to hack the pentagon. 4. Getting access to image generation, though I don't use it too much, is a nice perk compared to Anthropic. edit: Should mention that I had like 4 banked manual resets as well. It feels like OpenAI wants me to use their product, whereas Anthropic wants my money while giving me a nerfed experience
  - 1mo ago
pbreit 1mo ago
The incremental improvements seem like they are going to be pretty modest from this point.
dyauspitr 1mo ago
DeepSeek is doing pretty much the same thing they said they weren’t going to change their prices after the 75% discount for the foreseeable future. That foreseeable future turned out to be two months.
- benjiro29 1mo ago
  It did not exactly help that we saw traffic to DS (over OpenCode) jump from around 1.6T tokens per day, to over 14T token in a matter of days. Nobody has the compute to deal with such increases. This keeps happening with every good new model release. People jumping from one to another, and as prices get lower, they start using the models even more. People make not like to hear it but prices and usage limits are ways to shape traffic. The third option is the nuclear one like Kimi did, by just stopping to sell subscription at all. But that is something that DeepSeek can not do as all they offer is API. Even OpenAI despite having the most compute is not immune to client influx = capacity issues. As people found their usage dropping, despite the push to the easier to run Luna models. Reality is, that compute can not keep up with demand, especially when models get more capable and cheaper. What trigger people being using them more, what trigger compute crisis's. This constant up and down cycle is going to keep happening for a long time, as this new market grows and eventually, somewhere in the future stabilizes. But yea, that is still going to be a few more years for sure.
llm_nerd 1mo ago
>You don't feel they want to give you a dependable service for an, albeit premium, price. It's a constant bargaining game We all know that the subscription prices are not at all sustainable for these providers. You all do, right? Yes, they're struggling to segment the market and find a way to make money, and that basically relies upon emptying the pockets of whales. As someone enjoying a hilariously subsidized Max plan, I understand that, and I don't think they're trying to scam me in some way. And both sides of this equation understand that the market is competitive, and maybe more competitive than they thought it would be. Like, would you rather they did pull Fable when they first said they would? Or that they'd cut quota? I wouldn't. But I'm glad that Kimi K3 and GPT 5.6 Sol and the latest GLM and Qwen and...I love that this has forced Anthropic to change plans. I'm not going to hold that against them.
- zsoltkacsandi 1mo ago
  > We all know that the subscription prices are not at all sustainable for these providers. You all do, right? I don’t think it is fair to expect from people to know or understand this. If you buy something or subscribe to a service there is a price tag on it. You get X for Y amount of price. That is how consumers conditioned for decades. They do not care what is your customer acquisition strategy. If Antrophic cannot provide reliable services on that price, customers will be unsatisfied.
  - llm_nerd 1mo ago
    >If Antrophic cannot provide reliable services on that price, customers will be unsatisfied. The complaint wasn't "I paid for X and now they say they aren't going to give me X", it was "I paid for X, and they said hey guess what we're doing a promo and you get a bonus extra 2X, and also you get special limited time access to our new product Y", that's a hell of a thing to complain about. Look, I pay a lot of money to Anthropic and I'm pretty happy that competitors have forced them to abandon their plans to add premium charges on these bonuses, but it's pretty ridiculous seeing the whining and gnashing, somehow turning this into complaints. It very much has a "oh no my lobster is too buttery, my blanket too warm" kind of feel to it.
- 1mo ago
etempleton 1mo ago
OpenAI is also now actively discounting their model. They just offered a free month to users. Both companies seem spooked by what I have to imagine is slowing user growth.
- anukin 1mo ago
  Where is the free month offer going on? Are you talking about usage resets?
  - wavewrangler 1mo ago
    he probably canceled his subscription and they offered him a free month as a result
- Zylokloto 1mo ago
  Might just be preparation for their IPOs. But the agentic layer is being worked on, agents will start consuming more and more tokens
SkyPuncher 1mo ago
Yea, I don’t have any interest in trying Fable because I’m not interested in the BS that’s going to come with it. I’m at the point where I need stability and predictability. I want the B- student who shows up everyday rather than the A+ student that’s unreliable.
- AgentOrange1234 1mo ago
  Yes, I feel like you can just sense the garbage coming. Age/identity verification, mandatory data sharing, morality policing, "Answer Engine Optimization" ads and influence peddling... it's going to be so painful to watch it all enshittify.
  - ryandrake 1mo ago
    OP made the "electricity" analogy, and that's really all people want. I want to plug something into the wall and have it work. I don't want to have to worry that my electric company is going to rug-pull me because I plugged the wrong appliance in, or I didn't agree to some TOS, or I used the electricity to run grow lights for my pot farm, or this or that or the other.
    - z2 1mo ago
      The analogy is apt because I feel this is exactly what keeps Anthropic and OpenAI's owners up at night -- becoming the utility company the People want them to be. Ironically their behavior may accelerate their fears. And yes, the so-called safety features are ridiculously invasive and the worst is agreeing to have surveillance cameras installed in every room that occasionally detect any attempt to grow plants with LED strips as a pot farm. After a false alarm of almost having my ChatGPT account terminated for cybersecurity abuse and appeals auto-denied twice (I did nothing even close to hacking), I have started doing everything I can to decrease switching costs and thus the bargaining power of the suppliers and I'm doing the same for my company.
      - ryandrake 1mo ago
usef- 1mo ago
For what it's worth, the things you describe are mostly because they're extremely short of GPUs and growth rates were absurdly high. (Eg. They repeatedly said they'd keep fable in lower subscription plans if they had the capacity)
corv 1mo ago
Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish!
- niccl 1mo ago
  nit pick: _So Long_ and thanks for all the fish I'm really sorry about that, but it jarred my ASD-ness
  - JSR_FDED 1mo ago
    No, it’s _Goodbye_ and thanks for the memories! Everyone knows that.
fatata123 1mo ago
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deleted 1mo ago
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Revanche1367 1mo ago
Some users on HN in recent months started describing Anthropic as having become a “token merchant” and I think that moniker is quite apt.
- raincole 1mo ago
  If they actually became a token merchant it'd be amazing. But they didn't. They tried to hide the chain of thoughts tokens. They banned accounts for using third-party harnesses with Claude subscription. Their tokens are also not very at a very competitive price.
yieldcrv 1mo ago
They need to fire their growth marketer Their truth is “we don't have compute and are working to improve capacity” People would root for that Instead they got people rushing to escape the permanent underclass until they have a mental health crisis just to beat the fake deadline. $100, $200, is a lot for those people
Lammy 1mo ago
> Most people want to not care. We want our AI like electricity I was with you until this part where the metaphor completely falls apart :p https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/residential-electric-rate-plan-pricing.pdf https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/resid...
- noosphr 1mo ago
  I was going to say that the model of the electricity market OP is talking about hasn't existed in 15 years and it's only getting worse with more intermittent renewables entering the market. And no, batteries are not the answer because physics doesn't care how much greenwashing lobbyists do.
  - brendoelfrendo 1mo ago
    What a weird non-sequitur. P.S. batteries are the answer, hope this helps
    - zeafoamrun 1mo ago
      Yeah just had a power engineer and physicist out for lunch and batteries are the answer (according to them)
      - noosphr 1mo ago
        Funny I'm a physicist and worked as a power grid quant. Batteries aren't the answer.
        embedding-shape 1mo ago
        This battle of giants is so interesting I can't wait for the next information-filled reply to teach me something new about the batteries vs no batteries battle. I love how both of you are arguing about what the solution is, yet the problem isn't even clearly defined yet :P
Aurornis 1mo ago
> They have tried to find the highest that the market pays for sota models; however, on the consumer side, this is just too confusing and unsettling: The consumer side cheap monthly plans exist for the same reason companies like Cloudflare and Vercel have a free tier: When it’s cheap and easy to get developers familiar with the tools, they will push their companies to pay the real money for those tools. It’s a hard balance with LLM serving because you can’t really make it free. $20/month is close to free, but the $200/month plans are in a difficult place where they’re big enough that many small companies pay for $200/month plans for their employees and ignore the enterprise features you get with the full expensive arrangements. So the companies are continually adjusting the $20-$200 plans to keep them from being reliable options for businesses, which is where the real money is. There’s a short sighted cheering on of the 3rd tier and lower companies offering lower rates, but we’re already seeing them ratchet up the pricing and keep larger models closed after they get market attention.
- cherryteastain 1mo ago
  > There’s a short sighted cheering on of the 3rd tier and lower companies offering lower rates, but we’re already seeing them ratchet up the pricing and keep larger models closed after they get market attention. Sorry, but people are cheering on Chinese companies (of whom your are unduly dismissive with your '3rd rate' comment given how good GLM-5.3, Kimi K3 are) not only because they are more economical, but also because they do not constantly refuse to do legitimate tasks and provide you with the weights for self hosting these models.
  - dv_dt 1mo ago
    I feel like many VC driven companies have completely forgotten how to compete on basic value for product and instead tie themselves into knots with meta-competitiveness games.
    - TheOtherHobbes 1mo ago
      "We have the smartest model in the world but our company consistently does stupid things" is not a sustainable business model. Maybe Anthropic's enterprise sales are going brilliantly, and the rest of us are just pixel dust to them. Still. Brand perception is a thing, and between rug-pull usage policies, weirding verbedly output quality, and "I'm sorry Dave I can't do that" pushback, Anthropic are clearly having strategy issues.
chrismsimpson 1mo ago
Also you don’t want to connect to the pipe and then after the fact find they’ve started diluting arsenic into it.
itemize123 1mo ago
main reason is the 30days retention; not the plan changes
visarga 1mo ago
> That forces people to look beyond the walled garden. Every time I get "you used your quota, come back in 3 hours, or 2 days" -> that is experimentation time with their competition, leading to changed service plans. When they said "claude -p" will be billed at API pricing even for plan users I moved my harness off claude. After I integrated codex, then it was never going to be a full claude project again. What business encourages users to try their competition and adapt their usage to the competing products?
- LaurensBER 1mo ago
  >™Every time I get "you used your quota, come back in 3 hours, or 2 days" -> that is experimentation time with their competition, leading to changed service plans. I guess this is why they're pushing Claude code hard (not supporting agents.md, not allowing third party harnesses, etc) but when switching to another provider is as easy as opening a new terminal and typing omp/pi/codex your moat is effectively zero. They can compete on price, quality or value but anything else is just madness. Currently they (arguably) own quality but this won't last.
- zymhan 1mo ago
  It drove me to setup Qwen 3.8 this weekend. I couldn't see the value in just giving them money for a higher tier plan instead. I've never run a local LLM model before. Certainly won't take as long to iterate on this.
  - dexterlagan 1mo ago
    Qwen 3.8 is excellent. With the right harness, it does about 95% of what Opus can do, in my case automation software development. Since 3.8 came out, I have significantly revised my expectations for a local model. Give it another year or two, and we'll be running fast and free local models for nearly everything that matters, and these costly subscriptions will be a thing of the past. I've always believed that AI should be free for everybody, like TV and radio. We're almost there.
    - mrtsepelev 1mo ago
larodi 1mo ago
Opus and Sonnet 5 babble like crazy - this’ one reason. At some point one feels as if staring at the Random himself, not a conversation. Fable is super expensive. From a cost-effective perspective the GPT models are much cheaper - one can easily tell it takes longer with GPT5.x to exhaust limits and this matters A LOT. I can’t say which of these corpos I despise more though. I though for a while Dario was cool, but a massive distrust is piling and the first third player offering decent experience (and showing some decency) will win me over. For the record - I’m also unsure whether I despise more Exxon or BP or burning fuel as a whole. Hope u get the point...
sznio 1mo ago
In my case it's been kind of unhealthy, just constantly waiting for the token limit to reset, always feeling like I'm wasting a resource if I'm not using subscription right now. I just put $30 on openrouter, switched to Pi, and I finally have a calm mind. Since I actually pay per request I want to maximize efficiency rather than utilization
nsoonhui 1mo ago
Not entirely sure how OpenAI is any different. Their quota system seems random to me. I can use up my quota in a single day, and the next day it gets refilled for no apparent reason. But another time, I also used up my quota in a single day, and there was no refresh; I was made to wait six more days. To me, all of these are just exercises in getting me to pay for more tokens at API rates.
dexterlagan 1mo ago
They haven't communicated well the fact that the default model should be Sonnet 5, which should give you unlimited use for common coding tasks (say with occasional subagents use) on the Pro plan. Instead they're pushing Opus and even Fable, to try and get people addicted to the higher tier, without realizing that nearly everybody has a Sonnet for peanuts via DeepSeek V4 on OpenRouter, or completely free through Qwen 3.8 locally. I predict major trouble for Anthropic, now that OpenAI's models are closing in, are cheaper for daily use and don't have those silly 5 hours limits - and that Chinese models are getting really good and are even cheaper.
- praseodym 1mo ago
  Claude Code also doesn't make it easy to make _efficient_ use of the different models to reduce overall cost. There are many tokenmaxxing features (e.g. ultracode that spawns dozens of subagents) to burn through the 5-hour limit in minutes, but if you want to let an Opus planning agent use Sonnet for implementing you have to orchestrate your own workflow. I'm pretty sure that's because the Anthropic employees working on Claude Code have unlimited token budgets so they're mostly on tokenmaxxing workflows themselves.
- vikramkr 1mo ago
  Sonnet 5 is a trash model and stupidly expensive if you accidentally set reasoning tokens high - more expensive than fable - it absolutely should not be the default lmao. If the common coding tasks you use ai for is doable with sonnet or local qwen - you're either not using Claude code (if you are, you'll very quickly see that sonnet 5 in Claude code is not a model for "occasional subagent use" - spinning up subagents is the only thing it's good at and it does it way too much. It can spin up subagents and waste huge amounts of tokens but it can't write good code lol.) or you've got Claude code workflow that is very human in the loop where you are significantly steering and controlling the models. And in that case your default should be to use gpt. Claude models are stupid slow.
  - datadrivenangel 1mo ago
    Yeah Opus 5 on low is faster, cheaper, and better than Sonnet 5 on high...
troupo 1mo ago
> Wait, now it's up to half your usage It doesn't help that all their models are bow trained to waste as many tokens as possible with their extremely verbose output
sarjann 1mo ago
I think an important part is communication, so many of these issue could be fixed by saying "Hey we're seeing our utilisation go over x% over the weekdays so we need to implement "surge usage" during this period starting in 2 weeks. Instead often it feels like they make a change, then wait for someone to figure it out. Then Anthropic ends up being reactive as opposed to proactive in communication. It is kind of funny because surprises from OpenAI tends to be positive (Tibo resets), on the Anthropc side I dread them.
coldtea 1mo ago
The problem isn't the confusion from pricing and ToS changes, but the constant feeling they don't give a fuck about their customers, and they'll fuck them up with lock-in tactics and high prices at any chance they get.
- deleted 1mo ago
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thisisit 1mo ago
Add to that at one point Claude was the go to models for the very basic use case for LLMs - text generation. With newer models text generation outputs have gone from probably human readable text to dense philosophical treatise about "load bearing" and incomplete sentences. So much so that now you need skills or another LLM to just parse the output. Simple answers and text generation just doesn't exist.
sourcecodeplz 1mo ago
openai has been starting these shaningangs too, with "resets". i hate it. hope they wise up.
michaelbuckbee 1mo ago
It also distorts the testing as it encourages non-typical behavior.
neya 1mo ago
I'm surprised no one mentions about their recent privacy violation(s). The breaking point for me was the privacy violation. They've been fingerprinting every request and violating users' privacy hoping no one would notice. Too bad, someone found out and that was the day when I cancelled my subscription. https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography
- guluarte 1mo ago
  Engineers love to play with different tools, in my company some use opencode,omp, hermes and you cannot use the team sub with those
- urbnspacecowboy 1mo ago
  Like many things that "nobody's talking about", people really are talking about it. Discussion from two months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734373
  - benjiro29 1mo ago
    I spend way too much time in all the LLM related subs, to the point that i consider it unhealthy (inc claude/anthropic subs). Its in my opinion not wide spread at all and as today is literally the first time i ever hear anybody mention this.
  - neya 1mo ago
    No, that was the very first time that article was submitted to HN. That's not called "talking about" it. Talking about it means highlighting this enough in discussions so users really know their privacy is being compromised. I have more respect for AI companies that openly talk about selling user data than the ones pretending to be privacy heroes while doing the opposite.
- ryreacher 1mo ago
  How this entire watermarking thing plays out will also be interesting
dkersten 1mo ago
I stopped using Claude because of this BS. If I pay for a service, I want to know what I’m paying for, I want it to be predictable. Anthropic have been anything but. Flip flopping on model availability, model access behind an opaque filter, their past behaviour of model degradation as they prepared their next model… these are not signs of a reliable service. I’ve mostly settled on using a mixture of open weights models through Together.ai and Fireworks.ai, a MiniMax subscription for high-token-use tasks that don’t need the best model (for $20 I get what feels like infinite tokens), and codex for the occasional high complexity task, although with Kimi K3 and hopefully soon GLM 5.3, it’s becoming increasingly less important. Deepseek 4 flash is my cheap main with delegation to other models as needed. I’ve also found LFM2.5 8B surprisingly useful for single-focus tasks like “does this diff touch anything that isn’t related to the task”, and it’s incredibly cheap ($0.03/0.12 per M in/out).
- kees99 1mo ago
  I run LFM2.5 8B locally. It's not very smart, to say the least. But then, there are plenty of mindless, menial tasks out there, and it would go through those like a champ. And quickly, too.
  - dkersten 1mo ago
    Exactly, not all tasks require smarts, they just need to be good enough. I’ve found that if prompts are really focused, the tiny models do alright.
lukan 1mo ago
Not just with the pricing models and avaiability, also with how the tool behaves. Currently I am fighting "auto-mode" that was introduced recently - and enabled by default without warning - and now I have to watch all the time that it does not got reenabled somehow again, depending on project and device I am developing it. Also that the behavior of the models change, suddenly more fluff in the comments etc is annoying, but that is probably being part of using cutting edge tech.
- fg137 1mo ago
  FYI you can disable it globally
  - lukan 1mo ago
    In theory yes, I know, but it somehow kept coming again (probably bugs, also I switch dev devices often). For now it seems off.
zahirbmirza 1mo ago
There is a consumer unfriendly ethic behind this. Overly long answers are a cunning was to increase token cost and therefore profit. Consumers are savvy and will prohibit monopoly whilst there is still plentiful competition.
throwaw12 1mo ago
it also feels like they are optimizing their models to output more tokens, because everyone is saying inference is profitable, they wan't to close the gap between training and inference cost by increasing output token count (which also increases input tokens in agentic use cases), with 5 min TTL, this means you almost don't have a cache
ray_v 1mo ago
Not only that but it appears as if they're also treating the platform that customers actively use in such a way as well - heavily A/B testing features and behavior of the platform with little regard for customer comfort in terms of platform use, moving targets for subscription limits, etc etc. I suppose most of us chalk it up to the technology being new and evolving, but I'm not so sure everyone shares that same sentiment clearly.
jaapz 1mo ago
Also, for whatever software engineering work I throw at Fable 5, Opus 5 also does fine. Apparently Fable is supposed to do better at long running tasks (in other words - burning more tokens without interacting with the user), but that's not the kind of work I'm doing. After Fable 5 launched, it was better than Opus 4.8 for sure. Then they rug-pulled Fable from me (EU), and later released Opus 5. Now I only reach for fable when Opus 5 API returns 529 for the millionth time this year.
- spaceywilly 1mo ago
  Fable was really excellent before the whole fiasco with the US government. Once they brought it back it was not the same at all. I have switched over to ChatGPT now for most things, its answers are way better than Fable in my experience. I still use Opus 5 for purely coding tasks. This is why I think open weight models will win out in the end. Right now there’s too much going on behind the scenes with the models. Day to day you never know if you’re going to get smart Claude or dumb Claude.
  - jayGlow 1mo ago
    that part is extremely frustrating, I can't tell if it's a placebo or if the model quality does actually vary. the uncertainty makes me more hesitant to rely on it heavily as some days it just seems incredibly dumb to the point of being useless.
- misalliance 1mo ago
  For browser game generation, Fable 5 consistently produces much better game prompts and playable 2D or 3D prototypes than Opus 5 (based on 500+ prototypes I created using different models). It has a much better grasp of how visual elements work together and implementing game mechanics.
willmadden 1mo ago
The solution: 1) Set pricing tiers that do not change. 2) As models evolve, move the outdated models down the ladder, and replace the top tiers with the frontier models. 3) Give the users a warning before you do this, so they know their model is changing. 4) Sort the economic distortions out of your OPEX and reset pricing when the technology ossifies. Is that so hard?
stellamariesays 1mo ago
[flagged]
AlwaysRock 1mo ago
Yup. It also seems like the latest and greatest is a smaller and smaller gap everytime. I will continue using the second best more affordable model until a new model comes out, everyone talks about how great it is, and the last greatest model becomes the second best and costs the same as the previous model I was using.
JohnMakin 1mo ago
Yes, this was a bit upsetting for me. I found myself organizing my work hours and availability around perceived or actual fable quota limits / trial periods - only to find out multiple times it didn't matter, there is no seeming strategy or rhyme or reason to it. Enormously frustrating, and I did end up just settling for a while with cheaper models. I'm not saying this with any undue derision, it's genuine - do they have a real product team or are they clauding that too? The direction makes little sense.
qaq 1mo ago
Not just that once I hit my Fable limit I naturally experimented with other options and realized that 5.6 Sol + Grok 4.6 gives me same quality of results as Fable + 5.6 Sol so not really that reliant on Fable anymore.
steveBK123 1mo ago
Isn't it just tipping the hand at where the actual businesses are going to end up inevitably? The only B2C is going to be watered down ad-driven BS, and they will charge B2B via tokens. The $50/mo - $200/mo consumer LLM subscription is not something I expect to last long / or to drive much of the revenue share... like individuals paying for Gmail vs Googles overall business.
- snovv_crash 1mo ago
  If they can make a business like that, yes. But with how rapidly the competition is catching up, I'm not sure that's a viable strategy.
4d4m 1mo ago
This is the key point. Trust is earned and being anti consumer or opaque with pricing or terms doesn't bode well for arr or repeated usage.
petterroea 1mo ago
The whole fable thing really did the company a number. Their filters are incredibly sensitive now and I got banned for bootstrapping a react app. 13 days and still no response, and they haven't even refunded the subscription as the FAQ says they should have. Their support system is designed around using your account to contact support, and if you are banned you cannot. How are you supposed to build trust around that. The last half year has been more and more haphazard.

by a1371 1mo ago

irishcoffee 1mo ago

It’s almost like they’re trying to sell a solution looking for a problem! Startup lesson #1, don’t do that.

ls612 1mo ago

The fact is that demand for tokens at electric bill rates so far outstrips what can be supplied currently not just with frontier models, but with open weights cheap models too. Running an always on Deepseek flash agent would cost three figures a month at API prices.

dannyw 1mo ago
Total costs sure, electricity only costs no. My two DGX Sparks run DS4 Flash at about 50tok/s concurrency=1 which is more than suitable; at about 150W total wall power when generating. That’s about A$16 a month in electricity if I ran it 7x24x30.

fluidcruft 1mo ago

Yeah, I agree with this. The constant state of "...will the rug be pulled?!?" does discourage relying on it as a model and building a workflow on it. Anthropic used to just be a reliable thing you could play with. Now it's this constant source of anxiety. It also didn't help that the government yanked it which adds another source of anxiety since OpenAI is on much better terms with the administration and the administration seems corrupt enough that they would mess with Anthropic if they got a big enough donation from OpenAI. But anyway after Sol entered the picture, I don't think Anthropic can get away with this as much and I also think they're going to face a massive backlash from Max subscribers if they do end up ending the +50% promotion at the end of the month because Sol is a Fable peer and priced very competitively.

adriand 1mo ago
As soon as I started using Fable I was like, okay, this is probably as good a model as I will need for software engineering going forward. I still feel that way. I don’t need a better model, I need a faster Fable. The thing I miss most about programming is flow, and the constant bouncing between terminal tabs sucks. I’d love to do one thing at a time, with Fable, quickly.
- codazoda 1mo ago
  You may or may not like agents mode. I also hate flipping tabs, but I enjoy using agent mode with well named sessions. I still stick with a single session until I must move to another, then I leave them around for a few days until I’m sure I won’t need to pick up where I left off again. Command: claude agents
  - pastel8739 1mo ago
    I don’t think they were complaining about literally flipping tabs but rather just needing to context switch so often. This doesn’t sound like it helps with that.
- jmalicki 1mo ago
  There is GPT 5.6 Sol on Cerebras if you want to try that experience for an ungodly sum of money (not getting into GPT 5.6 Sol vs Fable, but only one is available on Cerebras) for an 11x speedup.
  - hakimg 1mo ago
    OpenAI also have 5.6 fast mode for a 2.5x speedup for 2x cost and is available on standard plans.
- kbrannigan 1mo ago
  remember 4 year ago we use to : have stack overflow open, documentation, obscure forums plus other tabs. An ide open with 20 tabs open each file a component, a class or an interface We also use to hold entire codebases in our brain.

dannyw 1mo ago

I agree they’ve done a bit too many pricing / usage promotions and A/B tests. The period was also marked with many billing bugs, like spending people’s usage credits for included Fable for a few hours (gave me a huge shock), but to their credit they refunded it.

hparadiz 1mo ago
They are fumbling the bag hard. AI's utility is for general purpose. The floor is rapidly improving from below them. With chatgpt I'm uploading all my day to day stuff. Meanwhile Claude is only for occasional super hard tech problems which are rapidly improving with being solvable easily by Sol. So what's the value add? Their disrespect for their users is also another problem. You only get one shot to make a good impression.
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 1mo ago
  > With chatgpt I'm uploading all my day to day stuff. Same, it's been a while since I logged into Claude web. ChatGPT web usage being separate from Codex usage limit is a nice touch unlike Claude.
  - hparadiz 1mo ago
    If I got cut off from asking chatgpt what the status of a spreadsheet is for handling my personal bills due to my rate limit from coding work I would not be coding on it at all. Glad someone over there realized this obvious fact.
    - mgkimsal 1mo ago
      I'd go further and say chatgpt offering continuing service just with degraded model keeps me in their 'free web use' tier. I have API keys for coding stuff, but for most of my day to day use of public llm, I know I won't get 'blocked' using ChatGPT. Yes, the model may change, and I'll get 'worse' output, but usually I can't tell the difference. Using Claude for day to day stuff, I get completely locked out after so many hours. Again, I have API keys for Claude as well, and use it for 'pro' work, but day to day chat stuff... it's not my daily driver.

YetAnotherNick 1mo ago

I don't think Anthropic wants a stable experience on their consumer subscription plans. It is just used for customer acquisition who will then ask their employer to pay for enterprise plan(assuming most employer care about data control) which is based on tokens. Most coders don't pay for tokens themselves. It's just on reddit and HN you would think that everybody does.

cactusplant7374 1mo ago
Dario said in an interview that they originally wanted to be an enterprise only company.
- andai 1mo ago
  What changed their mind?
  - gensym 1mo ago
    I would guess that it's hard to compete with Google without a consumer component. Most enterprises already have contracts and policies with Google, so anything driven from the top-down is likely to prefer Google. (And failing that, there was a real risk for OpenAI to be the default for enterprises.) To defeat that, you need to frontline employees the chance to experience better tooling and models which is where the subsidized subscriptions come in.
    - trollbridge 1mo ago
      Or AWS, or Microsoft, etc who have all the other stuff enterprises want.
codebje 1mo ago
I pay for my tokens for my own projects, at least when the ones Google seems willing to keep throwing at me for free don't cut it. I'd think that's not too uncommon, especially here where there's likely a high ratio of hobby coders (whether also professionals or otherwise).

rob 1mo ago

As Anthropic does this, OpenAI Is giving everybody resets like every other day now on Twitter. I'm strongly considering biting the bullet and just ditching my $200/month Claude Code plan for the Codex one instead, especially because I keep running into my weekly limits (even sticking to Opus.)

technotony 1mo ago
Where do you get those? I got about 5 resets in July but none since then
- wild_egg 1mo ago
  You should have just got a reset today at least. There are several sites around for tracking them now. I use this one: https://codex-resets.com https://codex-resets.com
- mondojesus 1mo ago
  I got a reset today and also one of those reset tokens which I'll probably use sometime this week.
Petersipoi 1mo ago
I ditched Claude Code $200/month a couple of months ago in favor of Codex $200/month. The value is night and day. 1. No 5 hour usage limit 2. Weekly usage gets reset CONSTANTLY. It's crazy. The longest I've ever seen it go without a reset is maybe 5 days? 3. I don't feel like OpenAI is constantly trying to fuck with me. Unlike Anthropic. I would way rather have Sol all day every data, consistently, than a slightly better Fable for like, 1 prompt every 5 hours, and only when Anthropic decides to not treat me like a cyber criminal. Believe in yourself as much as Claude believes your CRUD app is going to hack the pentagon. 4. Getting access to image generation, though I don't use it too much, is a nice perk compared to Anthropic. edit: Should mention that I had like 4 banked manual resets as well. It feels like OpenAI wants me to use their product, whereas Anthropic wants my money while giving me a nerfed experience
- 1mo ago

pbreit 1mo ago

The incremental improvements seem like they are going to be pretty modest from this point.

dyauspitr 1mo ago

DeepSeek is doing pretty much the same thing they said they weren’t going to change their prices after the 75% discount for the foreseeable future. That foreseeable future turned out to be two months.

benjiro29 1mo ago
It did not exactly help that we saw traffic to DS (over OpenCode) jump from around 1.6T tokens per day, to over 14T token in a matter of days. Nobody has the compute to deal with such increases. This keeps happening with every good new model release. People jumping from one to another, and as prices get lower, they start using the models even more. People make not like to hear it but prices and usage limits are ways to shape traffic. The third option is the nuclear one like Kimi did, by just stopping to sell subscription at all. But that is something that DeepSeek can not do as all they offer is API. Even OpenAI despite having the most compute is not immune to client influx = capacity issues. As people found their usage dropping, despite the push to the easier to run Luna models. Reality is, that compute can not keep up with demand, especially when models get more capable and cheaper. What trigger people being using them more, what trigger compute crisis's. This constant up and down cycle is going to keep happening for a long time, as this new market grows and eventually, somewhere in the future stabilizes. But yea, that is still going to be a few more years for sure.

llm_nerd 1mo ago

>You don't feel they want to give you a dependable service for an, albeit premium, price. It's a constant bargaining game We all know that the subscription prices are not at all sustainable for these providers. You all do, right? Yes, they're struggling to segment the market and find a way to make money, and that basically relies upon emptying the pockets of whales. As someone enjoying a hilariously subsidized Max plan, I understand that, and I don't think they're trying to scam me in some way. And both sides of this equation understand that the market is competitive, and maybe more competitive than they thought it would be. Like, would you rather they did pull Fable when they first said they would? Or that they'd cut quota? I wouldn't. But I'm glad that Kimi K3 and GPT 5.6 Sol and the latest GLM and Qwen and...I love that this has forced Anthropic to change plans. I'm not going to hold that against them.

zsoltkacsandi 1mo ago
> We all know that the subscription prices are not at all sustainable for these providers. You all do, right? I don’t think it is fair to expect from people to know or understand this. If you buy something or subscribe to a service there is a price tag on it. You get X for Y amount of price. That is how consumers conditioned for decades. They do not care what is your customer acquisition strategy. If Antrophic cannot provide reliable services on that price, customers will be unsatisfied.
- llm_nerd 1mo ago
  >If Antrophic cannot provide reliable services on that price, customers will be unsatisfied. The complaint wasn't "I paid for X and now they say they aren't going to give me X", it was "I paid for X, and they said hey guess what we're doing a promo and you get a bonus extra 2X, and also you get special limited time access to our new product Y", that's a hell of a thing to complain about. Look, I pay a lot of money to Anthropic and I'm pretty happy that competitors have forced them to abandon their plans to add premium charges on these bonuses, but it's pretty ridiculous seeing the whining and gnashing, somehow turning this into complaints. It very much has a "oh no my lobster is too buttery, my blanket too warm" kind of feel to it.
1mo ago

etempleton 1mo ago

OpenAI is also now actively discounting their model. They just offered a free month to users. Both companies seem spooked by what I have to imagine is slowing user growth.

anukin 1mo ago
Where is the free month offer going on? Are you talking about usage resets?
- wavewrangler 1mo ago
  he probably canceled his subscription and they offered him a free month as a result
Zylokloto 1mo ago
Might just be preparation for their IPOs. But the agentic layer is being worked on, agents will start consuming more and more tokens

SkyPuncher 1mo ago

Yea, I don’t have any interest in trying Fable because I’m not interested in the BS that’s going to come with it. I’m at the point where I need stability and predictability. I want the B- student who shows up everyday rather than the A+ student that’s unreliable.

AgentOrange1234 1mo ago
Yes, I feel like you can just sense the garbage coming. Age/identity verification, mandatory data sharing, morality policing, "Answer Engine Optimization" ads and influence peddling... it's going to be so painful to watch it all enshittify.
- ryandrake 1mo ago
  OP made the "electricity" analogy, and that's really all people want. I want to plug something into the wall and have it work. I don't want to have to worry that my electric company is going to rug-pull me because I plugged the wrong appliance in, or I didn't agree to some TOS, or I used the electricity to run grow lights for my pot farm, or this or that or the other.
  - z2 1mo ago
    The analogy is apt because I feel this is exactly what keeps Anthropic and OpenAI's owners up at night -- becoming the utility company the People want them to be. Ironically their behavior may accelerate their fears. And yes, the so-called safety features are ridiculously invasive and the worst is agreeing to have surveillance cameras installed in every room that occasionally detect any attempt to grow plants with LED strips as a pot farm. After a false alarm of almost having my ChatGPT account terminated for cybersecurity abuse and appeals auto-denied twice (I did nothing even close to hacking), I have started doing everything I can to decrease switching costs and thus the bargaining power of the suppliers and I'm doing the same for my company.
    - ryandrake 1mo ago

usef- 1mo ago

For what it's worth, the things you describe are mostly because they're extremely short of GPUs and growth rates were absurdly high. (Eg. They repeatedly said they'd keep fable in lower subscription plans if they had the capacity)

corv 1mo ago

Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish!

niccl 1mo ago
nit pick: _So Long_ and thanks for all the fish I'm really sorry about that, but it jarred my ASD-ness
- JSR_FDED 1mo ago
  No, it’s _Goodbye_ and thanks for the memories! Everyone knows that.

fatata123 1mo ago

[dead]

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

Revanche1367 1mo ago

Some users on HN in recent months started describing Anthropic as having become a “token merchant” and I think that moniker is quite apt.

raincole 1mo ago
If they actually became a token merchant it'd be amazing. But they didn't. They tried to hide the chain of thoughts tokens. They banned accounts for using third-party harnesses with Claude subscription. Their tokens are also not very at a very competitive price.

yieldcrv 1mo ago

They need to fire their growth marketer Their truth is “we don't have compute and are working to improve capacity” People would root for that Instead they got people rushing to escape the permanent underclass until they have a mental health crisis just to beat the fake deadline. $100, $200, is a lot for those people

Lammy 1mo ago

> Most people want to not care. We want our AI like electricity I was with you until this part where the metaphor completely falls apart :p https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/residential-electric-rate-plan-pricing.pdf https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/resid...

noosphr 1mo ago
I was going to say that the model of the electricity market OP is talking about hasn't existed in 15 years and it's only getting worse with more intermittent renewables entering the market. And no, batteries are not the answer because physics doesn't care how much greenwashing lobbyists do.
- brendoelfrendo 1mo ago
  What a weird non-sequitur. P.S. batteries are the answer, hope this helps
  - zeafoamrun 1mo ago
    Yeah just had a power engineer and physicist out for lunch and batteries are the answer (according to them)
    - noosphr 1mo ago
      Funny I'm a physicist and worked as a power grid quant. Batteries aren't the answer.
      - embedding-shape 1mo ago
        This battle of giants is so interesting I can't wait for the next information-filled reply to teach me something new about the batteries vs no batteries battle. I love how both of you are arguing about what the solution is, yet the problem isn't even clearly defined yet :P

Aurornis 1mo ago

> They have tried to find the highest that the market pays for sota models; however, on the consumer side, this is just too confusing and unsettling: The consumer side cheap monthly plans exist for the same reason companies like Cloudflare and Vercel have a free tier: When it’s cheap and easy to get developers familiar with the tools, they will push their companies to pay the real money for those tools. It’s a hard balance with LLM serving because you can’t really make it free. $20/month is close to free, but the $200/month plans are in a difficult place where they’re big enough that many small companies pay for $200/month plans for their employees and ignore the enterprise features you get with the full expensive arrangements. So the companies are continually adjusting the $20-$200 plans to keep them from being reliable options for businesses, which is where the real money is. There’s a short sighted cheering on of the 3rd tier and lower companies offering lower rates, but we’re already seeing them ratchet up the pricing and keep larger models closed after they get market attention.

cherryteastain 1mo ago
> There’s a short sighted cheering on of the 3rd tier and lower companies offering lower rates, but we’re already seeing them ratchet up the pricing and keep larger models closed after they get market attention. Sorry, but people are cheering on Chinese companies (of whom your are unduly dismissive with your '3rd rate' comment given how good GLM-5.3, Kimi K3 are) not only because they are more economical, but also because they do not constantly refuse to do legitimate tasks and provide you with the weights for self hosting these models.
- dv_dt 1mo ago
  I feel like many VC driven companies have completely forgotten how to compete on basic value for product and instead tie themselves into knots with meta-competitiveness games.
  - TheOtherHobbes 1mo ago
    "We have the smartest model in the world but our company consistently does stupid things" is not a sustainable business model. Maybe Anthropic's enterprise sales are going brilliantly, and the rest of us are just pixel dust to them. Still. Brand perception is a thing, and between rug-pull usage policies, weirding verbedly output quality, and "I'm sorry Dave I can't do that" pushback, Anthropic are clearly having strategy issues.

chrismsimpson 1mo ago

Also you don’t want to connect to the pipe and then after the fact find they’ve started diluting arsenic into it.

itemize123 1mo ago

main reason is the 30days retention; not the plan changes

visarga 1mo ago

> That forces people to look beyond the walled garden. Every time I get "you used your quota, come back in 3 hours, or 2 days" -> that is experimentation time with their competition, leading to changed service plans. When they said "claude -p" will be billed at API pricing even for plan users I moved my harness off claude. After I integrated codex, then it was never going to be a full claude project again. What business encourages users to try their competition and adapt their usage to the competing products?

LaurensBER 1mo ago
>™Every time I get "you used your quota, come back in 3 hours, or 2 days" -> that is experimentation time with their competition, leading to changed service plans. I guess this is why they're pushing Claude code hard (not supporting agents.md, not allowing third party harnesses, etc) but when switching to another provider is as easy as opening a new terminal and typing omp/pi/codex your moat is effectively zero. They can compete on price, quality or value but anything else is just madness. Currently they (arguably) own quality but this won't last.
zymhan 1mo ago
It drove me to setup Qwen 3.8 this weekend. I couldn't see the value in just giving them money for a higher tier plan instead. I've never run a local LLM model before. Certainly won't take as long to iterate on this.
- dexterlagan 1mo ago
  Qwen 3.8 is excellent. With the right harness, it does about 95% of what Opus can do, in my case automation software development. Since 3.8 came out, I have significantly revised my expectations for a local model. Give it another year or two, and we'll be running fast and free local models for nearly everything that matters, and these costly subscriptions will be a thing of the past. I've always believed that AI should be free for everybody, like TV and radio. We're almost there.
  - mrtsepelev 1mo ago

larodi 1mo ago

Opus and Sonnet 5 babble like crazy - this’ one reason. At some point one feels as if staring at the Random himself, not a conversation. Fable is super expensive. From a cost-effective perspective the GPT models are much cheaper - one can easily tell it takes longer with GPT5.x to exhaust limits and this matters A LOT. I can’t say which of these corpos I despise more though. I though for a while Dario was cool, but a massive distrust is piling and the first third player offering decent experience (and showing some decency) will win me over. For the record - I’m also unsure whether I despise more Exxon or BP or burning fuel as a whole. Hope u get the point...

sznio 1mo ago

In my case it's been kind of unhealthy, just constantly waiting for the token limit to reset, always feeling like I'm wasting a resource if I'm not using subscription right now. I just put $30 on openrouter, switched to Pi, and I finally have a calm mind. Since I actually pay per request I want to maximize efficiency rather than utilization

nsoonhui 1mo ago

Not entirely sure how OpenAI is any different. Their quota system seems random to me. I can use up my quota in a single day, and the next day it gets refilled for no apparent reason. But another time, I also used up my quota in a single day, and there was no refresh; I was made to wait six more days. To me, all of these are just exercises in getting me to pay for more tokens at API rates.

dexterlagan 1mo ago

They haven't communicated well the fact that the default model should be Sonnet 5, which should give you unlimited use for common coding tasks (say with occasional subagents use) on the Pro plan. Instead they're pushing Opus and even Fable, to try and get people addicted to the higher tier, without realizing that nearly everybody has a Sonnet for peanuts via DeepSeek V4 on OpenRouter, or completely free through Qwen 3.8 locally. I predict major trouble for Anthropic, now that OpenAI's models are closing in, are cheaper for daily use and don't have those silly 5 hours limits - and that Chinese models are getting really good and are even cheaper.

praseodym 1mo ago
Claude Code also doesn't make it easy to make _efficient_ use of the different models to reduce overall cost. There are many tokenmaxxing features (e.g. ultracode that spawns dozens of subagents) to burn through the 5-hour limit in minutes, but if you want to let an Opus planning agent use Sonnet for implementing you have to orchestrate your own workflow. I'm pretty sure that's because the Anthropic employees working on Claude Code have unlimited token budgets so they're mostly on tokenmaxxing workflows themselves.
vikramkr 1mo ago
Sonnet 5 is a trash model and stupidly expensive if you accidentally set reasoning tokens high - more expensive than fable - it absolutely should not be the default lmao. If the common coding tasks you use ai for is doable with sonnet or local qwen - you're either not using Claude code (if you are, you'll very quickly see that sonnet 5 in Claude code is not a model for "occasional subagent use" - spinning up subagents is the only thing it's good at and it does it way too much. It can spin up subagents and waste huge amounts of tokens but it can't write good code lol.) or you've got Claude code workflow that is very human in the loop where you are significantly steering and controlling the models. And in that case your default should be to use gpt. Claude models are stupid slow.
- datadrivenangel 1mo ago
  Yeah Opus 5 on low is faster, cheaper, and better than Sonnet 5 on high...

troupo 1mo ago

> Wait, now it's up to half your usage It doesn't help that all their models are bow trained to waste as many tokens as possible with their extremely verbose output

sarjann 1mo ago

I think an important part is communication, so many of these issue could be fixed by saying "Hey we're seeing our utilisation go over x% over the weekdays so we need to implement "surge usage" during this period starting in 2 weeks. Instead often it feels like they make a change, then wait for someone to figure it out. Then Anthropic ends up being reactive as opposed to proactive in communication. It is kind of funny because surprises from OpenAI tends to be positive (Tibo resets), on the Anthropc side I dread them.

coldtea 1mo ago

The problem isn't the confusion from pricing and ToS changes, but the constant feeling they don't give a fuck about their customers, and they'll fuck them up with lock-in tactics and high prices at any chance they get.

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]

thisisit 1mo ago

Add to that at one point Claude was the go to models for the very basic use case for LLMs - text generation. With newer models text generation outputs have gone from probably human readable text to dense philosophical treatise about "load bearing" and incomplete sentences. So much so that now you need skills or another LLM to just parse the output. Simple answers and text generation just doesn't exist.

sourcecodeplz 1mo ago

openai has been starting these shaningangs too, with "resets". i hate it. hope they wise up.

michaelbuckbee 1mo ago

It also distorts the testing as it encourages non-typical behavior.

neya 1mo ago

I'm surprised no one mentions about their recent privacy violation(s). The breaking point for me was the privacy violation. They've been fingerprinting every request and violating users' privacy hoping no one would notice. Too bad, someone found out and that was the day when I cancelled my subscription. https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography

guluarte 1mo ago
Engineers love to play with different tools, in my company some use opencode,omp, hermes and you cannot use the team sub with those
urbnspacecowboy 1mo ago
Like many things that "nobody's talking about", people really are talking about it. Discussion from two months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734373
- benjiro29 1mo ago
  I spend way too much time in all the LLM related subs, to the point that i consider it unhealthy (inc claude/anthropic subs). Its in my opinion not wide spread at all and as today is literally the first time i ever hear anybody mention this.
- neya 1mo ago
  No, that was the very first time that article was submitted to HN. That's not called "talking about" it. Talking about it means highlighting this enough in discussions so users really know their privacy is being compromised. I have more respect for AI companies that openly talk about selling user data than the ones pretending to be privacy heroes while doing the opposite.
ryreacher 1mo ago
How this entire watermarking thing plays out will also be interesting

dkersten 1mo ago

I stopped using Claude because of this BS. If I pay for a service, I want to know what I’m paying for, I want it to be predictable. Anthropic have been anything but. Flip flopping on model availability, model access behind an opaque filter, their past behaviour of model degradation as they prepared their next model… these are not signs of a reliable service. I’ve mostly settled on using a mixture of open weights models through Together.ai and Fireworks.ai, a MiniMax subscription for high-token-use tasks that don’t need the best model (for $20 I get what feels like infinite tokens), and codex for the occasional high complexity task, although with Kimi K3 and hopefully soon GLM 5.3, it’s becoming increasingly less important. Deepseek 4 flash is my cheap main with delegation to other models as needed. I’ve also found LFM2.5 8B surprisingly useful for single-focus tasks like “does this diff touch anything that isn’t related to the task”, and it’s incredibly cheap ($0.03/0.12 per M in/out).

kees99 1mo ago
I run LFM2.5 8B locally. It's not very smart, to say the least. But then, there are plenty of mindless, menial tasks out there, and it would go through those like a champ. And quickly, too.
- dkersten 1mo ago
  Exactly, not all tasks require smarts, they just need to be good enough. I’ve found that if prompts are really focused, the tiny models do alright.

lukan 1mo ago

Not just with the pricing models and avaiability, also with how the tool behaves. Currently I am fighting "auto-mode" that was introduced recently - and enabled by default without warning - and now I have to watch all the time that it does not got reenabled somehow again, depending on project and device I am developing it. Also that the behavior of the models change, suddenly more fluff in the comments etc is annoying, but that is probably being part of using cutting edge tech.

fg137 1mo ago
FYI you can disable it globally
- lukan 1mo ago
  In theory yes, I know, but it somehow kept coming again (probably bugs, also I switch dev devices often). For now it seems off.

zahirbmirza 1mo ago

There is a consumer unfriendly ethic behind this. Overly long answers are a cunning was to increase token cost and therefore profit. Consumers are savvy and will prohibit monopoly whilst there is still plentiful competition.

throwaw12 1mo ago

it also feels like they are optimizing their models to output more tokens, because everyone is saying inference is profitable, they wan't to close the gap between training and inference cost by increasing output token count (which also increases input tokens in agentic use cases), with 5 min TTL, this means you almost don't have a cache

ray_v 1mo ago

Not only that but it appears as if they're also treating the platform that customers actively use in such a way as well - heavily A/B testing features and behavior of the platform with little regard for customer comfort in terms of platform use, moving targets for subscription limits, etc etc. I suppose most of us chalk it up to the technology being new and evolving, but I'm not so sure everyone shares that same sentiment clearly.

jaapz 1mo ago

Also, for whatever software engineering work I throw at Fable 5, Opus 5 also does fine. Apparently Fable is supposed to do better at long running tasks (in other words - burning more tokens without interacting with the user), but that's not the kind of work I'm doing. After Fable 5 launched, it was better than Opus 4.8 for sure. Then they rug-pulled Fable from me (EU), and later released Opus 5. Now I only reach for fable when Opus 5 API returns 529 for the millionth time this year.

spaceywilly 1mo ago
Fable was really excellent before the whole fiasco with the US government. Once they brought it back it was not the same at all. I have switched over to ChatGPT now for most things, its answers are way better than Fable in my experience. I still use Opus 5 for purely coding tasks. This is why I think open weight models will win out in the end. Right now there’s too much going on behind the scenes with the models. Day to day you never know if you’re going to get smart Claude or dumb Claude.
- jayGlow 1mo ago
  that part is extremely frustrating, I can't tell if it's a placebo or if the model quality does actually vary. the uncertainty makes me more hesitant to rely on it heavily as some days it just seems incredibly dumb to the point of being useless.
misalliance 1mo ago
For browser game generation, Fable 5 consistently produces much better game prompts and playable 2D or 3D prototypes than Opus 5 (based on 500+ prototypes I created using different models). It has a much better grasp of how visual elements work together and implementing game mechanics.

willmadden 1mo ago

The solution: 1) Set pricing tiers that do not change. 2) As models evolve, move the outdated models down the ladder, and replace the top tiers with the frontier models. 3) Give the users a warning before you do this, so they know their model is changing. 4) Sort the economic distortions out of your OPEX and reset pricing when the technology ossifies. Is that so hard?

stellamariesays 1mo ago

[flagged]

AlwaysRock 1mo ago

Yup. It also seems like the latest and greatest is a smaller and smaller gap everytime. I will continue using the second best more affordable model until a new model comes out, everyone talks about how great it is, and the last greatest model becomes the second best and costs the same as the previous model I was using.

JohnMakin 1mo ago

Yes, this was a bit upsetting for me. I found myself organizing my work hours and availability around perceived or actual fable quota limits / trial periods - only to find out multiple times it didn't matter, there is no seeming strategy or rhyme or reason to it. Enormously frustrating, and I did end up just settling for a while with cheaper models. I'm not saying this with any undue derision, it's genuine - do they have a real product team or are they clauding that too? The direction makes little sense.

qaq 1mo ago

Not just that once I hit my Fable limit I naturally experimented with other options and realized that 5.6 Sol + Grok 4.6 gives me same quality of results as Fable + 5.6 Sol so not really that reliant on Fable anymore.

steveBK123 1mo ago

Isn't it just tipping the hand at where the actual businesses are going to end up inevitably? The only B2C is going to be watered down ad-driven BS, and they will charge B2B via tokens. The $50/mo - $200/mo consumer LLM subscription is not something I expect to last long / or to drive much of the revenue share... like individuals paying for Gmail vs Googles overall business.

snovv_crash 1mo ago
If they can make a business like that, yes. But with how rapidly the competition is catching up, I'm not sure that's a viable strategy.

4d4m 1mo ago

This is the key point. Trust is earned and being anti consumer or opaque with pricing or terms doesn't bode well for arr or repeated usage.

petterroea 1mo ago

The whole fable thing really did the company a number. Their filters are incredibly sensitive now and I got banned for bootstrapping a react app. 13 days and still no response, and they haven't even refunded the subscription as the FAQ says they should have. Their support system is designed around using your account to contact support, and if you are banned you cannot. How are you supposed to build trust around that. The last half year has been more and more haphazard.