From Anthropic’s Reddit account:

One user consumed tens of thousands in model usage on a $200 plan. Though we're developing solutions for these advanced use cases, our new rate limits will ensure a more equitable experience for all users while also preventing policy violations like account sharing and reselling access.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

I worked at a startup that offered an unlimited option.

It's amazing how fast you go from thinking nobody could ever use that much of your service to discovering how many of your users are creatively abusing the service.

Accounts will start using your service 24/7 with their request rating coming at 95% of your rate limiter setting. They're accessing it from a diverse set of IPs. Depending on the type of service and privacy guarantees you might not be able to see exactly what they're doing, but it's clearly not the human usage pattern you intended.

At first you think you can absorb the outliers. Then they start multiplying. You suspect batches of accounts are actually other companies load-splitting their workload across several accounts to stay under your rate limits.

Then someone shows a chart of average profit or loss per user, and there's a giant island of these users deep into the loss end of the spectrum consuming dollar amounts approaching the theoretical maximum. So the policy changes. You lose those 'customers' while 90+% of your normal users are unaffected. The rest of the people might experience better performance, lower latencies, or other benefits because the service isn't being bombarded by requests all day long.

Basically every startup with high usage limits goes through this.

I think it might actually be because they're selling services at a loss.

guy was bragging about it on twitter yesterday. $13,200 of spend for his $200 account. he said he had like 4-5 opus only agents running nonstop and calling each other recursively.

clearly that's abusive and should be targeted. but in general idk how else any inference provider can handle this situation.

cursor is fucked because they are a whole layer of premium above the at-cost of anthropic / openai etc. so everyone leaves goes to cc. now anthropic is in the same position but they can't cut any premium off.

you can't practically put a dollar cap on monthly plans because they are self exposing. if you say 20/mo caps at 500/mo usage then that's the same as 480/500 (95%) discount against raw API call. that's obviously not sustainable.

there's a real entitled chanting going on too. i get that it sucks to get used to something and have it taken away but does anyone understand that just the cap/opex alone is unsustainable let alone the RD to make the models and tools.

I’m not really sure what can be done besides a constant churn of "fuck [whoever had to implement sustainable pricing], i'm going to [next co who wants to subsidize temporarily in exchange for growth]".

i think it's shitty the way it's playing out though. these cos should list these as trial periods and be up front about subsidizing. people can still use and enjoy the model(s) during the trial, and some / most will leave at the end, but at least you don't get the uproar.

maybe it would go a long way to be fully transparent about the cap/op/rdex. nobody is expecting a charity, we understand you need a profit margin. but it turns it from the entitled "they're just being greedy" chanting to "ok that makes sense why i need to pay X to have 1+ tireless senior engineers on tap".

I don't understand why the current setup for rate limits wouldn't be sufficient to stop this kind of thing.

It reminds me of how many landlords (where I live) would offer electricity included in rent, years ago, for the smaller apartments.

Worked great for years, decades even, until crypto miners caught on - and maxed out the usage. Ruined it for the other 99.99% of renters.

>> preventing policy violations like account sharing and reselling access.

> This is why we can’t have nice things.

We're living in the worst world that Stallman could have predicted. One in which even HN agrees that people shouldn't be allowed to share or resell what they pay for.

okay? why not just ban or create a special pricing for the 1% of less of users obviously abusing it. i get that they had to do this, but to frame it as some kind of community benefit is a little disingenuous. we know you're operating at a loss and trying to figure out a path forward.

pointing to the most extreme example as if you can't stop it in it's tracks is a bad argument. its like saying we will now restrict sending of emails for everyone because this one spammer was sending 1000x the amount of an avg or even power user when you should just be solving the actual problem (identifying and stopping those that disrupt).