The dark pattern isn't the payment pattern, that's fine. The dark pattern is hiding how much you're using, thereby tricking the human lizard brain into irrationally fearing they are running out.

The human brain is stupid and remarkably exploitable. Just a teensy little bit of information hiding can illicit strange and self-destructive behavior from people.

You aren't cut off until you're cut off, then it's over completely. That's scary, because there's no recourse. So people are going to try to avoid that as much as possible. Since they don't know how much they're using, they're naturally going to err on the side of caution - paying for more than they need.

I'm only on the $20 Pro plan, and I'm a big users of the /clear command. I don't really use Claude Code that much either, so the $20 plan is perfect for me. However, a few times I've gotten the "approaching context being full, auto compact coming soon" thing, so I manually do /compact and I run out of the 5hr usage window while compacting the context. It's extremely infuriating because if I could have a view into how close I was to being rate limited in the 5 hour window, I might make a different choice as to compact or finish the last little thing I was working on.