The pricing model works as long as people (on average) think they need >$200 worth of tokens per month but actually do something less, like $170/month. Is that happening? No idea.

Maybe that is what Anthropic is banking on, from what I gather they obscure Max accounts actual token spend so it's hard for subscribers to tell if they're getting their moneys worth.

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/1109

Well, the $200/mo plan model works as long as people on the $100/mo plan is insufficient for some people which works as long as the $17/mo plan is insufficient for some people.

I don't see how it matters to you that you aren't saturating your $200 plan. You have it because you hit the limits of the $100/mo plan.

I don't know about for people using CC on a regular basis, but according to `ccusage`, I can trivially go over $20 of API credits in a few days of hobby use. I'd presume if you are paying for a $200 plan then you know you have heavy usage and can easily exceed that.

It's probably easier (and hence, cheaper) to finance the AI infrastructure investments if you have a lot of recurring subscriptions.

There is probably a lot of value in predictability. Meaning it might be visible for a $200, to offer more tokens than $200.