I fill my week limit in a few days :(

Yes and the staff will tell them to stop that or charge them extra for it.

I need a hypothetical use case for things like this, I don't get how so many people have so much desire for use of features like this.

I've mention before that we should have a look at Telegraph/telegram speak. There was a HUGE industry in word efficiency at that time. There are hundreds of books.

I even think an LLM trained to communicate using telegram style might even be faster and way cheaper.

It’s the new cloud cost vector, where cutting 2K from context on a busy service saves $xxxxx.

Terse.

No org doing real work cares about token use costs.

This mainly just affects hobbyists.

This is how free drink refills, airplane tickets, Internet service, unlimited data plans, insurance, flat rate shipping, monthly transit passes, Netflix, Apple Music, gym memberships, museum memberships, car wash plans, amusement park passes, all you can eat buffets, news subscriptions, and many more work.

Either you get a flat rate fee based on certain allowed usage patterns or everyone has to be billed à la carte.

>Especially as local LLM continues to develop so fast.

I'm sorry is there anything even close to sonnet, much less opus, that can be run on a 4080? Or 64gb of ram, even slowly?

Yes, but very few people are actually doing that compared to OpenClaw. If everyone else was doing that, they'd be cracking down on it too.

When you can’t enforce everything at once, you go where the most acute problems are. I imagine when your MCP avenue of abuse catches on—like this other category of harnesses did—to such a scale as to become a problem impacting us folk trying to go about our business… when that’s where the problems shift, I imagine (and hope) Anthropic will crack down on that vector too. To keep the service usable for us ordinary meatbags.

I’m glad they give us the leeway to experiment, and I’m also glad they weed the garden from time to time. To switch metaphors, I’m deeply frustrated when my very modest, commuter-grade use gets run off the figurative highway by figurative hot-rodders. It’s been extra-529y this week, and it’s about time they reined it in a little.

You’re always welcome to pay-as-you-go for as many tokens as you’d like to burn on their infrastructure… or to compute against any of the wide array of ever-improving open models on commodity compute providers…

While you can write an automated tool to consume all their tokens, I strongly suspect most users, like myself, are not doing that. So even if Anthropic loses money on a power user, they profit overall and keep public sentiment high by not alienating users with restrictions. It's an optimization problem of making a profit off the average used while staying low enough to attract customers, even if that means some users cost more than they pay.

More users spinning up OpenClaw means that balance starts to shift towards more users maxing their tokens, thus the average increases, so I think their explanation makes sense still.

Anthropic is much more concerned about what people are ACTUALLY doing than what they could, in theory, be doing.

>How can an OpenClaw user use 6 times what a human subscriber is using when I'm four hours into the week and 15% of my weekly limit is already used up, just by coding?

Perhaps because your Claude agent usage is not representative of the average user, and closer to the average OpenClaw user levels...

Without data, this is just a bunk excuse to defend the walled garden practices.

With data, it's an engineering target.

They could just 429 badly behaved clients.

It is priced incorrectly, but that is intentional. You can't create a tiered paid plan for the whole world that fits everyone. You can't create nuanced extra plans to satisfy all the outliers. It's an bet to keep the customers and still having a good margin. Think of ecom, returns are a big struggle for any large company because they are unpredictable and subject to abuse, shipping fees are just an sophisticated guess to cover that cost. Not a subscription, same mechanics. The only thing here to criticize is, if it's a good thing to make everything a subscription and disguise the real cost.

No, it is priced correctly.

Just because outliers can be money-losing doesn’t mean you should raise the price for everyone.

If this was a gym subscription, it would be an equivalent of some people going to the gym, and some people sending their android to the gym every day, for the whole day, and using as much equipment as the gym policy allows.

Defining earnest (placeholder word btw) is the hard part of the trade-off, though.

When your least automated, most interactive users are competing for capacity with fully-automated tools, let's say, you're forced to define some sort of periphery between these groups.

OpenClaw is a self-directed, automated loop that sits on a server. It's wowing its owner by shitposting on moltbook and doing any number of crazy stories you can find online that amount to "omg I can't believe my self-directed claude loop spent all day doing this crazy thing haha."

On the other end of the spectrum is someone using Claude.app's interface.

And then in the middle, you can imagine "claude -p" inside a CI tool that was still invoked downstream of a user's action. Still quite different from the claude loop.

To some degree sure, is it about the number tokens you can max out?

I’m pretty happy knowing that it supports my development workflow for a week. Recent features like the Code Desktop built in browser, Cowork with Claude in Chrome and remote control matter to me way more than the number of tokens. But that’s me.

Depends on their targeted ICP also, which they are free to define. Is it those users maxing out tokens for the buck? I have the feeling there’s even better alternatives on the market right now.

They already have the way that you're supposed to bill for usages like this, the API usage. The purpose of the subscription plan is strictly for the cases where you are using few enough tokens on average that it's not a money pit for them.

They don’t need to change how they bill. Your subscription is for Claude app/code. Otherwise you pay per token. It’s always been this way.

Start paying by the token if you want to use these tools. Simple as.

I’d be surprised if that propagated to personal subscription plans, simply because it would put them at a huge competitive disadvantage against Anthropic, which they’ve already signaled they care about by saying they allow third-party harnesses. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they required third-party harnesses to use per-token billing, since that’d put them on par with Anthropic.

OpenAi is burning cash to stay relevant aiui, i.e. they will keep subsidizing

You can use these tools with most providers today, just no subscription plan. If you have enough spend, you can likely get bulk deals

> we are self-preferencing, and the FTC should really take a look at us, even if we're technically not a monopoly right now

Tell me you have zero clue what a monopoly is or what the law is, without telling me.

Monopoly law relies on broad categories, not narrow ones. You can’t call Microsoft a monopoly because they are the only company that makes Windows. You can’t call Amazon a monopoly because they are the only company that makes AmazonBasics. You can’t call Anthropic a monopoly because their product is 20% better for your use case, otherwise by definition no company has any incentive to do a good job at anything.

It's a good way to win market share and build goodwill, but one has to wonder whether this class of usage is marginally profitable for them (or anyone) and how sustainable their lenient policies will be for them long term.

The real threat that Anthropic sees as real competitors in the long term, are the AI labs building open weight models, especially the AI labs in China.