| ▲ | jmalicki 5 hours ago |
| You aren't paying to be using that limit all of the time. You are paying to be using that limit some of the time. There are 5 hour windows when you are sleeping and can't use it. There are weekend limits. Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that. It's structured so users can have bursts of unlimited usage, and spend ~15% of the theoretical max cap, and that's still cheaper than a subscription for that user. An OpenClaw user can use 6, 7, 8 times what a human subscriber is using. |
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| ▲ | daynthelife an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that. No, there is a weekly limit as well. Maxing out a single 5h window uses ~10% of the weekly limit |
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| ▲ | teekert an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I've met people that fill a box of sushi to take home at the end of their “all you can eat” session because “they paid for it”. Shrug. |
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| ▲ | KeplerBoy a minute ago | parent [-] | | Yes and the staff will tell them to stop that or charge them extra for it. |
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| ▲ | lherron 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think maybe you are not familiar with what /loop and the Claude cron tools do. https://code.claude.com/docs/en/scheduled-tasks |
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| ▲ | gregjw an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | j45 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Efficient token use will be the new code/vim golf. Whether it's human token use, or future OpenClaws |
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| ▲ | xtracto 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | djfergus 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Reminds me of the terminus agent/harness on the terminal-bench coding benchmark - they just send send keystrokes to a tmux session. They score pretty well. https://www.tbench.ai/news/terminus | |
| ▲ | mannicken 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I've mention before that we should have a look at Telegraph/telegram speak. .- -. -.. / .. --..-- / ..-. --- .-. / --- -. . --..-- / .-- . .-.. -.-. --- -- . / --- ..- .-. / -. . .-- / - . .-.. . --. .-. .- -- -....- -... .- ... . -.. / --- ...- . .-. .-.. --- .-. -.. ... | |
| ▲ | quietsegfault 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why use many word when few do trick? |
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| ▲ | reilly3000 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It’s the new cloud cost vector, where cutting 2K from context on a busy service saves $xxxxx. Terse. | |
| ▲ | xvector 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No org doing real work cares about token use costs. This mainly just affects hobbyists. |
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| ▲ | jen20 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > You aren't paying to be using that limit all of the time. The erosion of the norm of things doing what they advertise rather than being weasel-worded BS is particularly unfortunate, and leads to claims like this. |
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| ▲ | dimmke 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I feel like Anthropic is going down a bad path here with billing things this way. Especially as local LLM continues to develop so fast. I downgraded from my $200 a month plan to my $20 plan and hit limits constantly. I try to use the API access I purchased separately, and it doesn't work with Claude Code (something about the 1 million context requiring extra usage) so I have to use it Continue. Then I get instantly rate limited when it's trying to read 1-2 files. It just sucks. This whole landscape is still emerging, but if this is what it's like now, pre enshittification, when these companies have shitloads of money - it's going to be so much worse when they start to tighten the screws. Right now my own incentive is to stop being dependent on Claude for as much as I can as quickly as I can. |
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| ▲ | harrall 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | dimmke 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is a different case - those all have limitations based on human behavior (it's not necessary or possible to constantly be washing your car the entire month when you pay for unlimited washes) - that doesn't exist here. The types of plans available should reflect that reality. If gyms faced a situation where people would go and spend 18 hours working out every day for a month, they would probably change how they billed things. Your comparisons are all also "unlimited" situations to Claude's very much limited situation. You can't buy a plan for Claude that is marketed as being unlimited. They're already selling people metered usage. They're just also adding restrictions on top of that. | | |
| ▲ | coldtea 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They sell metered usage while having the implied expectation that most wont use it fully. Power users and users of stuff like OpenClaw don't match that idea. So they further restricted the metered caps, which were only offered to NOT be reached by that many. Simple as that. | | |
| ▲ | dimmke 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | >Power users and users of stuff like OpenClaw don't match that idea. Then they should figure out how to structure an offering that accommodates this type of usage not just blanket ban it | | |
| ▲ | 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | satvikpendem 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Why "should" they? There's no reason they would especially when their competitor now owns OpenClaw. | | |
| ▲ | dimmke 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Because a big part of Anthropic's story is that they build based on how people actually use AI. Power users aren't just annoying edge cases, they're signal. Throttling them and calling it done is inconsistent with that. | | |
| ▲ | satvikpendem 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Sorry to tell you but generally any company's "story" is all marketing and PR, if it interferes with their making money, which it does in this case, that company will not hesitate to leave it behind. | |
| ▲ | bergheim 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Oh the billion bollar vc backed pre ipo companys story was this? Omg and they somehow are not delivering up to your standards? Damn they better get their act together lest people like you will whine on twitter about them losing their way |
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| ▲ | guiambros 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They did: just use the metered API. | |
| ▲ | what 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They did figure out how to structure an offering that accommodates that type of usage: pay for your tokens. |
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| ▲ | fluoridation 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >If gyms faced a situation where people would go and spend 18 hours working out every day for a month, they would probably change how they billed things. Not the best example. The upkeep cost of a gym is pretty flat regardless of how much people use the facilities. Two people can't use a single machine at the same time make it wear out twice as fast. The price of memberships is not correlated to usage, it's inversely correlated to the number of memberships sold. | | |
| ▲ | dimmke 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | >Two people can't use a single machine at the same time make it wear out twice as fast The machine doesn't care about the number of people using it. If it's constantly being used, it will wear out faster. You are conflating "we price based on expected under-utilization" with "costs don't scale with usage." Those are different things. The inverse correlation you talk about isn't relevant here - People buy gym memberships intending to go, feel good about the intention, and then don't follow through. The business model is built on that gap. That's pretty specific to fitness and a handful of similar industries where aspiration drives purchase. Anthropic doesn't sell based on a "golly gee I hope people dont use this" gap - they sell compute. Different business. | | |
| ▲ | fluoridation 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | >If it's constantly being used, it will wear out faster. Yeah, but there's an absolute limit to that, beyond which the cost doesn't keep increasing. Beyond that point, the QoS goes down (queues). >You are conflating "we price based on expected under-utilization" with "costs don't scale with usage." I'm not conflating anything, I'm responding to what you said: >If gyms faced a situation where people would go and spend 18 hours working out every day for a month, they would probably change how they billed things. Why would a gym need to change how they bill things if all their customers were aiming for maximal utilization, when their costs would barely see any change? I doubt your typical gym operates on razor-thin margins. | | |
| ▲ | dimmke 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Gym costs absolutely scale with usage. Equipment wears faster under heavier use. Cleaning and maintenance staff hours scale with how much the facility is used. Consumables like towels, soap, and chalk go faster. HVAC runs harder. The reason gyms can offer flat-rate pricing is that they bet on under-utilization, not that costs are flat. Setting that aside, even if we accept your argument that gym costs barely scale with usage, then that makes gyms a bad comparison case for Anthropic, whose costs directly scale with usage. You can't use the gym model to defend Anthropic's pricing decisions if the two cost structures are nothing alike. I'm arguing that both gyms and Anthropic have usage costs that scale with usage, but gym business model assumes a large margin of under-utilization and there's a hard cap to "power user" - I think both of those extremes don't apply to Anthropic's situation. Under-utilizers aren't paying for AI they have a free tier. There's also a natural ceiling on how much any one person can use a gym. There's no equivalent constraint on API usage. | | |
| ▲ | fluoridation 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | >You can't use the gym model to defend Anthropic's pricing decisions if the two cost structures are nothing alike. Am I? I think you read something into my comments that I didn't write. |
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| ▲ | jyrkesh an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | "Unlimited" has always been a lie. There is no free lunch. There are always limits. I've had to unwind "unlimited" within startups that oversold. I've been bit by ISPs, storage providers, music streamers, fuckin _Ubers_, now AI subscription services, that all dealt in "unlimited". None of them delivered in the long run. I'd be mad at Anthropic if it weren't for the fact that my experience now can see this sort of thing from a mile away. There are a lot folks, even on HN, that haven't been around for as long. I understand the outrage. I've been there. But these computers cost money to run, and companies don't operate at a loss in the fullness of time. Once you know that unlimited trends towards limited, the real question is whether we're equipped as a society to deal with the fact that the capital-L Labor input to the economic equation is about to be replaced with a Capital input for which only a handful of companies have a non-zero value. |
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| ▲ | taneq 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The commons? Tragic. |
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| ▲ | boppo1 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >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? | | |
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| ▲ | mech422 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| you can write automated MCP tools that run within claude code, and could theoretically generate as high a load as any other automated/3rd party agent. You can also do loops that burn tokens incredibly fast. This is allowed with no caveats (I use MCP's basically to test what I'd like to try with the API...) So this explanation just seems a lil hollow. |
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| ▲ | PlasmaPower 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | alwa 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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… | | |
| ▲ | mech422 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | >>when your MCP avenue of abuse catches on Thats an interesting way of phrasing it - so is there a way to use the quota that's not 'abuse'? MCP/claude code seems to be want they want you to use it - are loops or ralph abuse as well ? | | |
| ▲ | Leynos 2 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It's not difficult at all to burn through your weekly limit just writing code. |
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| ▲ | fyrecean 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | mech422 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | >>So even if Anthropic loses money on a power user, they profit overall and keep public sentiment high by not alienating users with restrictions So they profit overall if I use all my tokens either way? Again, I understand usage limits - I just don't understand why some usage is 'good' and some 'bad' if I'm using the same either way. >>More users spinning up OpenClaw I'm pretty sure that's a small percentage of overall users, and probably skewed towards the very people that would be recommending/implementing you model for work/businesses. Seems like that would be the group you are encouraging/cultivating ? |
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| ▲ | mvdtnz 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Anthropic is much more concerned about what people are ACTUALLY doing than what they could, in theory, be doing. |
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| ▲ | stavros 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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? OpenClaw can't use 600% of my weekly limits. |
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| ▲ | coldtea 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >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... | |
| ▲ | echelon 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | stavros 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | They already 429 everyone! That's the crazy thing. They already have strict limits that we all keep hitting regularly. |
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| ▲ | goosejuice 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that. Then it's not priced correctly. As I said, you can do all of this without OpenClaw.. claude code ships with everything you need to maximize the limits. |
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| ▲ | Yokohiii 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | fluoridation 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | >You can't create a tiered paid plan for the whole world that fits everyone. I mean, you can. Electricity is already sold that way. Subscribers with uncharacteristic usage spikes don't get blackouts, they get a slightly larger bill, and perhaps get moved up a tier. | | |
| ▲ | Yokohiii 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Very valid. My comment was fixated around the fact that big tech has the addiction to have subscriptions for everything. It's common that you provide generic subscription plans for the masses and supply "call us" custom plans for the specific (usually corporate) needs. If anthropic doesn't provide that or vibe coders are too cheap to do that, then those are issues, but the subscription models are itself valid. It is certainly misleading to a degree, but we've stopped complaining about this a while ago. | | |
| ▲ | fluoridation 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's pretty stupid because as others in this thread have pointed out it's already not a flat plan. Even from their side it makes zero sense to bill things this way rather than based on usage. It's not like a VPS where your VM shares the hardware, which consumes electricity more or less regardless of what you use the machine for. | | |
| ▲ | Yokohiii 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Those yottabytes of VRAM are also consuming electricity constantly. | | |
| ▲ | fluoridation 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The difference being that an LLM request is not an operating system. Since they're compartmentalized and ephemeral, you can very easily distribute requests among your available hardware so that you can switch off machines during periods of low activity. | | |
| ▲ | jmalicki 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Your capital costs for buying those machines don't go away. | | |
| ▲ | fluoridation 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's a problem that already exists in power generation and delivery, and it's already been solved. Bills are sums of fixed terms and variable terms. | | |
| ▲ | Yokohiii an hour ago | parent [-] | | Custom payment schemes are late stage profit generation. It requires hoards of salespeople or an AI that can actually do math. It's just how hyperscaling works. You are not wrong, but in the wrong timeline. | | |
| ▲ | fluoridation 3 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I'm not talking about custom, negotiated service contracts, I'm talking about simply charging people for what they use. |
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| ▲ | brookst 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No, it is priced correctly. Just because outliers can be money-losing doesn’t mean you should raise the price for everyone. | | |
| ▲ | goosejuice 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Just because outliers can be money-losing doesn’t mean you should raise the price for everyone. If they are losing money then it's not priced correctly. That's what I responded to. Yes, subscriptions work as you say. Plenty of people under utilize subscriptions from prime, to credit cards, to netflix. But if they lost money overall, they too would raise prices. Because that's how economics works. Shortage of capacity, high demand, raise prices until equilibrium. There's other knobs beyond ToS. They just didn't choose those options. | | |
| ▲ | jmalicki 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, they chose the knob of ToS, because that was the way to price it correctly. | | |
| ▲ | goosejuice 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | The market will determine if it was the correct choice. I don't think it's an obviously bad choice on their part. |
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