> 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.

▲

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 3 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 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not talking about custom, negotiated service contracts, I'm talking about simply charging people for what they use.

▲

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.