| 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. |
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| ▲ | 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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