I think removing Claude Code from the $20 tier is a terrible idea, I never would've gone from nothing right into the $100/200 tier. The $20 plan let me get my feet wet and see how good it could be, and in less than a week I was on the $100 plan.

I think they need to at least have a 1 month introductory rate for the max plan at $20, or devs that decide to try out agentic coding just won't go to Anthropic.

That leads to downstream impacts, like when a company is deciding which AI coding tools to provide and the feedback management hears everyone is already used to (e.x.) Codex, then Anthropic starts losing the enterprise side of things.

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siva7 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

They're not losing anything. They have much more demand than they could ever fulfill to care anymore about promotional or subsidized user groups.

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bsder 4 days ago | parent [-]

Until magically all their demand vaporizes.

I suspect a lot of people are like me. They got into this at the $20/month level individually to check things out. I'm not stressing things out, so I haven't moved up, but the moment I bump into a limit, I'll pull the trigger by default. Until then, I'm the sleeping dog, and you should let me lie.

Well, Anthropic decided to kick me. Now, I'm investing the time to figure out how to use the "open" and "Chinese" models assuming that Anthropic is about to screw me. Once I switch, Anthropic is going to have to demonstrate significant improvements over what I'm now using to get me to even consider them again.

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tverbeure 4 days ago | parent [-]

I don't think they need the $20/month users when there are some who use over $1000 in tokens per day.

	▲	bsder 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I know of 4 companies that are already starting to stomp down on the AI whales using the "$1000 per day". There was the cost of the entire AI usage of the company and then there was the cost of about a half-dozen people who dwarfed it individually. So, we've established a hard upper ceiling for what AI can extract per user at roughly $100K and more realistically at $10K per year. Basically, if using the AI costs the same as a human salary, it's going to get pushback. I mean, the whole point was to get rid of those pesky human salaries, after all. So, there are about 2 million-ish software jobs in the US? It's more than 1 million but a far cry from 10 million. So that pencils in at $20 billion in the US per year total? That means that if an AI company literally won all the US software programmers, it would be worth max $200 billion to be bought out (10x revenue). Now how much investment have the AI companies taken? Yeah, roughly that. And investors are going to want quite a bit more than that back. Even if they had zero delivery costs, the AI companies are cooked long term. The moment your number bumps into "All the X in the US/World", you've got a problem. Short term? Greater fool theory applies. And there appear to be a lot of them. And all this is before we start getting into people exploring the open models. Most people were like me; we started on something like Claude and just stayed put because it was straightforward. Now that we've been kicked, we'll start looking at the other options.

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wek 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree. Why would they not keep the $20 plan as a gateway drug?