That tweet only makes things worse. On top of all their other nonsense recently, it actually convinced me to cancel my subscription.

I can't trust Anthropic to manage their products in a way that supports my workflow.

A/B tests only work if the subjects don't realize they are in a A/B test.

Maybe a silly bet where the head of sales had 1-2 glasses of wine too much... "I bet they will still pay us 20 bucks/mo without CC! Don't believe me? I'm going to prove it!"

>"his title should be changed to Head of Corporate Bullshitting"

They're hitting the physical limits of energy production and chip supply for inference capacity. There's literally nothing that can be done but reduce usage to spread it around for now.

A few enterprise customers I know are upgrading to the higher plan now that their limits have been nuked.

I imagine Anthropic is trying to see how many users they can push to higher tiers with these new squeezes.

I hate to say it but I imagine it will work.

It’s going to suck for me, because I had gotten used to ridiculously cheap tokens, but I guess the era of subsidized tokens is over.

Yeah I flat out don't believe the 2% thing. It's possible that I was the 1 out of 50 who checked the page and saw that Claude code was removed... but it really seems like everyone I shared it with saw the same thing which is incredibly unlikely. Also I am an existing subscriber and checked the price page while logged in, so I shouldn't be counted in "2% of new subscribers" at all...

That works until openai does the same thing. Pretty clear as an industry they want to establish a new price floor for non-trivial coding use.

That's what Claude is testing I guess (people often don't do what they say they do when it comes to pricing)

Presumably for new subs.

It's a test on sign ups, not on users, so "will they sign up without X feature for the same price" yes

Presumably they want to lose existing subscribers because it’s way too expensive to keep them at $20.

Claude subscription became non deterministic too

I think of enshittification as "we're making plenty of money but let's make more." In other words greed.

Based on how much money Zitron has reported that these companies are losing on every subscription, this feels more like they're just trying to survive. In other words "ohshittification."

> It is honestly truly fucking incredible how corps still find new, innovative ways to enshittify. Regular enshittification won't cut it, they have to exercise their artistic creativity.

I had a bit of an epiphany the other day thinking about these VC companies offering products to the public at unsustainable prices. It's classic anticompetitive behavior.

You imagine anticompetitive behavior to come from a monopoly because they can afford to burn money to drive competition out before they bring prices back to profitable but the whole VC burn is the same thing. People talk about it a lot without really saying it explicitly when they talk about moats. The only moat Anthropic and OpenAI have is money and they utilize it by offering products below cost.

The two companies are just trying to outlast the other one until they are the only one left.

So it's not really enshitification as much as you were previously getting the deal of a lifetime.

It could be an A/B test to see whether people without an existing subscription care about Claude Code (CC) at all. If they sign up then CC is disabled (or not as it is not really an issue to offer more). Capturing that info would definitely be useful to a growth team.

No, they're testing removing it from the Pro tier for new subscribers.

No I think the test is that some new sign ups won't get Claude code in that tier if they pick it and they're seeing if users will still pay for it without it?