And their constant flipflopping is why they lost their Goodwill with me. It was too much work just to make sure I wasn't breaking their AUP week to week. They will say one thing and then directly contradict it in a social media post. I was constantly losing features that were the reasons I signed up with them.

"pausing" not walking back, I've already shifted to other harnesses

I’m not sure why are people throwing the word “subsidizing” so much. Do we know that they are actually losing money on subscriptions?

Because if not that’s just normal market segmentation since enterprise users are willing to pay many times mores than private individuals.

Anthropic isn’t setting is’s price based on cost + fixed profit margin they are charging as much as each market is willing to bear..

Where is the difference when I hit my 5 hour limit or weekly limit with Claude Code compared to PI or OpenCode?

There is no evidence that subscriptions lose money. It’s just as likely that subscriptions break even and the api has 10x margins

The the article was talking about how Anthropic costs too much and how there are cheaper options available then yes I would agree with you. But this article has a conspiratorial and moral crusade tone which is what I'm responding to. The article says "In my opinion (which may be in the minority), it’s unethical to:

lock in your customers to a closed system for maximum market gain put down the competition when they pose a risk to your product make hypocritical claims on how your product increases quality when your own software sucks artificially restrict one’s own product as a fear-mongering marketing stunt test dynamic pricing on your users to see how much more they’ll pay for less change the terms of your product after the sale without notifying your user base"

anthropic is not just a business operating in a market, they are "unethical" and "fear-mongering" and "hypocritical".

Short term yes. But there is a reason why IDEs, game engine and other development tools have very high cheap or free versions for this market segment. Since these users end up having a huge influence on what companies they work at / end up working at spend their money on.

Of course LLMs are a commodity at this point but if someone is using Codex, Pi etc. at home it becomes more likely they won’t be picking Claude Code at their day job either.

Why compare to what historical tooling (which is very different in terms of how it's built and what it does) instead of to value over replacement?

If you need stability for your business you can pay API prices, just like business plans for internet are also more expensive.

It shows Anthropic doesn’t trust its agents to write native apps. That cuts cleanly against its marketing.

And if the Electron app were flawless, that would be one thing. It isn’t. It’s buggy, feature light, constantly updating and slow.

I don't understand why people care about Electron? Evaluate the quality of the software based on its own merits IMO. VS Code, Slack, Postman, Obsidian.. I use this software every day and my only complaint is Slack's RAM usage (which honestly has no negative effect on my machine, but just seems silly for a messaging app).

Claude is a buggy mess because it's slop, not because it's electron. Heck, it runs a full Linux VM under the covers without asking.. it's insane.

Yet… VS code somehow became the most popular IDE that happens to be generally viewed favorably by most of its users.

I personally hate it due to various reasons but I don’t feel like the Electron part is the issue (Java based Jetbrains IDEs generally seem way more bloated)

It just seems like Anthropic has made a deliberate choice to make themselves a TypeScript dev shop.

From Claude Code being written in React (!!) to acquiring the Bun people so they they could have their very own bespoke JS/TS runtime (and then... rewriting the whole thing), to having the CC "native" app being Electron, etc.

It just seems like it comes down to a choice at the highest level to hire people from a "full stack" background, and build in and and prioritize TypeScript as their dev language, for better or for worse.

I personally think it's worse and that shows in the performance and quality of CC, but I'm biased.

Codex, FWIW, is written in Rust, and it is by far snappier and more reliable, though less featureful for now.

>The global LLM market seems trending towards fragmentation.

Wait until investors stop giving out money out of FOMO. Google/Facebook/etc. gonna swoop in on anyone who is remotely viable and independent anyway

> If you want stable costs, the API plan is right there.

Why don't you ask Microsoft [0], Tesla [1] and Alibaba [2] on why they believe it is not only expensive, but it also a security risk for them?

Like I said, You don't get anything for defending Anthropic and they are not going to hire you into their sales team.

> You simultaneously say they cannot afford the API pricing but also claim they are overcharging, it sounds like you just want to get mad ad Anthropic.

Read it again. "Except they themselves cannot afford it"

They is "Anthropic" given that I said "themselves". Who are the ones that cannot afford to subsidize tokens forever due to the even cheaper Chinese alternatives. They all know that the answer is open weight models and why Anthropic cannot raise prices and why the above companies are ditching them for open weight models.

[0] https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-cancels-c...

[1] https://letsdatascience.com/news/tesla-limits-employee-ai-sp...

[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

1.) All you can eat buffets ARE the product, not a loss leader, so there's no bundle there.

2.) Early bird specials, again, aren't loss leaders. They're a way to get sales on the left side of the bell curve. The restaurant food is still the product, not a subsidy.

3.) Free soda with large fry doesn't actually exist (though it sounds like it should, right?)

4.) Happy hour wings (again, see #2)

None of these are bundling so I don't really get why you bothered to comment

Because the US models haven’t had to compete on the actual price of providing the unsubsidized service, the Chinese models are probably ahead of us in terms of what can actually be delivered profitably (which is a pretty bad result given the level of investment).

Any service or product delivered at a loss seems pretty plainly anti-competetive. Whether it is actually subsidized to that extent, I’m not sure.

It would make it impossible for makers of 3rd-party harnesses to compete with Claude Code. This principle is not just limited to LLMs.

> You're just upset that you don't get to use their VC money the way you want to use it lol.

I don't particularly care about Claude or harnesses.