Where Anthropic f'ed up was treating their monetization the way they treat model training. Turns out that success in experimentation is not transferrable.

They have tried to find the highest that the market pays for sota models; however, on the consumer side, this is just too confusing and unsettling:

"You can only use Fable for a week as a part of your plan" "Be ready! You have to start paying per token!" "Nevermind! we extended it for a couple more weeks" "Wait, now it's up to half your usage" "Ok, now its..."

Most people want to not care. We want our AI like electricity -- Kind of just there no matter how easy/hard is for the supply. You don't want your electricity company to be on the brink of cutting you off any second.

That's Anthropic. You don't feel they want to give you a dependable service for an, albeit premium, price. It's a constant bargaining game. That forces people to look beyond the walled garden. There, they find models that are fine... and without the shenanigans.

Yeah, I agree with this. The constant state of "...will the rug be pulled?!?" does discourage relying on it as a model and building a workflow on it. Anthropic used to just be a reliable thing you could play with. Now it's this constant source of anxiety.

It also didn't help that the government yanked it which adds another source of anxiety since OpenAI is on much better terms with the administration and the administration seems corrupt enough that they would mess with Anthropic if they got a big enough donation from OpenAI.

But anyway after Sol entered the picture, I don't think Anthropic can get away with this as much and I also think they're going to face a massive backlash from Max subscribers if they do end up ending the +50% promotion at the end of the month because Sol is a Fable peer and priced very competitively.

I agree they’ve done a bit too many pricing / usage promotions and A/B tests.

The period was also marked with many billing bugs, like spending people’s usage credits for included Fable for a few hours (gave me a huge shock), but to their credit they refunded it.

As Anthropic does this, OpenAI Is giving everybody resets like every other day now on Twitter.

I'm strongly considering biting the bullet and just ditching my $200/month Claude Code plan for the Codex one instead, especially because I keep running into my weekly limits (even sticking to Opus.)

The incremental improvements seem like they are going to be pretty modest from this point.

For what it's worth, the things you describe are mostly because they're extremely short of GPUs and growth rates were absurdly high.

(Eg. They repeatedly said they'd keep fable in lower subscription plans if they had the capacity)

OpenAI is also now actively discounting their model. They just offered a free month to users. Both companies seem spooked by what I have to imagine is slowing user growth.

Yea, I don’t have any interest in trying Fable because I’m not interested in the BS that’s going to come with it.

I’m at the point where I need stability and predictability. I want the B- student who shows up everyday rather than the A+ student that’s unreliable.

I don't think Anthropic wants a stable experience on their consumer subscription plans. It is just used for customer acquisition who will then ask their employer to pay for enterprise plan(assuming most employer care about data control) which is based on tokens.

Most coders don't pay for tokens themselves. It's just on reddit and HN you would think that everybody does.

Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish!

The fact is that demand for tokens at electric bill rates so far outstrips what can be supplied currently not just with frontier models, but with open weights cheap models too. Running an always on Deepseek flash agent would cost three figures a month at API prices.

>You don't feel they want to give you a dependable service for an, albeit premium, price. It's a constant bargaining game

We all know that the subscription prices are not at all sustainable for these providers. You all do, right?

Yes, they're struggling to segment the market and find a way to make money, and that basically relies upon emptying the pockets of whales. As someone enjoying a hilariously subsidized Max plan, I understand that, and I don't think they're trying to scam me in some way.

And both sides of this equation understand that the market is competitive, and maybe more competitive than they thought it would be. Like, would you rather they did pull Fable when they first said they would? Or that they'd cut quota? I wouldn't. But I'm glad that Kimi K3 and GPT 5.6 Sol and the latest GLM and Qwen and...I love that this has forced Anthropic to change plans. I'm not going to hold that against them.

DeepSeek is doing pretty much the same thing they said they weren’t going to change their prices after the 75% discount for the foreseeable future. That foreseeable future turned out to be two months.

[dead]

It’s almost like they’re trying to sell a solution looking for a problem! Startup lesson #1, don’t do that.