Comment by jesse_dot_id
3 days ago
There seem to be a ton of people who don't understand how subscription services work. Every single one of them oversells their capacity. The power users that use the services a lot are subsidized by those who don't use it as much, which tends to be the vast majority of the user base. OpenClaw is an autonomous power user. The growing adoption of this walking attack surface was either going to A) cause the cost of Claude to go up or B) get banned to protect the price of the service for actual users.
What you're saying is conceptually true for subscription services in general, but thats not why they are making this change. There's a 5 hour limit and a weekly limit. Those are hard token limits. Everyone on a plan pays for the max set of tokens in that plan. The limits manage capacity. The solution to that isn't a change of ToS, it's adjusting the limits.
In other words this is about Anthropic subsidizing their own tools to keep people on their platform. OpenClaw is just a good cover story for that. You can maximize plans just as easily w/ /loop. I do it all the time on max 20x. The agent consuming those tokens is irrelevant.
For what it's worth I don't use OpenClaw and don't intend to, but I do use claude -p all the time.
You aren't paying to be using that limit all of the time.
You are paying to be using that limit some of the time. There are 5 hour windows when you are sleeping and can't use it. There are weekend limits.
Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that.
It's structured so users can have bursts of unlimited usage, and spend ~15% of the theoretical max cap, and that's still cheaper than a subscription for that user.
An OpenClaw user can use 6, 7, 8 times what a human subscriber is using.
I've met people that fill a box of sushi to take home at the end of their “all you can eat” session because “they paid for it”. Shrug.
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> Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that.
No, there is a weekly limit as well. Maxing out a single 5h window uses ~10% of the weekly limit
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I think maybe you are not familiar with what /loop and the Claude cron tools do.
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/scheduled-tasks
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At least on a personal max account, I can't max every window. There is also weekly limit. If I max every window, I run out of tokens halfway through the week.
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> You are paying to be using that limit some of the time. There are 5 hour windows when you are sleeping and can't use it. There are weekend limits.
They could easily structure their limits to enforce that kind of pattern fairly on both human and automated users. They could e.g. force a cooldown period between your daily activity bursts, by decreeing that continued heavy use on a 24h basis would count exponentially more towards your limit. That would be transparent and force the claws to lighten their load below that of a typical human user. We're talking about a company that's worth hundreds of billions of dollars and targeting highly sophisticated enterprise users, not consumers; it's just not credible that they'd be technically unable to set that up.
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I feel like Anthropic is going down a bad path here with billing things this way. Especially as local LLM continues to develop so fast.
I downgraded from my $200 a month plan to my $20 plan and hit limits constantly. I try to use the API access I purchased separately, and it doesn't work with Claude Code (something about the 1 million context requiring extra usage) so I have to use it Continue. Then I get instantly rate limited when it's trying to read 1-2 files.
It just sucks. This whole landscape is still emerging, but if this is what it's like now, pre enshittification, when these companies have shitloads of money - it's going to be so much worse when they start to tighten the screws.
Right now my own incentive is to stop being dependent on Claude for as much as I can as quickly as I can.
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> You aren't paying to be using that limit all of the time.
The erosion of the norm of things doing what they advertise rather than being weasel-worded BS is particularly unfortunate, and leads to claims like this.
Train a generation to min/max stats and then put them in a time box limit and then explain to them why “this is normal”.
The issue is, and always will be, competing views on what these services are for. Most, see them as augments of their normal everyday workflow. Others see it as the tool that allows their creativity to flow as fast as their thoughts do. The problem is the service is more than capable of catering to both but the creative vibe commander will hit those limits far faster. Simply telling them to “take a break” is a kin to those video game screen nags that developers were forced to put into games to remind people to pee.
> Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that.
This typically results in a ban for TOS violations after a few windows in a row on a claude subscription
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> You are paying to be using that limit some of the time.
This makes zero sense. I'm paying to use that limit all of the time. If that's too much for Anthropic, they are free to lower the limits or increase the price. Claiming otherwise would be false advertising.
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Efficient token use will be the new code/vim golf.
Whether it's human token use, or future OpenClaws
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I don't believe that Anthropic looses money when heavy users consume the max amount of tokens.
do you have any proof of your statement ?
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If you maximise the usage of your quota you are not doing anything wrong. They just tricked people I to thinking they quota was higher than it was really was and when people found a way of maximizing that, they had to cut it.
> Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that.
Then it's not priced correctly. As I said, you can do all of this without OpenClaw.. claude code ships with everything you need to maximize the limits.
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Tell me you are not using Anthropic without telling me. Bursts of unlimited usage was never the case. And I bet their infrastructure doesn’t like bursts as much as more spread out activity.
you can write automated MCP tools that run within claude code, and could theoretically generate as high a load as any other automated/3rd party agent. You can also do loops that burn tokens incredibly fast. This is allowed with no caveats (I use MCP's basically to test what I'd like to try with the API...) So this explanation just seems a lil hollow.
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How can an OpenClaw user use 6 times what a human subscriber is using when I'm four hours into the week and 15% of my weekly limit is already used up, just by coding? OpenClaw can't use 600% of my weekly limits.
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You guys are arguing on the reality of a subscription, but Anthropic still resides in the coocoo make-up world of growth at all costs backed up by unfathomable investments. They're not acting rationally by trying to present a good product with reasonable backend fundamentals. They're just trying to maintain the money loss to what they have set aside for the quarter. OpenClaw was not planned for, and thus must be fought.
Anthropic isn't "fighting" OpenClaw. They just want OpenClaw users to switch to API pricing so that their service doesn't become a blackhole for investor money. Operating at a loss can be strategic, but they had to carefully consider the ratio of casual users to power users to keep that loss steady and sustainable.
Power users always cost these services more than they pay, and OpenClaw turns every user into a power user. A recalculation was rational.
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> Everyone on a plan pays for the max set of tokens in that plan.
From Anthropic's perspective, everyone pays to be in bins with a given max.
And to everyone's benefit, there is a wide distribution of actual use. Most people pay for the convenience of knowing they have a max if they need it, not so they always use it.
So Anthropic does something nice, and drops the price for everyone. They kick back some of the (actual/potential) savings to their customers.
But if everyone automates the use of all their tokens Anthropic must either raise prices for everyone (which is terribly unfair for most users, who are not banging the ceiling every single time), or separate the continuous ceiling thumpers into another bin.
That's economics. Service/cost assumptions change, something has to give.
And of the two choices, they chose the one that is fair to everyone. As apposed to the one that is unfair (in different directions) to everyone.
Yes, mostly what I'm saying, but forgetting the important part:
From the email: > but these tools put an outsized strain on our systems. Capacity is a resource we manage carefully and we need to prioritize our customers using our core products
OpenClaw doesn't put an outsized strain on their systems any more than Anthropics own tools. They just happen to have more demand than they can serve and they benefit more when people to use their own tools. They just aren't saying that explicitly.
It has nothing to do with fairness or being nice.
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> there is a wide distribution of actual use
except when people start using openclaw, and the distribution narrows (to that of a power user).
I hate companies that try to oversell capacity but hides it in the expected usage distribution. Same goes for internet bandwidth from ISP (or download limit - rarer these days, but exists).
Or airplane seats. Or electricity.
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The trade-off is that if you set your usage limits so that you can handle the case where everyone is saturating their limit at all times, then (1) the usage limits would be too small and (2) you're optimizing for a usage pattern that doesn't exist and (3) you're severely underprovisioning, which is worse for everyone.
Instead, you can prioritize people "earnestly" bursting to the usage limits, like the users who are actually sitting at their computer using the service over someone's server saturating the limit 24/7.
The goal is to have different tiers for manual users vs automated/programmatic tools. Not just Anthropic, this is how we design systems in general.
Well earnest here just means using Claude code directly or the Claude app. Both that just happen to support using tokens while you sleep!
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I don’t really follow what you’re saying. You mention the 5 hour limit. Is your expectation that they have enough capacity so that everyone can hit their 5 hour limit all the time? Or you are proposing that’s how they limit capacity for a subscription?
Do you have an example of how this is how they have advertised or sold the plan? I don’t recall ever seeing any advertisement that their plan is simply pre paying for tokens.
There are multiple reasons why this makes sense for Anthropic
- The intention of subscriptions, as anywhere, is a combination of trying to promote brand loyalty, and the gym membership model of getting people to pay for oversubscribed resources that many will never use. As the parent noted, people maxxing out their allowed usage, for whatever reason, are not the most profitable customers, and in this case probably not profitable at all
- OpenClaw is now owned by a competitor, OpenAI, and Anthropic are trying to compete in this space
https://www.semafor.com/article/04/03/2026/anthropic-eyes-it...
- Anthropic are capacity constrained, having sensibly chosen to err on the side of safety (not going bankrupt), and are now trying to do the best they can to manage that.
Presumably they might be acting differently if they had capacity to spare, but even then helping a competitor to build market share in a potentially lucrative segment doesn't make strategic sense.
I do wonder about the wisdom of Anthropic promoting usage-maxxing development patterns such as running a dozen agents in parallel ... maybe not the wisest thing to do when capacity constrained! It would make more sense to promote usage at night with low priority "batch jobs" rather than encourage people to increase usage during periods of maximum demand.
This is what I've been wondering about for a while now. I have the 20x plan as well, which I thought would allow me to try some API coding - but you get zero API usage.
As you said, I would imagine where the token usage comes from is irrelevant - you are generating the same load whether you do it from claude code or some other agent. So it seems like the rules are more to do with encouraging claude code usage, rather then claude model usage.
Claude code is still getting used by these agents. They banned the mimicry awhile ago and said claude -p was fine.
OpenClaw just happens to also get telemetry, of probably higher value, out of the same tokens. It also happens to be owned by their competitor.
edit: I'm wrong OpenClaw surprisingly doesn't collect telemetry. Good for them.
How many tokens does the $20/month buy me? I want to know what those hard token limits are but they refuse to tell me. I'm pretty sure they've reduced those limits the last week but they won't admit it. It feels like a scammy pricing model.
I agree, I think consumers appreciate transparency.
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You are still misunderstanding.
If you max out your token limits, you are costing Anthropic more than you are paying them. They only expect a small percentage of their users to do this, but OpenClaw changed the dynamic.
Anthropic knows that they will lose more users by lowering limits than they will by blocking OpenClaw, because OpenClaw users will overwhelmingly switch to API pricing, while chatbot users will leave for competitors with higher limits.
They are a business. They hope to become profitable. This was the correct move.
What am I misunderstanding?
You’re missing something. I’m pretty sure it’s not only about the cost. Anthropic literally doesn’t have enough compute. They have to balance the load between enterprise customers and end users with subscription. If you consider they don’t have infinite compute (ie at their scale there is a limit to how much is available in a given region) and something is causing subscription users to increase usage significantly they do have to find a way to balance.
At least that’s my read. I don’t believe it is nefarious
It's not nefarious it's just bad PR cover. They definitely don't have enough compute.
If they bundled together these two radically different usage patterns, either the service would become more expensive or the limits would become a lot tighter, in both cases making Claude Code far less attractive to professional users.
OpenAI does this btw, it is why I still have that sub.
Exactly your point. Anthropic is subsidizing their own tools to keep people on their platform. What's wrong with that?
Tokens and these agents(Claude Code/cowork/claude.ai) are separate from model tokens, and they want to discount for their own product usage.
The subscription they sell is a package of these products, not tokens. They never sell token subscriptions, so why do we need to relate tokens with the subscription? Fundamentally, they never meant to sell token usage in that subscription, similar to any other SaaS company trying to sell API usage.
> What's wrong with that?
Nothing beyond fumbling the PR around it.
Exactly.
Subscriptions are crazy subsidized.
So you can’t use OpenClaw, OpenCode, etc. because they take you outside their applications/lock in and their ability to easily monetize in the future.
OpenAI allows you to use your sub with any of these tools.
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> The agent consuming those tokens is irrelevant.
This is so wrong.
The subscription is to Claude (the app, Claude code, etc) not the API.
Anthropic subsidizes Claude code because they collect a ton of super useful telemetry and logs so they can improve… Claude code.
Wanting to pay for a subscription to Claude and treat it like an API discount is like going to an all you can eat buffet and asking them to bring unlimited quantities of raw ingredients to you so you can cook at home. Ok, not a perfect analogy, but you get the idea.
> Anthropic subsidizes Claude code because they collect a ton of super useful telemetry and logs so they can improve… Claude code.
You just paraphrased my argument
OpenClaw is a mass project and doing something in the background 24/7.
I haven't even heard of claude -p before your comment.
OpenClaw is for sure not just a good cover story. Or its the cover face of the issue of automated tool workflows.
I don't think they are bothered too much about other frontends who do the same as claude code.
Well this is what happens when everyone hires an actuary to handle their pricing and every business earns its revenue through psuedo-insurance policy subscription products.
very true.
I am happy they are banning openclaw users instead of lowering my limits to compensate for these automated agents though.
Are we now banned from using `claude -p` now?
Look guys I use AI to help me re-write shit but for HN comments?
(Maybe I'm just being paranoid here).
Can’t you just use Anthropic models through bedrock?
yes and then still subsidise subscriptions by an order of magnitude
its obvious they will tighten everything and raise prices for years to come
thanks! I never thought of using -p for using claude and gemini for one-shots and in shell scripts before. Nice.
> There's a 5 hour limit and a weekly limit. Those are hard token limits
I mean, humans sleep and do other things than work, so they likely don’t hit their weekly limits or their 5 hour limits every single 5 hour chunk :)
-p gets penalized is not worth using it.
It’s shame they do all this sketchy stuff, I switched to Codex I have enough of their bs.
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It's one thing to pay $5 or $20 per month, which although it's a substantial difference, people pay that much for the convenience of having stuff ready and available - and it's a completely different thing to pay $200 per month. People don't pay that much for occasional usage and many/most people will organise themselves to use all or most of their weekly allowance when the expense is in that ballpark.
If Anthropic miscalculated the amount of tokens, or simply pushed too hard to capture market share, that is a costly mistake because people in this market are very sensitive to price hikes.
They have to be honest about what they can offer for $200. Sure, people don't max their subscriptions but when they're large they make the best of it, or they will likely cancel it. The typical subscription works well below capacity because it's cheap enough that the optionality may be worth it. $200 is not the typical subscription.
>They have to be honest about what they can offer for $200
Their expectation must have been a human using the service at a human capacity.
This is different from an automated agent orchestrating a ton of different agents at the same time doing a lot of things.
There is a difference.
If people are finding new ways to use AI, they should change how they bill. Banning third party harnesses is bad for a lot of reasons - it looks like they're trying to force people to use their software. Strategically it might make sense - gives them a tiny moat if their models ever slip - but it discourages the breakneck pace of innovation and the long term effect is that their customers (largely highly skilled with computers and building software) will look to decouple themselves. Claude is good but it's not so far better than anything else that they can pull shit like this and people will just deal with it.
They already have the regular subscription plans (Pro, Max) and a separate billing process for direct API usage. They could absolutely introduce another type of plan optimized toward this kind of usage or just accept that it's a dumb pipe that is being paid for and having these random arbitrary limitations is just making things more confusing and a bad plan for the future.
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The whole industry is about robots telling robots what to do, why wouldn't they have expected automation?
You are correct, but you don't need openclaw to batch your work. People will figure out ways to use their tokens at that fixed price.
Sure there is a difference. It's like when most mobile companies wouldn't allow tethering because then people would actually use the service.
You can try to stop that, but people will price in those inconveniences. They will simply learn that the fee pays for much less than the token limit and that the company is enforcing some unwritten limits by adding extra limitations to usage.
We will see it play out.
> They have to be honest about what they can offer for $200.
Isn't that exactly what they just did?
not really, no
being honest would be to just adjust the limits rather than adding piecewise limitations
but of course with honesty comes that people can actually gauge your product accurately and they may not want that
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> People don't pay that much for occasional usage and many/most people will organise themselves to use all or most of their weekly allowance when the expense is in that ballpark.
I don't think that's accurate for professional users. Personal users, especially those for whom $200/m is a significant cost, will definitely try to get the most out of it.
I know several $200/m user (I'm on the $100 personally), and they've all had the same experience I had when first upgrading to the max package: initially you try to use it as much as you can and feel like you need to keep it busy. But that goes away after a few days and you use it when you have need. The primary point of the max tiers for my peers is to not hit limits during their work if they occasionally use it intensively because it's disrupting to have to wait for X hours to continue.
If you get a benefit from using it, and you bill at $200 an hour, and you work 160+ hours a month, the $200 monthly cost doesn't register as a significant cost and you won't make it determine your usage patterns. I'm sure that'd be different if VC money goes away and it turns out the true price would need to be closer to $5k, but at this point it's similar to your ISP for fiber costing $80 a month. You enjoy the speed for a few days, but then it becomes the new normal.
Anthropic didn't miscalculate anything. They calculated what they could charge/subsidize for humans, not automatons. Banning OpenClaw brings usage levels under control.
If you had to pay for APIs yourself for any provider then you'd know that SOTA tokens are not cheap, and Claude Code for $100 is almost a too good to be true bargain for what you can get out of it.
The entire point of AI is for it to do shit autonomously?
The whole point is that the users can have it doing shit for them instead of them having to babysit the computer.
The fact that users still have to sit there and argue with it erodes their value proposition. The proposition you can pay fewer salaries.
I would argue that „doing shit” should be done by dummy automations. AI should be used to help build that automations or step in when dummy automation breaks.
For now too many people will use AI for stuff that deterministic stupid code would be much more efficient.
They could probably offer enough tokens for that but it would be at a higher price than the sub, I think. You could still pay fewer salaries at 3k a year or per token enterprise prices or whatever.
They want you to do your shit through their own desktop apps.
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My impression is that at the moment the value you get out of Claude is simply incredible.
As a senior engineer, you get an assistant that never gets tired and can do quite a lot on its own. For me, it’s been an eye-opening experience. I used to have a collaborator called M that had a good general culture, but was not too smart. The calculation going into my mind every time I ask Claude for something is: how much would that cost, in terms of time and effort, to get M to do that? M was a resource that costed many thousand dollars per month, plus the time I spent correcting and directing, while Claude is actually smarter and does what it is asked with a degree of autonomy and common sense that M could never dream of.
The flipside of the coin is obvious: Anthropic will find a way to claw back - no pun intended - some of this value by raising the cost of subscription. They would be crazy not to.
value is high but what about the competitors?
is claude that good? the last time i tried claude it was sonnet 4.5. it was ok, not worth the api money clearly. but i only use api tokens for llms.
If you look at SWE, Claude models aren’t that special. Other benchmarks come up with different results.
But… anecdotally, Claude is just that good. Gemini needs a lot of hand-holding, and it will still tell you it’s done when it achieved half the work. Or say, “this test isn’t passing, I’ll just delete it”. Every now and then I get tired of it and give the same task to Sonnet 4.6; 5 minutes later I’m done. Bug fixed, UI properly working, React hooks not being conditionally rendered, theme variables used properly. It’s wonderful.
I’m not sure about large agentic work or deep thinking, but I’m mostly automating away the drudgery of dealing with React Native. I still want to do the deeper work myself, but even there Opus is usually a really good sparing partner.
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I just discovered Pi Coding Agent and found that it's lean System Prompt + a tuned CLAUDE.md brought back a lot of the intelligence that Opus seemed to lose over the last month.
Sucks to be pushed back to Claude Code with opaque system behavior and inconsistency. I bet many would rather pay more for stability than less for gambling on the model intelligence.
We use Pi at work (where we pay per token) and I’d love to use it personally too. From what I’ve read, nobody has been banned for using Pi yet… I wonder if Anthropic minds this much as long as it’s still human usage, or if they’re mostly focused on stamping out the autonomous harnesses. Unfortunately Pi is also what OpenClaw uses so it could easily get swept up in the enforcement attention.
Or maybe I’ll just get a Codex subscription instead. OpenAI has semi-officially blessed usage of third party harnesses, right?
It appears that OpenAI has blessed third party harnesses. I know they officially support OpenCode and they have this on their developer portal:
"Developers should code in the tools they prefer, whether that's Codex, OpenCode, Cline, pi, OpenClaw, or something else, and this program supports that work."
https://developers.openai.com/community/codex-for-oss
Obviously, the context is that OpenAI is telling open source developers who are using free subscriptions/tokens from the Codex for Open Source program that they can use any harness they want. But it would be strange for that to not extend to paying subscribers.
They have, but they also just announced this week that for business and enterprise plans, they’re switching from quotas for codex to token use based pricing, and I would expect that to eventually propagate to all their plans for all the same reasons.
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regular Pi or oh-my-pi?
I wonder if there's a way to bring some of what Pi Coding Agent has to claude code itself.
It seems that installing claude code directly from npm shields from some of the current issues.
You can still use it with an OpenAI subscription (for now at least), and the models aren't substantially worse.
Err, yeah, you should neither do any web scraping without respecting robots.txt, nor use ad blockers when using Google. When working with a business, never use Google Docs without paying them. Nah, that's not how the world works and at least not in the software industry.
> Every single one of them oversells their capacity
That sounds like their problem, not ours
In theory yes, but the overselling does also keep the price low (at least a bit), but also boosts revenue. So when power users use the service too much, the seller will either raise prices, cut features or ban some usage patterns.
You can vote with your wallet though. So don’t throw money at them or just deal with it. Plain and simple.
Low for who exactly? You have low-users overpaying and a few openclaw users actually using what they paid for and getting banned for that... that's not really a "low price" for anyone.
If they they expect X money for Y tokens, better provide Y tokens for your X money. If they can't provide that, then change the pricing plans. That's not the users problem.
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Well, yes, it is. That's why you're seeing them take proactive steps to address the problem, like this new policy.
It's not your problem anymore once you switch from Claude :)
Doesn't look like it
It's not a problem at all, you get subsidised to use it
I run a small third-party harness myself (not OpenClaw, something much smaller). Checked my API key today after this announcement - turns out I was already on a regular API key so it doesnt affect me directly.
But the interesting thing is, my actual token usage running agents is way less than people here seem to assume. Most of the time the agent is waiting for tools, reading files, thinking. The bursts are intense but short. I probably use less tokens per hour than someone doing a long manual coding session with lots of back and forth.
The real issue for me isnt cost, its that they can just change the rules whenever. I had to drop everything today to verify my setup still works. Thats the tax of building on someone elses platform I guess.
"subsidised" is in wrong context. They charge how much they thought it would make sense then people found a way of maximizing the usage under the rules and now they change the rules. I am sure they will put out a product which is exactly OpenClaw/openclaw-like with Claude code soon, and my guess goes even to say that's the reason why they went after the naming... They totally wanted to steal the idea from the moment they saw. As they, and all other ai companies always do. They just steal and contribute nothing back.
> Every single one of them oversells their capacity
Indeed. And this model breaks in several cases that overlaps with the current AI business model:
- marginal cost of incremental usage is too high (Movie Pass)
- adverse selection (all you can eat monthly steak subscriptions)
- demand is synchronized (WeWork)
Good point. I agree with that. The key point is that heavy users benefit from this model while light users are basically subsidizing them. But it's a distribution when everyone shifts toward heavy usage, prices inevitably go up. The $17/mo pro price is already set to compete with other providers. Raising it would lose customers. Other tiers are also carefully priced to match competitors. So the only move left is to prevent the whole distribution from drifting toward heavier usage. That's exatly what this ban does.
So basically their move is an admission that they can't scale up their capacity accordingly to shifting demand while keeping the current pricing.
Customers have their own value calculations. If they can't use Claude for autonomous agent at reasonable price they will move to providers that are cheaper and more flexible. Autonomous agent adds way more utility than a marginally better LLM (assuming that's even true).
> Every single one of them oversells their capacity
This is (almost) universally true of flat rate subscriptions; but there are usage-billed ones, too (and even those often have an aspect of subsidies).
A great example of the shakeup is when dial-up went from "connect, do the thing, disconnect" to "leave the computer online all the time" - they had to change the billing model because it wasn't built for continuous connections.
That's a good analogy. Maybe soon we'll see Claude Code CDs with 700 free hours.
AOLLM!
No, people want transparency. If it was "x tokens per time interval, then you pay extra", the problem wouldn't exist.
The API offers that. Pay X per month, get Y tokens. Then you can look at all the graphs of money being deleted by OpenClaw, for transparency.
People want a free lunch. If the API was cheaper than the subscription then everyone would use the API. Instead people flock to an, apparently, unsustainable pice at a fixed monthly rate; presumably subsidized by others who don't use their full capacity every month.
They have multiple tiers of service. The whole point of this was to allow "power users" to access more tokens. If someone upgraded to a $200/month Max subscription it's because they're a power user.
The thing is that a power user still sleeps.
It seems Anthropic thinks they have a much greater moat then they actually do. OpenClaw on a local model is better than any Claude offering, since it can just spin til the task is complete.
I'm pretty sure in this case it's anthropic doing the subsidizing because the api and extra usage rates are extremely expensive compared to the usage you get for the lowest subscription level. I pay $28 CAD per month and I'm pretty sure I'd burn through that in a day or two, and I'm not really a power user, I'm just using it to write code like it says on the tin. I seriously doubt there's a large portion of subscribers with low enough monthly usage that they'd save money by switching to the API.
And why aren’t OpenCode and others allowed anymore?
You don’t use more tokens than with Claude Code
> Every single one of them oversells their capacity.
My meal kit delivery service doesn't.
Still very interesting timing to ban third party harnesses, given the proximity to the Claude Code leak …
well that largely depends, lots of saas are running 90% operating profit margins
That is not the correct generalization. Most modern subscriptions have no capacity constraint. Usage based pricing makes more sense for a supply constrained business.
They do not advertise a capacity constraint. There is definitely one there, because it's the only way they can offer a reasonable price. Why do you think streaming services suddenly get plagued with technical issues when they host a live event? They are so chronically under-provisioned that they can only guess at the actual amount of compute they need to serve even a fraction of their subscriber base suddenly deciding to watch something at the same time. And their best guess is usually wrong, because even then — even when they know they need to deliver on a live event — they STILL under-provision their compute, or constrain their autoscaling thresholds, in an effort to save money.
Is your unlimited 5G plan actually unlimited, or does your download rate drop to dialup speeds after your crest a certain amount of bandwidth usage?
Have you ever had an ISP in a populated area? What's the reliability like? Is it worse during certain times of the day?
Come on, someone on a Max account has a reason why they are paying $200. I bet many are at least often near the weekly limit, or they‘ll downgrade. If anything, OpenClaw usage is more spread out instead of ingesting whole codebases during office hours.
The Anthropic subs are likely priced at marginal cost (Amp‘s CEO recently said that in a podcast). It just doesn’t serve Anthropic to be operating as the service layer for OpenClaw.
So it's like Sliceline from Silicon Valley (the show)
It's fine, their moat is thin. Frontier models as a service isn't really in the best interest of anyone anyways. Only a matter of time.
Are you arguing that eventually a competitor will emerge that does support OpenClaw with a subscription model? Wouldn’t that just be more expensive for the exact same reason Anthropic is banning it?
OpenAI have literally gone out of their way to explicitly support this sort of thing. As they did with OpenCode.
Honestly, this just looks like what Dylan of SemiAnalysis suggested on Dwarkesh – that they've massively under-provisioned capacity / under-spent on infrastructure.
That would honestly be a comforting answer if true, because I would gladly take 'we can't afford to do this right now' over 'we are self-preferencing, and the FTC should really take a look at us, even if we're technically not a monopoly right now, since we're the only strongly-instruction-following model in town and we clearly know it'.
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Some of the Chinese labs with cheaper per token costs do support it, like say minimax: https://agent.minimax.io/max-claw
I haven't tried it to see if it's any good but it's $20/mo.
Doesn't OpenAI allow this today?
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Kimi seems to support this with their 39 usd a month plan.
You mean whether another competitor will emerge? Right now we have OpenAI.
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I agree, eventually the open models will be good enough and we can pay for our own infra and cut out the middle man. Also, the smaller frontier are nearly as good today and I expect the mega models will be used primarily for distillation