Comment by goosejuice
3 days ago
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.
Yes and the staff will tell them to stop that or charge them extra for it.
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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
now maxing out a 5h window takes it to 20%. just experienced it today. so clearly they have reduced the subsidy on plans along with this
I fill my week limit in a few days :(
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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
I think maybe you still don’t understand that not everyone will max out their usage, regardless of the methods available.
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I need a hypothetical use case for things like this, I don't get how so many people have so much desire for use of features like this.
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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.
I think the gp understands that, he is stating that openclaw (has cron that runs every 30 seconds) will use up the last drop of juice the plan offers - aka ultimate power user.
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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.
Or alternatively just pay based on what you use? I.e. $/tokens.
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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.
This is how free drink refills, airplane tickets, Internet service, unlimited data plans, insurance, flat rate shipping, monthly transit passes, Netflix, Apple Music, gym memberships, museum memberships, car wash plans, amusement park passes, all you can eat buffets, news subscriptions, and many more work.
Either you get a flat rate fee based on certain allowed usage patterns or everyone has to be billed à la carte.
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> I feel like Anthropic is going down a bad path here with billing things this way.
What do you expect them to do? You are looking at a business currently running at a loss, and complaining about their billing even though this is not a price-rise?
Unrelated, is it still possible to use $10k/m worth of tokens on their $200/plan?
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>Especially as local LLM continues to develop so fast.
I'm sorry is there anything even close to sonnet, much less opus, that can be run on a 4080? Or 64gb of ram, even slowly?
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We can hope that they optimize the models. I still think its going to be very hard for them to charge $100 or $200 a month at scale from many people, especially with AI "taking jobs". To the extent that happens most of those people won't find replacement income.
You can use the API with CC, you just need to log out and log in, selecting API usage.
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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
I have maxed out my 5 hour limits and my weekly limits fairly regularly, when I did a bunch of editing work on long form writing next to having CC run a few coding tasks over the xmas holidys - I only slept a few hours at night an timed those roughly (by chance) with my limits.
I neither got a warning or a ban or anything - and that was with the double token amount during those days.
So I don't see human usage being something they ban for TOS violation, like you describe. But as always YMMV.
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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.
They did? What do you think that email to the user was about?
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Efficient token use will be the new code/vim golf.
Whether it's human token use, or future OpenClaws
I've mention before that we should have a look at Telegraph/telegram speak. There was a HUGE industry in word efficiency at that time. There are hundreds of books.
I even think an LLM trained to communicate using telegram style might even be faster and way cheaper.
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It’s the new cloud cost vector, where cutting 2K from context on a busy service saves $xxxxx.
Terse.
Like "Token Usage Consulting" companies popping up now? :-D
No org doing real work cares about token use costs.
This mainly just affects hobbyists.
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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 ?
If we do same work via Subscription and API , the subscription is way cheaper. So if we compare them yes they loose money.
Obviously, Anthropic is a private company, so nobody here is going to know their financials (who is at liberty to share them). I'm not GP, but I think it's reasonable to assume the subscription is priced based on average usage, and that's a major reason it's so much cheaper than API prices.
none of them are making any money yet. they all lose.
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.
It is priced incorrectly, but that is intentional. You can't create a tiered paid plan for the whole world that fits everyone. You can't create nuanced extra plans to satisfy all the outliers. It's an bet to keep the customers and still having a good margin. Think of ecom, returns are a big struggle for any large company because they are unpredictable and subject to abuse, shipping fees are just an sophisticated guess to cover that cost. Not a subscription, same mechanics. The only thing here to criticize is, if it's a good thing to make everything a subscription and disguise the real cost.
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No, it is priced correctly.
Just because outliers can be money-losing doesn’t mean you should raise the price for everyone.
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Yes, and they are in control of Claude Code, so they are fine with that. If it causes problems they can tweak it. If OpenClaw causes problems they can’t.
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.
When you can’t enforce everything at once, you go where the most acute problems are. I imagine when your MCP avenue of abuse catches on—like this other category of harnesses did—to such a scale as to become a problem impacting us folk trying to go about our business… when that’s where the problems shift, I imagine (and hope) Anthropic will crack down on that vector too. To keep the service usable for us ordinary meatbags.
I’m glad they give us the leeway to experiment, and I’m also glad they weed the garden from time to time. To switch metaphors, I’m deeply frustrated when my very modest, commuter-grade use gets run off the figurative highway by figurative hot-rodders. It’s been extra-529y this week, and it’s about time they reined it in a little.
You’re always welcome to pay-as-you-go for as many tokens as you’d like to burn on their infrastructure… or to compute against any of the wide array of ever-improving open models on commodity compute providers…
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Yes, but very few people are actually doing that compared to OpenClaw. If everyone else was doing that, they'd be cracking down on it too.
While you can write an automated tool to consume all their tokens, I strongly suspect most users, like myself, are not doing that. So even if Anthropic loses money on a power user, they profit overall and keep public sentiment high by not alienating users with restrictions. It's an optimization problem of making a profit off the average used while staying low enough to attract customers, even if that means some users cost more than they pay.
More users spinning up OpenClaw means that balance starts to shift towards more users maxing their tokens, thus the average increases, so I think their explanation makes sense still.
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My company has several MCPs that our very token intensive, but it seems that with Claude Code, usage is throttled even before hitting limits. I don't have any proof, but often when using intensive MCPs, Claude Code will just stall for 10+ minutes.
I wonder if anyone else has experienced this?
Anthropic is much more concerned about what people are ACTUALLY doing than what they could, in theory, be doing.
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.
>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?
Perhaps because your Claude agent usage is not representative of the average user, and closer to the average OpenClaw user levels...
Not sure what tier you're on.
Basically; spin up in the morning eats a lot of tokens because the cache is cold. This has actually gotten worse now that Opus supports a 1Mt context.
So: compact before closing up for the night (reduces the size of the cache that needs to be spun up); and the default cache life is 5 minutes, so keep a heartbeat running when you step away from the keyboard to keep the cache warm.
Also, things like web-research eat context like crazy. Keep those separate, and ask for an md report with the key findings to feed into your main.
This is not exhaustive list and it's potentially subtly wrong sometimes. But it's a good band-aid.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616297
Know what's funny? Openclaw might actually burn less tokens than a naive claude code user; if configured correctly. %-/
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Man, I run 3-5 sessions an evening for 5-6 hours, and longer on weekends and feel like I'm barely using what I paid for. I've only hit five hour limits a small number of times. Genuinely baffled when I hear people blow through tokens apparently several times faster than me. Are you going out of your way to design complex subagent workflows or something? I just let claude code use subagents when it wants to but don't give it any extra direction to use them.
Without data, this is just a bunk excuse to defend the walled garden practices.
With data, it's an engineering target.
They could just 429 badly behaved clients.
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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.
Anthropic wants power users, that's specifically their game, they just don't want those users using a harness they don't control.
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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.
If this was a gym subscription, it would be an equivalent of some people going to the gym, and some people sending their android to the gym every day, for the whole day, and using as much equipment as the gym policy allows.
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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.
> I hate companies that try to oversell capacity but hides it in the expected usage distribution.
Except they charge you less because of the distribution. Competition for customers doesn't evaporate.
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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!
Defining earnest (placeholder word btw) is the hard part of the trade-off, though.
When your least automated, most interactive users are competing for capacity with fully-automated tools, let's say, you're forced to define some sort of periphery between these groups.
OpenClaw is a self-directed, automated loop that sits on a server. It's wowing its owner by shitposting on moltbook and doing any number of crazy stories you can find online that amount to "omg I can't believe my self-directed claude loop spent all day doing this crazy thing haha."
On the other end of the spectrum is someone using Claude.app's interface.
And then in the middle, you can imagine "claude -p" inside a CI tool that was still invoked downstream of a user's action. Still quite different from the claude loop.
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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.
To some degree sure, is it about the number tokens you can max out?
I’m pretty happy knowing that it supports my development workflow for a week. Recent features like the Code Desktop built in browser, Cowork with Claude in Chrome and remote control matter to me way more than the number of tokens. But that’s me.
Depends on their targeted ICP also, which they are free to define. Is it those users maxing out tokens for the buck? I have the feeling there’s even better alternatives on the market right now.
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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.
First, OpenClaw is OpenAI. [1]
Second, OpenAI is burning UNIMAGINABLE sums of money. Three days ago they raised $122 billion [2], the largest funding rounding in history. By comparison, Anthropic has emphasized a more capital efficient approach, with a ~30% burn rate. [3]
[1] https://x.com/sama/status/2023150230905159801
[2] https://openai.com/index/accelerating-the-next-phase-ai/
[3] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-anthropic-profitability-e...
> 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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