Comment by jmalicki
3 days ago
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.
Yes and they will hide their sushi-grabbing because somewhere deep inside they know it's not part of the deal, while at the same time still strongly feeling that they have indeed paid for it.
Ah, to be human!
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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 :(
Do you do process XLS or similar data? Ive seen using any other files than code files eats much more faster
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.
People don't pay double the $100 account in fixed recurrent payments if they don't intend to use a lot more than they would use in the $100 subscription.
Perhaps people at Anthropic should ask Sonnet (or Kimi, it's much better value) how power laws and pareto distributions work? You are advertising for people who can justify a virtually unlimited amount of tokens, why is it surprising that they would use as many as you're offering them in the plan?
PS: interesting that you'd use a throwaway account to post this
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.
https://martinfowler.com/articles/harness-engineering.html it's being talked about everywhere.
If you manage developers or product folk, do you allow them to work when you're not looking over their shoulder? All developers can be managers/team leads now. You plan, you delegate, you review.
You're welcome to not do this, surely that's appropriate in quite a few areas of work, but many of us are because we can get more work done than if we we're micromanaging every line of code change. For startups, where a bit of quality can suffer in favor of finding market fit, this is huge.
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Every morning it summarizes a bunch of stuff for me, suggests me PRs to review, emails to reply to, freshly cloned any new repos, pulled all others, presents me with the suggested approaches to my PRs of that day, and gives me a list of my slack mentions that look more urgent.
This is just the morning ones, and saves shitloads of time of clicking around from tool to tool, freeing up time for the thinking and deciding.
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Deduplicating/validating/processing incoming bug reports?
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.
And the point being made is that can be done using only Anthropic provided tools. Ask claude to set up crontab for you and be proactive. It will happily do so. This spring/summer you'll find all the same stuff they OpenClaw has in a Claude product. Most of it is already there just not packed neatly for a non technical 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.
They offer that, API pricing. Or "extra usage" which they're saying you can still use for OpenClaw. It's really expensive!
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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.
This is a different case - those all have limitations based on human behavior (it's not necessary or possible to constantly be washing your car the entire month when you pay for unlimited washes) - that doesn't exist here. The types of plans available should reflect that reality. If gyms faced a situation where people would go and spend 18 hours working out every day for a month, they would probably change how they billed things.
Your comparisons are all also "unlimited" situations to Claude's very much limited situation. You can't buy a plan for Claude that is marketed as being unlimited. They're already selling people metered usage. They're just also adding restrictions on top of that.
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Rent doesn't work that way... yet. Imagine if it did though, people would be arguing:
"Well, you're not expected to be able to live in that home the entire month that you paid for!"
The commons? Tragic.
à la carte is honest; overprovisioning just slows progress by preventing demand from creating pressure to innovate proper solutions.
Internet service and unlimited data plans work like this though.
> 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?
They seem to know what they’re doing. Anthropic entered 2025 with a run rate of $1 billion; the run rate for March 2026 is estimated at $19 billion.
Internal projections show the company reaching cash-flow break-even in 2028, after stopping cash burn in 2027.
They’ve already implemented several of the features that put OpenClaw on the map.
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If you can do less for the same price, that is in effect a price increase.
>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?
Well, I reinstalled LM Studio today after some ~10 months since I last used it, just to test Gemma 4. On my PC with 32GB RAM and 4070 Ti (12GB VRAM), it (Gemma 4 26B A4B Q4_K_M) loads and runs reasonably fast, with no manual parameter or configuration tuning - just out of the box, on fresh install - and delivers results usable results on the level I remember expecting from SOTA cloud models 12-16 months ago. And handles image input, too. I'm quite impressed with it, TBH. It's something I can finally see myself using, and yay, it even leaves some RAM and VRAM left for doing other stuff.
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Look for the current crop of local Mixture of Experts models, where it seems like they've made inroads on the O(n^2) context attention cost problem. Several folks have mentioned Qwen, but there's many more of that ilk. Several of them actually score really high on benchmarks. But when I mess with one of them locally by hand myself, (I have a 3090), it feels a bit like last year's Sonnet. They don't quite make the leaps of understanding you get from Opus.
* Weird thing of the day: https://huggingface.co/Jackrong/Qwen3.5-27B-Claude-4.6-Opus-...
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You can run SOTA local MoE models very slowly by streaming the weights in from a fast PCIe 5 SSD. Kimi 2.5 (generally considered in the ballpark of current sonnet, not opus of course) has been measured as 2 tok/s on Apple M5 hardware, which is the best-case performance unless you have niche HEDT hardware with lots of PCIe lanes to attach storage to and figure out how to use that amount of parallel transfer throughput.
A ~$5000 USD Macbook can run open source models that are competitive with GPT 3.5 or Sonnet 3. So on nice consumer hardware you can have the original groundbreaking ChatGPT experience that runs locally.
Qwen 3.5, Gemma 4
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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.
It wouldn't really surprise me if their automatic systems are, one way or another, looking for that sleep period. Those ostensibly human users who use the service with no breaks for sleep would be naturally suspect.
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Was this on a new (few months) or significantly older account?
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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?
They lowered limits opaquely before this. They "announced it" in a twitter by a tech lead. This time it was in an email on a Friday to only some customers.
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.
Why use many word when few do trick?
Reminds me of the terminus agent/harness on the terminal-bench coding benchmark - they just send send keystrokes to a tmux session. They score pretty well.
https://www.tbench.ai/news/terminus
> I've mention before that we should have a look at Telegraph/telegram speak.
.- -. -.. / .. --..-- / ..-. --- .-. / --- -. . --..-- / .-- . .-.. -.-. --- -- . / --- ..- .-. / -. . .-- / - . .-.. . --. .-. .- -- -....- -... .- ... . -.. / --- ...- . .-. .-.. --- .-. -.. ...
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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.
Token use cost can easily get as large as dev salaries. Even real businesses care about that.
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.
>You can't create a tiered paid plan for the whole world that fits everyone.
I mean, you can. Electricity is already sold that way. Subscribers with uncharacteristic usage spikes don't get blackouts, they get a slightly larger bill, and perhaps get moved up a tier.
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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.
> Just because outliers can be money-losing doesn’t mean you should raise the price for everyone.
If they are losing money then it's not priced correctly. That's what I responded to.
Yes, subscriptions work as you say. Plenty of people under utilize subscriptions from prime, to credit cards, to netflix. But if they lost money overall, they too would raise prices. Because that's how economics works. Shortage of capacity, high demand, raise prices until equilibrium.
There's other knobs beyond ToS. They just didn't choose those options.
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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…
>>when your MCP avenue of abuse catches on
Thats an interesting way of phrasing it - so is there a way to use the quota that's not 'abuse'? MCP/claude code seems to be want they want you to use it - are loops or ralph abuse as well ?
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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.
>>So even if Anthropic loses money on a power user, they profit overall and keep public sentiment high by not alienating users with restrictions
So they profit overall if I use all my tokens either way? Again, I understand usage limits - I just don't understand why some usage is 'good' and some 'bad' if I'm using the same either way.
>>More users spinning up OpenClaw
I'm pretty sure that's a small percentage of overall users, and probably skewed towards the very people that would be recommending/implementing you model for work/businesses. Seems like that would be the group you are encouraging/cultivating ?
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. %-/
I'm on the $100 tier, but I don't use OpenClaw. My point is it can't use more than 100% of my limit, so "6-8x more" is only possible if you use 15% of your subscription normally.
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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.
They already 429 everyone! That's the crazy thing. They already have strict limits that we all keep hitting regularly.