Comment by muyuu
3 days ago
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.
They already have the way that you're supposed to bill for usages like this, the API usage. The purpose of the subscription plan is strictly for the cases where you are using few enough tokens on average that it's not a money pit for them.
They have subscription plans for their software, and a seperate billing process for the API. There's nothing to change. 'Accepting that it's a dumb pipe' would just mean removing the Pro & Max plans as options.
Clawdbot was clearly against the Consumer Terms of Use the whole time, they’ve just started actively detecting and blocking it.
> Except when you are accessing our Services via an Anthropic API Key or where we otherwise explicitly permit it, [it is forbidden] to access the Services through automated or non-human means, whether through a bot, script, or otherwise.
Start paying by the token if you want to use these tools. Simple as.
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They don’t need to change how they bill. Your subscription is for Claude app/code. Otherwise you pay per token. It’s always been this way.
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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
But the limits apply to all users. I doubt non-OpenClaw users want to pay $XX more to subsidize OpenClaw users.
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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.