Comment by dimmke
3 days ago
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.
They sell metered usage while having the implied expectation that most wont use it fully. Power users and users of stuff like OpenClaw don't match that idea.
So they further restricted the metered caps, which were only offered to NOT be reached by that many.
Simple as that.
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"Unlimited" has always been a lie. There is no free lunch. There are always limits.
I've had to unwind "unlimited" within startups that oversold. I've been bit by ISPs, storage providers, music streamers, fuckin _Ubers_, now AI subscription services, that all dealt in "unlimited". None of them delivered in the long run.
I'd be mad at Anthropic if it weren't for the fact that my experience now can see this sort of thing from a mile away. There are a lot folks, even on HN, that haven't been around for as long. I understand the outrage. I've been there. But these computers cost money to run, and companies don't operate at a loss in the fullness of time.
Once you know that unlimited trends towards limited, the real question is whether we're equipped as a society to deal with the fact that the capital-L Labor input to the economic equation is about to be replaced with a Capital input for which only a handful of companies have a non-zero value.
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>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.
Not the best example. The upkeep cost of a gym is pretty flat regardless of how much people use the facilities. Two people can't use a single machine at the same time make it wear out twice as fast. The price of memberships is not correlated to usage, it's inversely correlated to the number of memberships sold.
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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.
> Anthropic entered 2025 with a run rate of $1 billion; the run rate for March 2026 is estimated at $19 billion.
I don't know what that means in this context.
> Internal projections show the company reaching cash-flow break-even in 2028, after stopping cash burn in 2027.
What does that have to do with them implementing restrictions on their plans because they are currently running at a loss?
Okay, lets say their internal projections[1] are accurate: were those before or after Openclaw released? Maybe their projections were made on the assumption that people would stop using $10k/m worth of tokens on a $200/m plan? Or that those users doing that will only be doing code? Or that the plan users won't be running requests at a rate of 5/minute, every minute of every hour of every day?
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[1] Where did you find those projections? I'm skeptical, at their current prices and current plans, that a break-even at any point in the future is possible unless they shut off or severely scale down training. Running at a per-unit loss means that the more you sell, the larger your loss - increasing your sales increases your loss.
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.
And the smaller Gemma 4 models can do audio too.
The Qwen models are also really good.
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-...
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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