Comment by harrall
3 days ago
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.
>Power users and users of stuff like OpenClaw don't match that idea.
Then they should figure out how to structure an offering that accommodates this type of usage not just blanket ban it
19 replies →
"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.
You can both know that "unlimited" means "limited" and also be pissed that they market it as such and try to conceal the actual limits.
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On your 1.5Mbps link, you could theoretically download 500GB per month. A huge amount, but I believe it was often genuinely allowed, because their uplinks could cope with it. Unlimited could genuinely be unlimited.
But now you might get things like “unlimited” 1Gbps… which reverts to 10Mbps (1% speed) or worse after 3.6TB (eight hours). And so your new theoretical maximum is about 6.8TB per month rather than 330TB.
This is all just the classic "the first hit's free" business model.
>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.
Two people can't use a machine at the same time is the issue. If you have 50 machines and 200 customers all of whom want to be in the gym 18 hours per day that's quickly going to lead to cancelled subscriptions. Now you need more space and machines or some other way to balance things.
1 reply →
>Two people can't use a single machine at the same time make it wear out twice as fast
The machine doesn't care about the number of people using it. If it's constantly being used, it will wear out faster. You are conflating "we price based on expected under-utilization" with "costs don't scale with usage." Those are different things.
The inverse correlation you talk about isn't relevant here - People buy gym memberships intending to go, feel good about the intention, and then don't follow through. The business model is built on that gap. That's pretty specific to fitness and a handful of similar industries where aspiration drives purchase.
Anthropic doesn't sell based on a "golly gee I hope people dont use this" gap - they sell compute. Different business.
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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.