Using -p (non-interactive mode) now uses API pricing, not subscription (so it's now more expensive). But if you have a subscription you get some free credits for it.
I really wish Anthropic would consult some monetization experts. Their recent strategy has been all over the place and they are burning early goodwill.
I don't think they are clueless, but rather, struggling. Being an AI provider is a money burner, and they probably don't have enough fuel for the fire anymore, so they are trying things to squeeze more $$$ and limit usage at the same time.
What are the biggest problems you've seen? Is it mostly related to limits for the subscription plans?
Within my circles (mostly big enterprises), I see more and more of my friends using Claude, and spending money on it, so they must be getting some sort of value out of it. For my uses, I've also been successful with Claude Code, though someone else is paying for my tokens.
Yes, it's related to the limits of the subscription plans. 2ish months ago the same sub started hitting limits earlier and earlier on very similar tasks/codebases. Then they said, Oh, sorry, it was a caching bug, now it's fixed. It wasn't. Then a couple more bugs. Still no fix. Recently they announced "doubling the limits" (made possible by the Grok deal) - still hitting limits super fast compared to how it used to be 2+ months ago. Moreover, the models got somewhat dumber and slower, too.
It really is the doordash/uber playbook all over again eh? Sell at a massive loss, gain userbase, then gradually boil the frog by adding fees, removing features, and increasing prices. Except instead of doing this a few years down the line, they're speedrunning the tighten-the-noose phase.
Unfortunately the competition is nipping at their heels so there's a good chance this blows up in their faces.
I still think/hope/pray the future will be on-device models that don't need constant retraining. That will blow up the existing business model but I think a company could still make good money with a "majority local/remote for the really challenging stuff" model.
The problem is that today's AI companies have taken on so much funding that a reasonable, not crazy profit ratio isn't enough for them.
The future is already pretty much here. Note the recent stories about Chrome adding a local model, not to mention the Googlebook demo (if it works as advertised, there's a 0% chance you could get that kind of latency with a non-local model).
I think people are being too generous with these comparisons. Not defending Anthropic but at the same time they are releasing new features and adjusting cost at pretty record speed for a new industry. Uber/doordash were subsidizing cost for what felt like a decade. Anthropic and related companies are adjusting price within months.
To me the bigger takeaway is that these business are seeing massive volume in use and figuring out how to price the products accordingly.
They have to speedrun boiling the frog because the capital expenditure is insane. Remains to be seen just how fast you can boil a frog before the frog notices
Disagree. Most businesses of size are going to enterprise agreements which are all on demand rates. Those rates have not been changing other than the underlying cost to the model API rates fluctuating. You could make argument they are secretly using that has the price lever.
With volume enterprises can already negotiate lower token rates. I don’t see a boiling the frog situation.
They will still need to increase costs for enterprise to be profitable, they're just going to be more greasy about it. Claude 5 will cost 20% more but not be 20% better, more shenanigans with "oh no we had a bug in our cache system :^)", or this gem from the current enterprise pricing page: "Opus 4.7 uses a new tokenizer... may use up to 35% more tokens for the same fixed text".
There is competition.
And there is no moat nor network effect.
I don't think it'll blow up in their faces if they provide a product and service that people value which demonstratively they have. But it may not be so lucrative to them or their shareholders.
As far as I can tell, it seemed very clear that was the playbook for about a year now. Its been regularly assumed they're selling plans as a major loss-leader because people can "spend" thousands of dollars a months on a plan if they were charged at API rates. I think there's good evidence that even the API rates are sold at a loss.
I think its assumed in the LLM model business that the models themselves are not a good moat, the next model by another company is just as likely to be as good as the current model. So companies like Anthropic have to tighten the noose slowly to start recovering their costs. This appears to be one of those steps.
The simpler explanation is probably some mix of marketing and also an expected use from people paying for a plan. The money to be made is not from plans ever. It’s in everyone’s best interest for these companies to accurately oversubscribe plans. Enterprise is where the money is to be made and I don’t feel that pricing has changed much on that end.
I had never thought of it that way, but it seems very likely that Enterprise oversubscribing is in the mix. Which does tie in nicely with this change; if a few devs are using their max plan to programmatically run parts of the business that could break the oversubscribes assumption.
Moviepass (afaik) was an attempt at the exact same playbook, it just failed.
Anthropic will also fail when the competition is.. near-equivalent-capability DeepSeek/Qwen/Llama on a $1k GPU with a break-even of 5 months of subscription costs. The value is simply not there for what they would need to charge to become profitable.
>when the competition is.. near-equivalent-capability DeepSeek/Qwen/Llama on a $1k GPU with a break-even of 5 months of subscription costs
Lol no. Chinese AIs are definitely not "near-equivalent-capability". The empirical proof is pretty obvious: how many people have you heard talking about using their codex/claude code subscription vs their z.ai or qwen subscription? Moreover even the Chinese models require epic amounts of GPUs to run the full version, eg. https://apxml.com/models/glm-51. The 2 bit quantized distilled model that you can run on your 4080 is further downgraded from that.
> At Anthropic, we build AI to serve humanity’s long-term well-being.
If Anthropic actually cared about humans, they would have the best customer support (staffed by humans, for humans) and communications team (again, staffed by humans, for humans).
As both of these are actually on par with Silicon Valley standards (between medicore and atrociously bad), Anthropic cannot and should not be trusted with anything to do with AI, because whatever they do will not benefit humanity.
> If Anthropic actually cared about humans, they would have the best customer support (staffed by humans, for humans)
I know Anthropic support is slow from firsthand experience, but it has to be pretty difficult to scale support 10-80x per year. And even more so when you have a long-tail of very low revenue usage in the form of $20/month subscriptions.
There is basically no support to speak of. Scaling a zero is not hard. You can be paying 200 USD a month with barely any chance of ever hearing back. Your best chance of getting support from Anthropic is the same as with any other big tech company: have a Twitter following or know someone who works there.
Extremely cynical take, but they're probably being honest. They wanna serve humanity. But maybe they only consider a small part of the population to be relevant humans.
it's hard, but not THAT hard, to find a few dozen people who can deal with large volumes of support tickets every day. so for a company like anthropic, you'd use a customized claude to triage and then those few dozen people spend all day actually caring about solving users' problems. a contract with fin fka intercom (lol) to offload this is a step in the wrong direction imo, but then nobody pays for support so it's hard to turn it into a revenue stream.
I'm sorry but a few dozen people actually caring about the problems of a billion users is a fart in a windstorm. You might as well hire a half-dozen to care, or none, for all the work you'll do. You'd need a dozen people just to design a scheduler for handling tickets only to watch that catch fire too.
I don't get it. None of the hyperscalers have human support teams at scale because it's obviously infeasible. Why, just because it would be nice, do we take leave of the requirement that something actually be possible before demanding it.
With lower margins of course. Walmart, Indian Railways, major airlines etc all support massive user bases comparable to or bigger than the paid tiers of these apps. But of course the cult of Big Shareholder value creation means the CEO that does this, especially in the US will be fired.
That's just it. If they were prioritizing humans they'd have a product with a measely million users, charge more, and offer great support. Their game isn't a good product though, their game is scale because they think that's the only way to win, and winning is the only way to survive.
Wait, how would limiting a great tool to 0.1% of the TAM demonstrate caring for humans?
Are you picturing them running a lottery for who’s allowed to use it, or an auction?
And with the loss of scale economies, it would have to be much more expensive.
So you end up charging, what, $10,000/month and only making it available to the very wealthy?
I don’t see how this game plan is better for humans. And I’m honestly not being snarky. Have you thought through how your proposed limits would work? Am I missing something?
It's funny how silicon valley bros always talk like making real world things is essentially impossible. I mean walmart or aldi are serving > 200 million customers a week, how do they manage that I can tell you that's much harder than customer support for an online product.
As a side note, how do you make up that billion user number? Claude has 10 million users.
I mean, the simplistic answer is that if a billion people are paying you, you should be able to hire a proportional number of support staff, because you're getting additional revenue from each customer.
I can imagine scaling may be difficult, but that should be a temporary problem.
California is trying to ban the sale of 3d printers that don't detect and block "gun parts" from being printed[1]. All Anthropic and friends need is some kind of safety rationale and we won't be able to buy computers that can run local models.
The plausible way to do this is to force all software through some kind of signing process. This would be trivial for Apple to pull off and not much harder for Microsoft. On the Linux side, I expect the systemd folks would be happy to add some kind of signature checking to "head off the inevitable".
They're already nearly there. Once everybody's computers are rooted for age verification, with government-approved OSes, it's barely even a step to only allow government-approved AI on them.
For some reason, people assume that mandatory age/identity verification on people's machines is primarily geared toward reporting across the network. If you wanted to age-restrict across the network, there are any number of trivial ways to do it that they have never even entertained. The reason that the first victims of this legislation are operating systems is because they, like Apple, Google, and Microsoft already have, want to restrict the software you can run.
They have to make sure that you can't have AI that can make pictures of naked children, or naked anything, or that might "underreport" the number of casualties in the Tienanmen Square protests, or could cast doubt on the vaccine (whichever vaccine), or say anything that could be interpreted as anti-Semitic (like that the Palestinians aren't savage animals), etc., etc....
This is already easy to get public support on, because in the same way they whipped up bizarre mind control allegations against genuinely evil social media companies to throw the public off the scent, the public is being groomed with absolutely bizarre and incoherent predictions of the evils of generative AI in order to throw them off the actual evils of the people behind generative AI. The same way that the anti-social media agitprop just resulted in TikTok being sold to explicit propagandists during a genocide and age attestation (as the social media giants do business without interruption), the "AI scaremongering" is just going to result in physical restrictions on individuals running AI - it will be tracked like explosives or nuclear material. The giant AI companies will be sold as the solution, just like closed platform software "stores" from Apple and Google are sold as consumer protection.
> When has that ever happened though?
Microsoft has to sign Linux so it can be installed under Secure Boot. Encryption was regulated as arms export, and is fully under attack again.
Yes, this is the main point, employees will have less and less leverage (I'm even seeing AI doing interviews now, good luck). Soon we'll be explaining to an AI why we aren't as productive as two weeks ago.
Jose valim is the creator of elixir for reference. He definitely includes a fan following within the elixir community. So its not much about twitter as much as the guy.
I mean even on top of my head, I still remember when jose commented back to me and it was a highlight for a few days as I told my friend about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234633
> I have a fun anecdote. About 5-6 years ago, Elixir completely disappeared from the top 100 after spending some time in the top 50. People reached out to me and then I reached out to TIOBE to understand why and the reason given was "bad presence on Amazon".
> After further investigation, the root cause seemed to be that we finally had enough published Elixir books. At the time, if you searched for "xyz programming" on Amazon and only found a few results, Amazon would pad those results with non-relevant entries. However, because Elixir reached about 20-30 books, we were no longer padded, so we suddenly got worse rankings than every other language with only a handful of books. This happened on every Amazon domain they searched on, so it compounded and effectively kicked us out of the top 100 altogether. This all happened at a time Elixir language activity had already reached top 25 on GitHub PRs/stars.
So although my comment has gotten a little offtopic but people have literally written books about elixir (the language he created).
My point is, people like to listen to jose and he's a really chill guy from what I know of him and elixir feels like a great language :-D
That doesn't actually answer the original poster's commentary, however.
Humans have left Twitter, its all propaganda and spam bots just spamming and propagandizing each other.
José Valim needs to move to either Bluesky (if he prefers to stay within the corporate ecosystem) or Mastodon (which is where the entirety of the FOSS universe went).
> José Valim needs to move to either Bluesky (if he prefers to stay within the corporate ecosystem) or Mastodon (which is where the entirety of the FOSS universe went).
Personally, I am not particularly on X so much as much as I am on bluesky, and I would really appreciate Jose joining bluesky.
But at the end of the day, I might take critique with the idea of needs
So I think that he's open to new platforms and old habits die hard perhaps. I don't wish to defend X because I don't particularly like it, but being honest, it is what it is.
> Humans have left Twitter, its all propaganda and spam bots just spamming and propagandizing each other.
Can't say about all but I can indeed confirm that when I tried to make a new account and post something, I was literally recommended tweets basically saying "like this tweet/follow us to get 1000 followers or buy these followers" when I had posted a video for an product.
Within my circles (mostly big enterprises), I see more and more of my friends using Claude, and spending money on it, so they must be getting some sort of value out of it. For my uses, I've also been successful with Claude Code, though someone else is paying for my tokens.
Basically, ongoing enshittification.
This makes sense.
Unfortunately the competition is nipping at their heels so there's a good chance this blows up in their faces.
The problem is that today's AI companies have taken on so much funding that a reasonable, not crazy profit ratio isn't enough for them.
Someone has to pay the 7 trillion (the current projections for the AI datacenter build up)
To me the bigger takeaway is that these business are seeing massive volume in use and figuring out how to price the products accordingly.
With volume enterprises can already negotiate lower token rates. I don’t see a boiling the frog situation.
I think its assumed in the LLM model business that the models themselves are not a good moat, the next model by another company is just as likely to be as good as the current model. So companies like Anthropic have to tighten the noose slowly to start recovering their costs. This appears to be one of those steps.
Uh, that’s a good thing
Anthropic will also fail when the competition is.. near-equivalent-capability DeepSeek/Qwen/Llama on a $1k GPU with a break-even of 5 months of subscription costs. The value is simply not there for what they would need to charge to become profitable.
Lol no. Chinese AIs are definitely not "near-equivalent-capability". The empirical proof is pretty obvious: how many people have you heard talking about using their codex/claude code subscription vs their z.ai or qwen subscription? Moreover even the Chinese models require epic amounts of GPUs to run the full version, eg. https://apxml.com/models/glm-51. The 2 bit quantized distilled model that you can run on your 4080 is further downgraded from that.
If Anthropic actually cared about humans, they would have the best customer support (staffed by humans, for humans) and communications team (again, staffed by humans, for humans).
As both of these are actually on par with Silicon Valley standards (between medicore and atrociously bad), Anthropic cannot and should not be trusted with anything to do with AI, because whatever they do will not benefit humanity.
I know Anthropic support is slow from firsthand experience, but it has to be pretty difficult to scale support 10-80x per year. And even more so when you have a long-tail of very low revenue usage in the form of $20/month subscriptions.
I don't get it. None of the hyperscalers have human support teams at scale because it's obviously infeasible. Why, just because it would be nice, do we take leave of the requirement that something actually be possible before demanding it.
Are you picturing them running a lottery for who’s allowed to use it, or an auction?
And with the loss of scale economies, it would have to be much more expensive.
So you end up charging, what, $10,000/month and only making it available to the very wealthy?
I don’t see how this game plan is better for humans. And I’m honestly not being snarky. Have you thought through how your proposed limits would work? Am I missing something?
Very humanitarian
As a side note, how do you make up that billion user number? Claude has 10 million users.
I can imagine scaling may be difficult, but that should be a temporary problem.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48125552
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126281
LLMs are software there's no plausible way to stop them running locally.
The plausible way to do this is to force all software through some kind of signing process. This would be trivial for Apple to pull off and not much harder for Microsoft. On the Linux side, I expect the systemd folks would be happy to add some kind of signature checking to "head off the inevitable".
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/1rek7ky/new_cal...
For some reason, people assume that mandatory age/identity verification on people's machines is primarily geared toward reporting across the network. If you wanted to age-restrict across the network, there are any number of trivial ways to do it that they have never even entertained. The reason that the first victims of this legislation are operating systems is because they, like Apple, Google, and Microsoft already have, want to restrict the software you can run.
They have to make sure that you can't have AI that can make pictures of naked children, or naked anything, or that might "underreport" the number of casualties in the Tienanmen Square protests, or could cast doubt on the vaccine (whichever vaccine), or say anything that could be interpreted as anti-Semitic (like that the Palestinians aren't savage animals), etc., etc....
This is already easy to get public support on, because in the same way they whipped up bizarre mind control allegations against genuinely evil social media companies to throw the public off the scent, the public is being groomed with absolutely bizarre and incoherent predictions of the evils of generative AI in order to throw them off the actual evils of the people behind generative AI. The same way that the anti-social media agitprop just resulted in TikTok being sold to explicit propagandists during a genocide and age attestation (as the social media giants do business without interruption), the "AI scaremongering" is just going to result in physical restrictions on individuals running AI - it will be tracked like explosives or nuclear material. The giant AI companies will be sold as the solution, just like closed platform software "stores" from Apple and Google are sold as consumer protection.
> When has that ever happened though?
Microsoft has to sign Linux so it can be installed under Secure Boot. Encryption was regulated as arms export, and is fully under attack again.
I mean even on top of my head, I still remember when jose commented back to me and it was a highlight for a few days as I told my friend about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234633
> I have a fun anecdote. About 5-6 years ago, Elixir completely disappeared from the top 100 after spending some time in the top 50. People reached out to me and then I reached out to TIOBE to understand why and the reason given was "bad presence on Amazon".
> After further investigation, the root cause seemed to be that we finally had enough published Elixir books. At the time, if you searched for "xyz programming" on Amazon and only found a few results, Amazon would pad those results with non-relevant entries. However, because Elixir reached about 20-30 books, we were no longer padded, so we suddenly got worse rankings than every other language with only a handful of books. This happened on every Amazon domain they searched on, so it compounded and effectively kicked us out of the top 100 altogether. This all happened at a time Elixir language activity had already reached top 25 on GitHub PRs/stars.
So although my comment has gotten a little offtopic but people have literally written books about elixir (the language he created).
My point is, people like to listen to jose and he's a really chill guy from what I know of him and elixir feels like a great language :-D
Humans have left Twitter, its all propaganda and spam bots just spamming and propagandizing each other.
José Valim needs to move to either Bluesky (if he prefers to stay within the corporate ecosystem) or Mastodon (which is where the entirety of the FOSS universe went).
Personally, I am not particularly on X so much as much as I am on bluesky, and I would really appreciate Jose joining bluesky.
But at the end of the day, I might take critique with the idea of needs
Nobody needs to do anything. It's his freedom and I just searched and Jose is literally on bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:6h6jhmuogujxac24oilywd45 but his account is inactive since last message of 11 months ago.
So I think that he's open to new platforms and old habits die hard perhaps. I don't wish to defend X because I don't particularly like it, but being honest, it is what it is.
> Humans have left Twitter, its all propaganda and spam bots just spamming and propagandizing each other.
Can't say about all but I can indeed confirm that when I tried to make a new account and post something, I was literally recommended tweets basically saying "like this tweet/follow us to get 1000 followers or buy these followers" when I had posted a video for an product.