They later said: https://twitter.com/TheAmolAvasare/status/204672549859272297...
> When we do land on something, if it affects existing subscribers you'll get plenty of notice before anything changes. Will hear it from us, not a screenshot on X or Reddit.
If you don't want things like this spreading through screenshots of X and Reddit, don't run "tests" like this in the first place!
(Also "if it affects existing subscribers" is a cop-out, I need to know the pricing of Claude Code for NEW subscribers if I'm going to adopt it at a company with a growing team, or recommend it to other people, write tutorials etc.)
That tweet only makes things worse. On top of all their other nonsense recently, it actually convinced me to cancel my subscription.
I can't trust Anthropic to manage their products in a way that supports my workflow.
pretty much none of these big providers are offering the guarantees needed to be taken seriously in workplaces right now. the technology itself isn't offering the deterministic guarantees that should warrant it in the workplace right now. problem is everyone's foot is just on the gas. even if your workplace isnt paying for it, people are just straight up rolling their own personal claude accounts to do work at orgs.
ive been trying to make the case all year that if we're going to let employees do shit with ai, lets try claude. in the past like.. 2-3 weeks all that goodwill has basically evaporated.
local inference needs to take off asap because all of these entities actually suck and i wouldn't trust a single sla with anthropic. they are not acting like a serious company right now, this is a joke.
What are you guys subscribed to if not Claude? Copilot? Or is everyone legit bringing their own license?
I have the basic subscriptions for Copilot, Claude and Codex. About €50 per month.
I enjoy Codex the most
But like Claude I’m not loyal to any of them.
Anthropic is absolutely taken seriously in workplaces, what are you even talking about?
No serious business uses Pro or Max, they are all on Anthropic API billing.
In fact with this move it is plainly obvious that Anthropic is moving compute from prosumers towards enterprise.
I know of a very serious business that deployed Max to all of their developers. API pricing, from what I see, can become more expensive than just hiring another dev.
We're also not seeing much difference in real throughput at an agency. Everyone is getting decent results, output wise but it just doesn't seem to change the outcomes that much. There is also a mixed incentive at an agency, because a reduction in hours spent is a reduction in revenue.
It will be interesting to see how it all plays out, but I suspect if cost continues to increase and output only improves incrementally from here, that the cost will be the final decider rather than the competence.
I could see it being a thing we use only sometimes, for some things, but ultimately remain reliant on developers to get the work through the pipeline.
API usage is on-demand, employees are a constant cost, guess what management loves most.
Well yes it is expensive, but companies are paying for that. It is far more expensive than the Max and it does go up to or more in some cases compared to the employee salary.
Larger companies are using Claude through AWS Bedrock and are willing to easily pay $5k+ per engineer per month for it.
The thinking appears to be that a model that can do the work of a developer must be worth a significant share of a developer salary. I think this idea is flawed.
Developer salaries are driven up by scarcity - scarcity of developer skills overall and scarcity of developer skills in specific places like California. If AI models destroy the scarcity then the price worth paying for a coding agent will drop dramatically.
Maybe Anthropic can get away with it for a couple of months. But this will not last.
But if e.g. a developer can do 50% more, shouldn't it be worth it to pay up to 50% of developer salary for the product?
So the % is debatable of course. There's cases where an AI agent can save weeks worth of investigation, there's cases where you are mainly blocked due to processes, and many different circumstances. It's up to every company on their own to decide it. But if they decide it's 50%, why shouldn't they spend 50% of salary on it?
Like imagine a large company with thousands of microservices. You need to build a feature, before you had to setup cross timezone team meetings to figure out who owns what, what is happening in each microservice, how it all connects together. But now you can essentially send an AI Agent to scour and prepare all this material for you, which theoretically in this planning could save hours of back and forth meetings.
If 1 hour / 1 eng costs $200, then a 10 people 1h meeting avoided would save $200 x 10 = $2000 alone.
I don't see it as a replacement for dev, it's more of a multiplier.
>But if e.g. a developer can do 50% more, shouldn't it be worth it to pay up to 50% of developer salary for the product?
That's the upper bound but it's not the market price.
Accounting software (+ hardware) doesn't cost nearly as much as the accountant hours it saves. Accountant salaries are simply not a relevant yardstick for the price that software vendors can charge for accounting software.
Equally, the market price for code generators will not stay anywhere near the price of developer hours it saves. It will be determined by competition.
I believe what GP is saying is that there is a price calculation today, but then if enough devs become unemployed, their salary will go down, making them more competitive by finops calculations, at which point the Ai prices will have to come down as well. Where equilibrium is, no one knows
I think it's an interest hypothesis but I don't think it works out like that. AI prices aren't priced in relation to the work they do, they're priced in relation to tokens (input/output). As long as it's cheaper to use those tokens than it is to pay a dev, then dev salaries will likely fall. Whenever it becomes cheaper to hire a dev than to use AI, a company will likely just hire a dev. But AI prices won't fall just because dev salaries have.
But the API is incredibly expensive. I calculated that I would have spent 3000 EUR the last month, a lot more than the 100 I pay now.
Nothing for large companies though.
I am pretty sure that a hole in the pocket in the order of 50 000 000 USD/month (assuming around 20 000 people using AI in not the smartest or most optimized way possible, therefore burning A LOT of tokens) will be noticeable by even the largest companies.
It is noticeable and even promoted, large companies do pay such sums for the API, like $5k+ per person per month. Not every eng is using AI that much already, but companies are clearly willing to pay those sums.
Per employee?
This not nothing.
I work for a "very serious" company with many billions of dollars of revenue. All our SWEs have max subscriptions.
I just cancelled before seeing this news. i was already pissed about constantly hitting limits on the 20 a month plan and looking for alternatives and this seals the deal. Bye bye!
Yea, I've been fine so far, but something happened with Opus 4.6 and especially 4.7. I was able to do some actual work with a Pro plan before. Now it's just pure anxiety of hitting the limits.
With Sonnet it's a bit better, but I can get the same performance with GPT-5.4.
Now I'm pretty much paying the 20€ for Claude Pro so it can plan/review stuff and then I use pi.dev + GPT-5.4 for the actual work.
I just paid for Pro for the first time 24 hours ago. Its been great, but the limits are crazy. It's nice not dealing with ChatGPTs sycophantic gaslighting, and not having random bugs.
That said, I seem to be caught in that 2% test if I open in a private tab. What nonsense. I wouldn't be paying for Claude if it wasn't for its quality abilities, which necessarily includes Claude Code.
I can easily hit the weekly limit on Claude even on the $200 plan. I have yet to ever hit a rate limit on Codex $100. And the results are almost as good. And don't get me started on Anthropic's extra usage scam.
How do you hit that limit? I’m never close to it.
Not the op, but it’s fairly easy to hit if you automate a kanban and have some stuff you want to get done. All those little “wouldn’t it be great if” tasks that show up after doing a big task become very doable, it just soaks your tokens.
With Opus 4.6 on the $20 plan the limits were bad, but at least you could do a short session.
I find that with Opus 4.7 I can do two messages. Once I had a short session with 4-5 messages and it consumed $10 in extra usage.
This relegated Claude to a backup option in addition to Codex, which has the better desktop app anyway, and much better usage limits.
I’m considering to even cancel Claude entirely.
> Will hear it from us, not a screenshot on X or Reddit.
Has this ever been true? You will almost always see some anecdotal screenshot a long time before any company would rat on themselves.
Yes the random screenshots include a lot of false positives. But official comms have a lot of their own problems given how companies behave nowadays.
A/B tests only work if the subjects don't realize they are in a A/B test.
Perhaps vibe coding the A/B testing engine isn't the best idea.
Solution: don't A/B test your users.
A/B testing people without their informed consent is immoral, unethical, and should be illegal.
To play devil's advocate, without A/B testing a lot of decisions would be made with insufficient relevant data, and lead to subpar results that affect the many negatively form the road.
counter-point : the companies that are most famous for A/B testing routinely are also the ones with the most notoriously non-existent customer service departments globally, facebook/google/amazon/ebay. Groups that harbor dissatisfied customers by essentially being 'the only show in town.'.
so, what i'm saying is : I think a lot of companies align themselves with the cash first and then measure whether or not the negative image/user impact is manageable .
(in fact I know they operate this way.)
A lot of decisions made with A/B testing are also made with insufficient relevant data, but it's less obvious since it's easy to think the A/B results cover everything.
So you're saying software should never change or you're happy with A testing, but not A/B testing
> So you're saying software should never change
Generally, yes. Make your software better first before releasing it and you won't need to make changes to it.
Want a new feature that you didn't have before? That's a new software product.
> or you're happy with A testing, but not A/B testing
I'm happy with testing when the user has explicitly opted-in for it.
Depends entirely on the stakes and whether personal data is involved
> Depends entirely on the stakes and whether personal data is involved
Sure. Let me just A/B test whether or not you'll respond positively or negatively to having your news delivered via push notification or delayed by 10 minutes.
I'm sure you would appreciate being tested on without your consent, just so that I can make an extra quick buck at your expense. Nothing amoral or unethical about it.
How does your example warrant such moral righteousness? The stakes of a late news notification seem strikingly low.
What do you think about slow rollouts for new features? Like, we think this new push notification system will be loved but let’s ship to only 1% of users in case there’s a horrible unforeseen consequence like occasional 10min delays? Dashboard goes upside down -> revert then work through logs to figure out what the hell went wrong.
What do you think of things you purchased changing over time into something you didn't purchase?
That's literally any software subscription ever.
So you're perfectly okay with repeatedly paying for a shit product, getting shat on by the company in the form of being tested for feedback, and "maybe" getting a better product in the future. Mind you, that "better" isn't necessarily better for you but more explicitly better for the company you're paying.
Sounds like someone who doesn't care about being a sheep. Or maybe someone whose salary depends on having sheep.
I think you are making far too wide-sweeping statements. I think most people here probably agree that if Anthropic drops Claude Code from the Pro plan after people have paid with the understanding that it is part of the package, that would be wrong, and they deserve to lose business over it. However, there are plenty of situations where A/B testing is entirely benign, and I would not have any problem with a company doing that testing without getting consent first. Every form of A/B testing is not done just for the gain of the company doing the testing.
Agreed and I can't wait until they regulate this stuff out of existence. It's absolutely hostile software technique that is deeply anti-human.
It is necessary to have a control group, just as in trials for new drugs.
> I need to know the pricing of Claude Code for NEW subscribers if I'm going to adopt it at a company with a growing team.
I agree, but can you really use Claude Code on the Pro plan as a full time developer, or professional 'knowledge worker' without hitting the usage limits fairly early in the day anyway?
It depends on the kind of work you do.
I'm in the academia, and Claude's performance in my field could be described as a very fast junior grad student. When I use Claude Code, I typically spend a few hours figuring out what needs to be done exactly, and describing it in sufficient detail. Then Claude does it in 30 minutes, while an actual student would need days. And then I spend anything from minutes to days evaluating the results, depending on if it needs to be tested with real data and how much weirdness those tests uncover.
But I also have other work to do beyond guiding the automated grad student. Which means my Claude Code usage rarely exceeds 1–2 hours/week.
I use Pro professionally and didn't hit limits most of the time. I believe I used up 5hr quota once or twice. We switched to Team sub and I'm on Standard(which is Pro x1.25 I believe). I don't vibecode entire applications, I ask it to make boilerplate, smaller, well scoped features or fix some errors. I don't let it go off with a prompt "make another netflix clone" cause I just don't see any real value in that
Just the Pro Plan Claude Code on its own? Maybe you could last a full day on just using Sonnet. Maybe one Opus dab in the morning to plan your Haiku/Sonnet day?
I have Pro Claude, Plus GPT and Pro Gemini. When one runs out I switch to another project on the next LLM. If I really need a task finished I'll restart it on another LLM, but I'm loathe to do that as it eats tokens just getting back up to speed.
I think it's more about how they approach their users in general that is the problem here.
Just like they gave plenty of notice regarding OpenClaw?
A screenshot is, however, apparently good enough for _new_ subscribers.
It’s pretty reasonable to say “demand is way up, quality is up, supply is constrained, and so price needs to rise”.
It seems weird to segment this way though. Surely it’s better to just give Sonnet to your bottom tier, rather than cut out the entire Claide Code product entirely?
Give folks a taste rather than lock the whole product behind a $100/mo plan.
But if Sonnet is bad it would give bad impression of the product, no? And it also takes compute, so you give a bad hallucinating impression of your product while still losing compute.
It’s not bad though, it’s crazy good in comparison to any model older than 1y old. If you don’t have access to any vibe coding at all it’s gonna be life changing.
But I think you are right, as long as Codex and Gemini are cheap alternatives then vs. 1yo models isn’t the correct comp.
Then it’s probably better to just resegment the whole Claude Code product as an enterprise only tier. (That also has the advantage of kicking out all the Claw subscribers that screw over the token limit economics for normal $20/mo users.)
I mean, this is why they do A/B testing. This way of testing stuff is not new at all, people who act genuinely surprised need to do a reality check. Companies want to maximize profit. They do this by testing what creates the biggest profit. A/B Testing is one of the ways to do this, and it has been used for decades in precisely this way.
Haha, right, just like the recent uncommunicated changes to limits, cache, etc.
Maybe a silly bet where the head of sales had 1-2 glasses of wine too much... "I bet they will still pay us 20 bucks/mo without CC! Don't believe me? I'm going to prove it!"