A realistic business plan would be to burn cash for many years (potentially more than a decade), and bank on being able to decrease costs and increase revenue over that time. Investors will be funding that journey.

So it is way too early to tell whether the business plan is unsustainable. For sure the unit economics are going to be different in 5 and 10 years.

Right now is very tough though- since it is basically all early adopter power user types, which spend a lot of compute. Later one probably can expect more casuals, maybe even a significant amount of "gym users" that pay but basically never uses the service. Though OpenAI is currently stronger for casuals, I suspect.

Over the next decade, hardware costs will go down a lot. But they have go find a way to stay alive (and competitive) until then.

I wouldn't call "spawning a lot of agents" to be a typical use case of the personal plan.

That was always in the domain of switching to a pay as you go API. It's nice that they allowed it on the fixed rate plans, but those plans were always advertised as higher limits, not unlimited.

The problem is this would reveal how expensive it _actually_ is to service interference right now at the scale that people use it for productive things.

Seems pretty standard to me.

The Buffet-style pricing gets you more bang for the buck. How much more? That bit is uncertain. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

The daily limits are probably there to fix the account sharing issue. For example I wanted to ask a friend who uses the most expensive subscription for work, if I could borrow the account at night and on weekends. I guess that's the kid of pattern they want to stop.

Internet, text messages, etc are roughly that: the direct costs are so cheap.

That’s not the case with LLM’s at this moment. There are significant direct costs to each long-running agent.

LLMs will become more efficient, GPUs, memory and storage will continue to become cheaper and more commonplace. We’re just in the awkward early days where things are still being figured out.

Opus at 24-40 looks pretty good too. A little hard to believe they aren't losing a bunch of money still if you're using those limits tbh.

That's why using the API directly and paying for tokens anything past that basic usage feels a bit nicer, since it's my wallet that becomes the limitation then, not some arbitrary limits dreamed up by others. Plus with something like OpenRouter, you can also avoid subscription tier related limits like https://docs.anthropic.com/en/api/rate-limits#rate-limits

Though for now Gemini 2.5 Pro seems to work a bit better than Claude for my code writing/refactoring/explanation/exploration needs. Curious what other cost competitive options are out there.

If anything pops this bubble, it won’t be ethics panels or model tweaks but subscription prices finally reflecting those electricity bills.

At that point, companies might rediscover the ROI of good old meat based AI.

I know nobody else really cares.. In some ways I wish I didn't think like this.. But its at this point not even an ethical thing, its just a weird fixation. Like I can't help but feel we are all using ovens when we would be fine with a toasters.

Mask off completely and just make it completely usage based for everyone. You could do something for trial users like first 20 (pick your number here) requests are free if you really need to in order to get people on board. Or you could do tiered pricing like first 20 free, next 200 for X rate, next 200 for X*1.25 rate, and then for really high usage users charge the full cost to make up for their extreme patterns. With this they can still subsidize for the people who stay lower on usage rates for market share. Of course you can replace 200 requests with just token usage if that makes sense but I'm sure they can do the math to make it work with request limits if they work hard enough.

Offer better than open-router pricing and that keeps people in your system instead of reaching for 3rd party tools.

If your tool is that good, even with usage based it will get users. The issue is all the providers are both subsidizing users to get market share, but also trying to prohibit bad actors and the most egregious usage patterns. The only way this 100% becomes a non-issue is usage based for everything with no entry fee.

But this also hurts some who pay a subscription but DONT use enough to account for the usage based fees. So some sales people probably don't like that option either. It also makes it easier for people to shop around instead of feeling stuck for a month or two since most people don't want multiple subs at once.

Unless/until I start having problems with limits, I'm willing to reserve judgment. On a max plan, I expect to be able to use it throughout my workday without hitting limits. Occasionally, I run a couple instances because I'm multitasking and those were the only times I would hit limits on the 5x plan. I can live with that. I don't hit limits on the 20x plan.

The stuff that we do now, my 13 year old self in 1994 would never dream of! When I dialed my 33.6kbps modem and left it going the whole night, to download an mp3.

It's exciting that nowadays we complain about Intelligent Agents bandwidth plans!! Can you imagine! I cannot imagine the stuff that will be built when this tech has the same availability as The Internet, or POTS!

Well, it is a limited resource, I'm glad they're making that clear.

I don't really know how it's sustainable for something like SOTA LLMs.

Some stuff I’ve used it for in the last day: figuring out what a family member needs for FAFSA as a nontraditional student, help identify and authenticate some rare first editions and incunabula for a museum collection I volunteer at, find a list of social events in my area (based on my preferences) that are coming up in the next week (Chatgpt Agent works surprisingly well for this too), adapting Directus and Medusa to my project’s existing schema and writing up everything I need to migrate, and so on.

Deep research really hits the Claude limits hard and that’s the best way to avoid hallucinations when asking an important question or making it write complex code. I just switch from Claude to ChatGPT/Gemini until the limits reset but Claude’s deep research seems to handily beat Gemini (and OpenAI isnt even in the running). DR queries take much longer (5-10 min in average) but have much more in depth and accurate answers.

I assume that the people hitting limits are just letting it cycle, but doesn't that just create garbage if you don't keep it on a tight leash? It's very eager but not always intelligent.

I think you're just confused about what the Pro plan was, it never included being used for 168 hours/week, and was extremely clear that it was limited.

> What are the reasonable local alternatives? 128 GB of ram, reasonably-newish-proc, 12 GB of vram? I'm okay waitign for my machine to burn away on LLM experiments I'm running, but I don't want to simply stop my work and wake up at 3 AM to start working again..

a $10k mac mini with 192GB of vram with any model you can download still isn't close to Claude Sonnet.

- 2x 4070 Ti (32 GB total VRAM) - $2200

- 64 GB RAM - $200-250

- Core i9/Ryzen 9 CPU - $450

- 2 TB SSD - $150

- Motherboard, cooler, case, PSU - $500-600

Total - ~$3500-3700, say $4000 with extras.

...are you allowed to do that? I guess if they don't stop you, you can do whatever you want, but I'd be nervous about an account ban.

*edited to change “pro” to “plus”

I know entire offices in Bangladesh share some of these accounts, so I can see how it is a problem.

Very good point, I find it unlikely that 1/20 users is account sharing or running 24/7 agentic workflows.

the principle: let's protect against outliers without rocking the behavior of the majority, not at this stage of PMF and market discovery

i'd also project out just how much the compute would cost for the outlier cohort - are we talking $5M, $100M, $1B per year? And then what behaviors will simply be missed by putting these caps in now - is it worth missing out on success stories coming from elite and creative users?

I'm sure this debate was held internally but still...

I regularly hit the the Pro limits 3 times a day using sonnet. If I use claude code & claude its over in about 30 minutes. No multi 24/7 agent whatever, no multiple windows open (except using Claude to write a letter between claude code thoughts).

I highly doubt I am a top 5%er - but wont be shocked if my week ends on a wednessday. I was just starting to use Claude chat more as it is in my subscription but if I can not rely on it to be available for multiple days its functionally useless - I wont even bother.

Just to nitpick: When the limit is a week, going over it does not mean losing access for a week, but for the remaining time which would assuming the limits aren't overly aggressive mean losing access for at most a couple of days (which you say is more palatable).

I wouldn't say you're too reliant, but it's still good to stay sharp by coding manually every once in a while.

Is it really necessary to use GPT to write a simple comment like that?

Well, not the entire week, however much of it is left. You said you probably won't hit it -- if you do, it's very likely to be in the last 36 hours (20% of a week) then, right? And you can pay for API usage anyway if you want.

If it's affecting 5% of users, it might be people who are really pushing it and might not know (hopefully they get a specialized notice that they may see usage differences).

Use /resume

When you have your functional spec, and your tech spec, ask it to implement it. Additionally add some basic rules, say stuff like "don't add any fallback mechanisms or placeholders unlessed asked. Keep a todo of where you're at, ask any questions if unsure.

The key is to communicate well, ALWAYS READ what you input. Reivew, and provide feedback. Also i'd reccomend doing smaller chunks at a time once things get more complicated.

That said, there's no fucking way I am getting what they claim w/Opus in hours. I may get two to three queries answered w/Opus before it switches to Sonnet in CC.

clearly that's abusive and should be targeted. but in general idk how else any inference provider can handle this situation.

cursor is fucked because they are a whole layer of premium above the at-cost of anthropic / openai etc. so everyone leaves goes to cc. now anthropic is in the same position but they can't cut any premium off.

you can't practically put a dollar cap on monthly plans because they are self exposing. if you say 20/mo caps at 500/mo usage then that's the same as 480/500 (95%) discount against raw API call. that's obviously not sustainable.

there's a real entitled chanting going on too. i get that it sucks to get used to something and have it taken away but does anyone understand that just the cap/opex alone is unsustainable let alone the RD to make the models and tools.

I’m not really sure what can be done besides a constant churn of "fuck [whoever had to implement sustainable pricing], i'm going to [next co who wants to subsidize temporarily in exchange for growth]".

i think it's shitty the way it's playing out though. these cos should list these as trial periods and be up front about subsidizing. people can still use and enjoy the model(s) during the trial, and some / most will leave at the end, but at least you don't get the uproar.

maybe it would go a long way to be fully transparent about the cap/op/rdex. nobody is expecting a charity, we understand you need a profit margin. but it turns it from the entitled "they're just being greedy" chanting to "ok that makes sense why i need to pay X to have 1+ tireless senior engineers on tap".

It's amazing how fast you go from thinking nobody could ever use that much of your service to discovering how many of your users are creatively abusing the service.

Accounts will start using your service 24/7 with their request rating coming at 95% of your rate limiter setting. They're accessing it from a diverse set of IPs. Depending on the type of service and privacy guarantees you might not be able to see exactly what they're doing, but it's clearly not the human usage pattern you intended.

At first you think you can absorb the outliers. Then they start multiplying. You suspect batches of accounts are actually other companies load-splitting their workload across several accounts to stay under your rate limits.

Then someone shows a chart of average profit or loss per user, and there's a giant island of these users deep into the loss end of the spectrum consuming dollar amounts approaching the theoretical maximum. So the policy changes. You lose those 'customers' while 90+% of your normal users are unaffected. The rest of the people might experience better performance, lower latencies, or other benefits because the service isn't being bombarded by requests all day long.

Basically every startup with high usage limits goes through this.

https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/sub-agents

you...already were? it already had a variety of limits, they've just added one new one (total weekly use to discourage highly efficient 24/7 use of their discounted subscriptions).

that's exactly what they've done? they've even put rough numbers in the email indicating what they consider to be "abusive"?

[1]: https://epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-price-trends

this entire thread is people whinging about the "you get some reasonable use for a flat fee" product having the "reasonable use" level capped a bit at the extreme edge.