alt Hacker NewsI just know there has to be some psychology in play with these promos. The promo during December got me to upgrade to the $100 plan, and I know I'm not the only one.
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I suspect it’s much more about understanding user behavior, i.e: given more allowance off-peak, do users change when they use Claude? And from there, that will inform how plans are designed long term. If they discover that offering higher off-peak limits meaningfully changes how/when users interact with the service, they can use discounted off-peak plans to flatten usage. I would be very surprised if this promotion had anything to do with encouraging people to upgrade.
You're probably right. I've been thinking about why anthropic's revenue keeps soaring. I think in terms of "new users trying the product" we're definitely somewhere in the slowing part of the S-curve (at least in the US), but there are other growth contributors. Two bigs ones are people finding new use-cases and people figuring out how to scale up current use-cases to use more tokens. Perhaps little temporary-usage-boosts like this give people permission to attempt new use-cases or more scale and realize they could use a higher tiered plan.
Interesting - the first thing my mind went to was the DoD supply chain risk designation, and wanting to boost metrics to calm investors nerves
There's definitely psychology in play, but I think it might be less "trying to get you to spend more" and more "trying to incentivize load-shifting", which (to me at least) is a lot less sinister-- my utility does this too for electricity, and nobody attributes malicious intent to it.
We all know these services see huge load spikes and sometimes service degradation when America wakes up, and I bet they'd appreciate it if as many "chug-and-plug" agent workflows moved to overnight hours as possible.
The psychology is to hook you on the usage. A lot of people see a little movement in the usage meter and get cold feet about heavy usage. The prior $70 credit deal and now this offering are to try to get people to dive in, and hopefully retain that usage pattern afterwards.
I found the $250 in free credit for Claude Code hard to actually use before it expired. I think I got down to less than $50
I found that when I have “infinite” tokens my behaviour changed. 3-5 tabs so I’m not waiting, free side quests, huge review skills over whole codebase, skills that wrap 10 other skills. It’s like going from expensive data to uncapped.
I think these token doubles are there to kick you into a abundance mindset (for want of a better term) so going back feels painful. Stop counting tokens, focus on your project and the cost of your own time.