alt Hacker NewsThere'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.
My assumption was always that the December promo was a combination – they were presumably way under capacity because everyone was on holiday given how enterprise-heavy they are, so giving people a bunch of extra usage with a loud promo meant a whole bunch of people would try Claude and see how good it had gotten at very little cost to Anthropic.