alt Hacker NewsThere seem to be a ton of people who don't understand how subscription services work. Every single one of them oversells their capacity. The power users that use the services a lot are subsidized by those who don't use it as much, which tends to be the vast majority of the user base. OpenClaw is an autonomous power user. The growing adoption of this walking attack surface was either going to A) cause the cost of Claude to go up or B) get banned to protect the price of the service for actual users.
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Good point. I agree with that. The key point is that heavy users benefit from this model while light users are basically subsidizing them. But it's a distribution when everyone shifts toward heavy usage, prices inevitably go up. The $17/mo pro price is already set to compete with other providers. Raising it would lose customers. Other tiers are also carefully priced to match competitors. So the only move left is to prevent the whole distribution from drifting toward heavier usage. That's exatly what this ban does.
It's one thing to pay $5 or $20 per month, which although it's a substantial difference, people pay that much for the convenience of having stuff ready and available - and it's a completely different thing to pay $200 per month. People don't pay that much for occasional usage and many/most people will organise themselves to use all or most of their weekly allowance when the expense is in that ballpark.
If Anthropic miscalculated the amount of tokens, or simply pushed too hard to capture market share, that is a costly mistake because people in this market are very sensitive to price hikes.
They have to be honest about what they can offer for $200. Sure, people don't max their subscriptions but when they're large they make the best of it, or they will likely cancel it. The typical subscription works well below capacity because it's cheap enough that the optionality may be worth it. $200 is not the typical subscription.
I just discovered Pi Coding Agent and found that it's lean System Prompt + a tuned CLAUDE.md brought back a lot of the intelligence that Opus seemed to lose over the last month.
Sucks to be pushed back to Claude Code with opaque system behavior and inconsistency. I bet many would rather pay more for stability than less for gambling on the model intelligence.
The entire point of AI is for it to do shit autonomously?
The whole point is that the users can have it doing shit for them instead of them having to babysit the computer.
The fact that users still have to sit there and argue with it erodes their value proposition. The proposition you can pay fewer salaries.
> Every single one of them oversells their capacity
This is (almost) universally true of flat rate subscriptions; but there are usage-billed ones, too (and even those often have an aspect of subsidies).
A great example of the shakeup is when dial-up went from "connect, do the thing, disconnect" to "leave the computer online all the time" - they had to change the billing model because it wasn't built for continuous connections.
Still very interesting timing to ban third party harnesses, given the proximity to the Claude Code leak …
It's fine, their moat is thin. Frontier models as a service isn't really in the best interest of anyone anyways. Only a matter of time.
What you're saying is conceptually true for subscription services in general, but thats not why they are making this change. There's a 5 hour limit and a weekly limit. Those are hard token limits. Everyone on a plan pays for the max set of tokens in that plan. The limits manage capacity. The solution to that isn't a change of ToS, it's adjusting the limits.
In other words this is about Anthropic subsidizing their own tools to keep people on their platform. OpenClaw is just a good cover story for that. You can maximize plans just as easily w/ /loop. I do it all the time on max 20x. The agent consuming those tokens is irrelevant.
For what it's worth I don't use OpenClaw and don't intend to, but I do use claude -p all the time.