alt Hacker NewsYou aren't paying to be using that limit all of the time.
You are paying to be using that limit some of the time. There are 5 hour windows when you are sleeping and can't use it. There are weekend limits.
Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that.
It's structured so users can have bursts of unlimited usage, and spend ~15% of the theoretical max cap, and that's still cheaper than a subscription for that user.
An OpenClaw user can use 6, 7, 8 times what a human subscriber is using.
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I've met people that fill a box of sushi to take home at the end of their “all you can eat” session because “they paid for it”. Shrug.
I think maybe you are not familiar with what /loop and the Claude cron tools do.
Tell me you are not using Anthropic without telling me. Bursts of unlimited usage was never the case. And I bet their infrastructure doesn’t like bursts as much as more spread out activity.
I feel like Anthropic is going down a bad path here with billing things this way. Especially as local LLM continues to develop so fast.
I downgraded from my $200 a month plan to my $20 plan and hit limits constantly. I try to use the API access I purchased separately, and it doesn't work with Claude Code (something about the 1 million context requiring extra usage) so I have to use it Continue. Then I get instantly rate limited when it's trying to read 1-2 files.
It just sucks. This whole landscape is still emerging, but if this is what it's like now, pre enshittification, when these companies have shitloads of money - it's going to be so much worse when they start to tighten the screws.
Right now my own incentive is to stop being dependent on Claude for as much as I can as quickly as I can.
> You aren't paying to be using that limit all of the time.
The erosion of the norm of things doing what they advertise rather than being weasel-worded BS is particularly unfortunate, and leads to claims like this.
Efficient token use will be the new code/vim golf.
Whether it's human token use, or future OpenClaws
you can write automated MCP tools that run within claude code, and could theoretically generate as high a load as any other automated/3rd party agent. You can also do loops that burn tokens incredibly fast. This is allowed with no caveats (I use MCP's basically to test what I'd like to try with the API...) So this explanation just seems a lil hollow.
> Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that.
Then it's not priced correctly. As I said, you can do all of this without OpenClaw.. claude code ships with everything you need to maximize the limits.
How can an OpenClaw user use 6 times what a human subscriber is using when I'm four hours into the week and 15% of my weekly limit is already used up, just by coding? OpenClaw can't use 600% of my weekly limits.
> Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that.
No, there is a weekly limit as well. Maxing out a single 5h window uses ~10% of the weekly limit