alt Hacker News> Everyone on a plan pays for the max set of tokens in that plan.
From Anthropic's perspective, everyone pays to be in bins with a given max.
And to everyone's benefit, there is a wide distribution of actual use. Most people pay for the convenience of knowing they have a max if they need it, not so they always use it.
So Anthropic does something nice, and drops the price for everyone. They kick back some of the (actual/potential) savings to their customers.
But if everyone automates the use of all their tokens Anthropic must either raise prices for everyone (which is terribly unfair for most users, who are not banging the ceiling every single time), or separate the continuous ceiling thumpers into another bin.
That's economics. Service/cost assumptions change, something has to give.
And of the two choices, they chose the one that is fair to everyone. As apposed to the one that is unfair (in different directions) to everyone.
Replies
> there is a wide distribution of actual use
except when people start using openclaw, and the distribution narrows (to that of a power user).
I hate companies that try to oversell capacity but hides it in the expected usage distribution. Same goes for internet bandwidth from ISP (or download limit - rarer these days, but exists).
Or airplane seats. Or electricity.
Yes, mostly what I'm saying, but forgetting the important part:
From the email: > but these tools put an outsized strain on our systems. Capacity is a resource we manage carefully and we need to prioritize our customers using our core products
OpenClaw doesn't put an outsized strain on their systems any more than Anthropics own tools. They just happen to have more demand than they can serve and they benefit more when people to use their own tools. They just aren't saying that explicitly.
It has nothing to do with fairness or being nice.