Saw this coming eventually. $20/month for autonomous agents running 24/7 was clearly not sustainable at API pricing. The part that's surprising is there's still no official announcement - just a quiet page edit.
> running 24/7
This was never the case though. There's a per week and per 5 hour quota. If you exhaust either you have to wait for the reset. What they're doing makes no sense.
Choosing to do it quietly instead of letting everyone know is actually not that surprising.
The $20/mo plan never supported 24/7 autonomous agents. With Opus 4.5 and 4.6 I would hit resource limits after a reasonable amount of work, which corresponded to a variable amount of wall clock time.
This makes me think either they’re severely resource constrained and need to focus on “high value” customers, they’re bleeding money on inference, or their sales and marketing team is incompetent.
Regardless, this feels like a pretty big rug pull. Especially without a phase-out period and a real announcement. As someone using Claude Code on a personal hobby project to get a better feel for its capabilities, I’m not sure what to do now. I can’t justify the $100+/mo plans for a hobby project.
My choices are then:
Fun times.