alt Hacker NewsYeah. And weird pricing seems like it's winding down.
It's interesting to compare it to electricity. Basically Anthropic was selling a flat fee electricity subscription, and when someone started connecting expensive washing machines (OpenClaw) to their subscriptions, instead of changing the pricing model, they banned washing machines...
I wonder if we will get to "electricity" style pricing for AI. What makes electricity predictable is relatively constant average usage over time + price is manageable. I'm just not buying electrical house heating and manage my electricity spending within some bounds.
With AI the problem is that we are only now getting to useful AI, and for now it's still too expensive to be useful, so they subsidize until they can stabilize at "cheap enough and smart enough" level. But it feels like that's still 2 years away while they are stopping to subsidize now. Will be interesting.
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OpenClaw was never banned from the Claude API, only flat-fee plans.
The Uber subscription analogy works well too.
>Basically Anthropic was selling a flat fee electricity subscription
No? It was flat, but with ambiguously stated limits (eg. 5x, 10x 20x). They were discriminating on how the "electricity" was used, but that's not that much different than how power companies have different rates for residential users vs industrial users.