Subscription models only work when marginal costs are low and/or there’s a good variety of usage that roughly averages out. Or, you need to be able to kick out abuse.

Unfortunately for those of us who just want to eat a nice filling meal at the fixed price all you can eat buffet of AI subscriptions, a minority of customers keeps paying for the all you can eat buffet and staying for hours and bringing containers to sneak food out when they leave. And they keep wearing disguises to try and evade detection.

It’s a losing battle for the provider, which ultimately means the subscription pricing model can’t work, which hurts the majority of customers that just want to use the system as intended and no longer have a subscription model available.

I have plenty of frustrations with Anthropic as a paying customer, but this specific false positive abuse detection doesn’t strike me as all that awful, just some annoying collateral damage. I’d rather have that than no subscription model at all.