Claude's Max Plan
anthropic.com
anthropic.com
Leadership at this crop of tech companies is more like followership. Whether it's 'no politics', or sudden layoffs, or 'founder mode', or 'work from home'... one CEO has an idea and three dozen other CEOs unthinkingly adopt it.
Several comments in this thread have used Anthropic's lower pricing as a criticism, but it's probably moot: a month from now Anthropic will release its own $200 model.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42333969I paid for that to get access to Deep Research from OpenAI and I feel I got more than $200 of value back out.
These companies have a hard time communicating value. Capabilities make that easier for me to understand. Rate-limiting and outages don't.
If it had deep research and this, with a large number of API requests, I'd consider $200/month.
[1] But if it is cheap enough, has large context window, then I might consider setting up something akin to claude.ai with Gemini's API.
The official Gemini app works well for me too and there's a nice free tier and it's free if you have a newer Pixel phone. Otherwise $20/month for the Advanced tier. There's no $200/month option.
Does AI Studio allow you to have projects with project files and whatnot?
How about its context window length, more or less than Claude's?
I am also interested in open-source alternatives to the web interface that claude.ai has, I know there are some but I have forgotten their names, would be cool to have a list here.
You can use the Gemini API for free with quite generous allowances, including for 2.5 Pro.
Extremely off-topic: are you still around DS?
edit, well it now appears to be https://firebase.studio/ - that is a recent change I haven't used it since it changed its name..
The 1M context window (2M?) really sets it apart.
I get the subscription fatigue, but there are splurges and there are truly valuable things.
The free tier is "used to improve our products", the paid tier is not.
IME the quality of all models goes down considerably after just a few thousand tokens. The chances of hallucinating, mixing up prompts, forgetting previous prompts, etc., are much more likely as context size increases. I couldn't imagine a context of 1M tokens, let alone 10M, being usable at all. Not to mention that any query is going to come to a crawl just to move that amount of data around (which still annoyingly happens on every query...).
So usually at around 10K tokens I ask it to summarize what was discussed, or I manually trim down the current state, and start a new fresh chat from there. I've found this to work much better than wasting my time fighting bad output. This is also cheaper if you're on a metered plan (OpenRouter, etc.).
But the main reason I quit is the constant downtime. Their status page[0] is like a Christmas tree but even that only tells half the story - the number of times I have input a query only to have Claude sit, think for a while then stop and return nothing as if I had never submitted at all is getting ridiculous. I refuse to pay for this kind of reliability.
I'd estimate there's probably like another 6 months to a year where I'll jump around to whatever 'cloud' LLM is currently winning on quality of the model (in terms of usefulness as a coding assistant) and just basic UI/availability and then I'll build a locally hosted system and just use that.
I certainly don't have anything like brand loyalty to any of them, so I'm down for a race to the bottom.
A pound of chicken breast, a pound of apples, a third loaf of bread cost at least $7. And that's only 1500 kcal.
Under $200/mo is relatively easy to achieve as long as you know how to cook or can tolerate a repetitive diet. Stretching it to $250-300/mo takes it up a notch and makes it a very balanced and varied diet with whatever fruit and vegetables you want. I only run it up to $300/mo when I buy higher quality meats at Costco and eat an avocado a day.
Yes, beans/potatoes/rice can get you a long ways.
Where win means the problem I set out to solve was solved and passed tests. Where both are aware of the tests.
No new models, no new capabilities, just higher limits. Which I know some people are asking/begging for but that's not been an issue for me. If I needed more I'd probably use the API.
I only continue to pay because some of the features in Claude Web are better than what I've seen elsewhere but their latest web redesign is making me seriously reconsider that stance. It's /bad/, breaks scrolling while it's generating a response, break copy/paste/selection, etc. It's incredibly hostile and I have to assume anyone seriously using Claude internally is using a different client.
The API gets overloaded and you get blocked out as well; yesterday I had to go look up a bunch of bash runes on stackoverflow because Claude's API was busy in the one day a year* I happened to be writing bash scripts. (Maybe I should have tried out Gemini for a change.)
Part of the promise here isn't just usage, but priority: you pay your $200/mo, and (I presume) you never have to worry about being locked out.
* This is an exaggeration but not much of one
- More usage
- Access to Projects to organize chats and documents
- Ability to use more Claude models
- Extended thinking for complex work
What does "more usage" mean? It doesn't say anywhere what the free tier usage limits are. What are "more" models? It also doesn't make clear what models are available with each tier (except for "extended thinking" which is a separate bullet point)The only thing I can reason is that they want to keep this vague so that they don't have to update their marketing copy each time they update their offerings, but that's absurd.
FAQ agrees: https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8324991-about-clau...
Ah, I see they've been to the Cloudflare school of free tier bait-and-switching.
And it's not "unlimited bandwidth", it's "unlimited bandwidth with restrictions". That's an important and critical distinction. I'm not sure I understand the position that somehow CF needs to subsidize every customer.
This is also how batching works for API users. If you don't need the results immediately, you can give them a batch with an attached 24-hour deadline, and they'll slot you in whenever they expect low usage, in exchange for better prices.
I can't believe we're going to high pricing based subscription. This makes me think we need than ever open source models like qwen and deepseek.
I get plenty of work done without the max model.
The key is breaking out a planning step before implementation.
Before they rolled this out, I rarely hit usage limits. Now it seems the usage limits have been lowered for Pro to add more value to Max. That is a less than ideal experience for users.
I agree with what most comments here are saying, that there should be more than just usage limits and I hope this changes (as it likely will because the state of competition is still high)
Even worse is I bought a yearly subscription from a deal they offered. However, now that reliability will be going down, I'm feeling a bit scammed!
I do really prefer Claude’s unified model interface. Hopefully OpenAI improves that soon. Their product UX is a mess.
Going via the API with your own interface seems like it's objectively the better way to handle things like this at high usage, since you'll always have priority, wont have usage limits, and you'll pay as you go.
I have been tempted several times to kill my GPT Pro account, but it is still valuable for cases where Gemini and Claude don't get the job done for whatever reason.
What (language/topic) are you coding in that gemini (or even chatgpt) is better than claude? Very surprised to hear this.
Gemini sometimes fucks up diffs or doesn't actually apply the edits - Claude is rock solid at that. They're both very good though - but 3.7 really likes refactoring unneeded shit and removing code sometimes.
They have web search, but it's true, no "deep research". It honestly is not very good and it's WAY too trigger-happy with it. As a result, if you accidentally leave it on, you get terrible answers to simple questions that non-search mode would have answered well.
(And for context Claude Sonnet 3.7 is my model of choice)
https://openrouter.ai/anthropic/claude-3.7-sonnet:thinking/p...
But I agree with the general point that using the API (with different providers) will have better uptime and that it will almost certainly be cheaper.
I can _easily_ burn $20/hour of credits in Cline/RooCode. Before switching to Cursor, full-time software dev could easily burn $100+/week.
I believe it's partly due to it doing Whisper processing remotely (correct me if I'm wrong), which introduces lag and slows things down.
Gemini does voice processing locally through text-to-speech and voice conversations with Gemini are soo much smoother.
The downside is Gemini does much more poorly than ChatGPT at uncommon words and when I code switch between languages. ChatGPT is just excellent at understanding uncommon words and in different languages.
If you want to do heavy coding right now go with Gemini.
Mostly I'm disappointed that the higher tiers are just usage tiers rather than features.
> Substantially more usage to work with Claude
Compared to pro or free what does this mean? More requests / time? More tokens / time? Something else?
> Scale usage based on specific needs
Are there limits with pro that this is removing or increasing? What kinds of specific needs?
> Higher output limits for better and richer responses and Artifacts
So Claude will do more thinking before responding compared to pro? Is that due to a new variant of 3.7 model?
> Be among the first to try the most advanced Claude capabilities
Okay so you’ll get access before people who pay less but not before well known tech people who get early access for testing, I’m assuming?
> Priority access during high traffic periods
If you’re paying for pro and they throttle you wtf are you paying them for? This seems like an admission they suck at capacity planning based on their current and predicted user base?
What the hell?
How is $200/month ridiculous for groundbreaking technology?
(OpenAI launched their pro plan 4 months ago!)
Its clear that neither company prioritizes their flagship chat UI, over their other offerings. So if it will be in stasis, I definitely like it
There are other web AI offerings now (deepseek web, perplexity, to name a few). This is what I like between these two:
The speed of responses.
The reliability. ChatGPT web UI often times out or has server errors for random things.
Different censorship. Overall better for my use cases, and how errors are handled.
Initially search of old chats was a first class citizen in Claude. ChatGPT didnt have it, needed third party plugins, it has since updated, but is still lackluster in this regard.
The diagrams, charting and coding interface is great and better. Easier for seeing how something compiles and runs, easier to copy and paste.
- Maximum Flexibility: 20x more usage than Pro => $200 per month
Compared to ChatGPT, where 20 bucks gets you hundreds of prompts, and if you ask it hard questions it actually answers instead of lecturing about morals, and why you shouldn't be asking these questions in the first place.
Other than using Free Claude to generate resumes to apply to job postings at anthrowhatever, it is by far and away the most useless of the LLMs.