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Comment by rlpb | Hacker News Reader

> It's all circumstantial but everything points towards "desperately trying to cut costs".

I have been wondering if it's more geared at reducing resource usage, given that at the moment there's a known constraint on AI datacenter expansion capability. Perhaps they are struggling to meet demand?

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It’s more that Anthropic knows that the models themselves are non-sticky, and the real moat is in the ecosystem around it.

It only makes sense for them to get users to use their ecosystem, rather than other tools.

See: Claude Cowork trying to establish an entire new group of people in their ecosystem.

And massive VM drive growth

> Perhaps Anthropic is struggling to meet demand?

Yes, definitely, they’re gracefully failing to meet demand. They could also deny new customers, but it would probably be bad for business.

I once decided to deny new customers in order to be able to service current demand at the quality we wanted. It backfired and made people want our product even more. Our phones were blowing up. That approach can have unintended consequences!

You unintentionally used a common sales tactic; by decreasing supply you increase demand.

Another knob you could have turned is: raise prices. Did you try this?

Anthropic is already doing this.

Signup prices seem higher now than three months ago.

This is actually the least frustrating method because people who can't afford to pay are not as angry as people who paid and aren't getting served (like when sign-in emails don't arrive for hours or days), or people who have paid for a long time to suddenly see quality decrease.

But it might not be best for business: Having more users than you can handle might suck, but if you're popular enough, people are still gonna put up with it.

Bad for business and probably unwise for the type of product people will pop their head in to check on, then stop paying and return much later to see whether it's still not much more than a parlor trick for them.

For my part, I've tried to help reduce their demand by cancelling my subscription.

I wish they would just rip the bandaid to stop everybody's entitled whining.

"We're sorry, what we were able to give you for $100/mo before now needs to be $200/mo (or more). We miscalculated/we were too generous/gave too much away for too little. It's a new technology, we are seeing a ton of demand, we are trying to run a business, hope you understand. If you don't want it, don't pay for it."

This is my take too, although I'm not prepared for a max400 reality to replace the max200, but... I hate all of the whingeing. Piggies at the buffet line seem to be the loudest on this subject.

It is one thing to pay 100 a month to make calendar apps for your linkedin and birds on bicycles to get invited to talks, paying 200 HOWEVER

If we didn’t have the birds on bicycles, how would we know the models are getting better?

Are we at the point where there are external constraints that cash can't solve?

can't tell if you're being facetious but yes, there's not enough cash in the world to double energy/silicon fab capacity in a year. Infrastructure takes time, hardware is hard, and you have to be willing to bet that the demand will be there 5 years from now to make an investment today.

Until one has the entire supply of world GPU production, cash can solve it by out bidding others

TSMC would never allow all of their output to only one customer. You have an over simplified view of this.

One could always make existing infrastructure more efficient. Nothing better than post-mature optimization.

Just put everyone on pay per use with the API and rip the band aid off.

Even the pay per use is heavily VC subsidied at current prices.

All indications are that inference for API use is margin positive for Open AI and Anthropic not the subscription.

It will basically cut the hobbyist out and entrench large corporations that can pay the real costs.

If that happened and I was working for myself, I would just buy the beefiest computer I could finance and do everything locally.

I would understand the move, but boy would it play right into the "AI is only here to make the rich even richer" feeling wouldn't it?

If I strain really hard, I can come up with a reason why it might play into such a narrative.

I wish they would too. I’d respect them more for the transparency. I think everyone’s enshitiffication sensors have rightly been dialed up over the years. So without explanations for the regressions it just feels like another example

Honestly, I wish they couldn’t subsidize with VC cash and such and offer below cost to begin with. Like I wish it were illegal. Basically this allows things like Uber, more or less putting taxis out of business and then being worse than what they replaced.

I’d like to see a lot more than entitled whining. I would like to see the fist of regulation slammed down on the back of these tech shenanigans where they know they’ll never be able to match the prices they’re starting with

> "We're sorry, what we were able to give you for $100/mo before now needs to be $200/mo (or more). We miscalculated/we were too generous/gave too much away for too little. It's a new technology, we are seeing a ton of demand, we are trying to run a business, hope you understand. If you don't want it, don't pay for it."

Anthropic's thing has always been that they are perceived as slightly ahead of the competition, if they 2X their pricing then the competition that used to be "slightly worse" suddenly becomes an absolute bargain and guts their user base.

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