Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

It would signal quite a fundamental pivot if their "Pro" plan excludes coding but supports personal productivity (Cowork). Quite surprising given most people attribute Anthropic's success to their elevation of coding above everything else. To have casual users locked out of that would be a major hit you would think.

Makes me curious about the internal thinking. One theory being they are in a capacity crisis and knocking Pro users off Claude Code is an emergency brake getting pulled. But an opposite theory is it's a revenue move and they think they have the lock in to pull it off. Especially if they are building up to IPO.

Interestingly the Team subscription which is still $20/month/seat still includes Claude Code. But you need minimum 5 seats. So it could be a way to force people off individual plans and into enterprise plans where possibly things scale better for them, especially IPO/wise. When one user wants it in a company, probably they go buy 5 seats.

I have to assume they're compute constrained and thus need to either raise prices or cut their lowest-margin products (which amounts to more or less the same thing, but with different optics), or turn away new users.

My assumption is that people are able to very easily saturate Pro with Claude Code and therefore even though the quotas are lower (more than proportionally) the utilization of those quotas is higher enough that Pro is less profitable.

I think there is a definite possibility that they aren't compute constrained, but rather trying to improve a sorry cash flow situation before IPO.

Of course, I don't have real insight into available compute, but the vibe slope seems to have dropped a bit, at the same time as new GPUs are being shoved into datacenters as fast as possible.

Their enterprise API customers are literally competing to see who can throw the most money at Anthropic. Anthropic has very little reason to focus on a $20/month user, and with their current momentum (especially since enterprise deals are long-lived) they could remove Claude Code from the Pro plan without any revenue hit. In fact, it may be a huge revenue boost given the strength of the Anthropic brand.

If that's the case, what will happen after IPO? Will they become good again?

I just switched from the $10 Copilot subscription to a $20 Claude subscription to get general AI and coding in one bill. I guess I'll try out GPT Codex.

gpt allows you to wire their models into other CLI tools, I'm advising everyone I know to lean that direction. Not trying to become hostage to something like claude's ecosystem for the rest of my development career.

They will eventually converge --- it's only a matter of time.

It's possible that Anthropic sees that the loss of $20/mo customers could be offset by the customers purchasing the $100/mo plan

This is a market where hyper growth is important

Loss of customers is the wrong direction

Their supply of being able to serve the models is hardcore rationed by their ability to scale up datacenters and GPUs.

They really don't need to subsidize unprofitable customers at this point when there is a line out the door to pay thousands of dollars a month per user, that are revolting because they aren't actually being able to get reliable uptime.

They have all the growth they need for now, they really don't need the cheap users.

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