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Comment by rideontime | Hacker News Reader

Anthropic’s “Head of Growth” claims this is a “test”: https://x.com/TheAmolAvasare/status/2046724659039932830

This does not explain the changes to documentation.

They later said: https://twitter.com/TheAmolAvasare/status/204672549859272297...

> When we do land on something, if it affects existing subscribers you'll get plenty of notice before anything changes. Will hear it from us, not a screenshot on X or Reddit.

If you don't want things like this spreading through screenshots of X and Reddit, don't run "tests" like this in the first place!

(Also "if it affects existing subscribers" is a cop-out, I need to know the pricing of Claude Code for NEW subscribers if I'm going to adopt it at a company with a growing team, or recommend it to other people, write tutorials etc.)

That tweet only makes things worse. On top of all their other nonsense recently, it actually convinced me to cancel my subscription.

I can't trust Anthropic to manage their products in a way that supports my workflow.

pretty much none of these big providers are offering the guarantees needed to be taken seriously in workplaces right now. the technology itself isn't offering the deterministic guarantees that should warrant it in the workplace right now. problem is everyone's foot is just on the gas. even if your workplace isnt paying for it, people are just straight up rolling their own personal claude accounts to do work at orgs.

ive been trying to make the case all year that if we're going to let employees do shit with ai, lets try claude. in the past like.. 2-3 weeks all that goodwill has basically evaporated.

local inference needs to take off asap because all of these entities actually suck and i wouldn't trust a single sla with anthropic. they are not acting like a serious company right now, this is a joke.

What are you guys subscribed to if not Claude? Copilot? Or is everyone legit bringing their own license?

Copilot's per-prompt pricing model is overwhelmingly the best value for money right now, although they more than doubled the price of Opus 4.7 compared to 4.6 and completely removed 4.5 and 4.6, which erodes their lead somewhat. Copilot restricts context much more than CC, but I still find it to be plenty capable. I've occasionally managed to give Copilot/Opus 4.6 a prompt that kept it productive for a full work day for a cost of just ~$0.10.

My company has Github Business, which provides all major models. Claude runs out of tokens usually in the middle of the month. I can use it with opencode.

Then one extra Claude Pro. Then also:

Codex business for a test month. gpt-5.4 was excellent.

And since kimi-2.6 I bought their monthly for testing. Works fine. Not as excellent as opus, but usable. Fixes tricky problems by its own.

Not an OpenRouter subscription yet. Those models are either free on opencode anyway, or not good enough. The free MinMax 2.5 on opencode is pretty usable also.

I have the basic subscriptions for Copilot, Claude and Codex. About €50 per month.

I enjoy Codex the most

But like Claude I’m not loyal to any of them.

I got a claude api key from work that I use with zed. It works really well and usually ends up costing $25/day if I use it all day.

I did recently experiment with copilot for personal stuff, but will cancel it now that opus is no longer available on the $10/month plan.

Anthropic is absolutely taken seriously in workplaces, what are you even talking about?

No serious business uses Pro or Max, they are all on Anthropic API billing.

In fact with this move it is plainly obvious that Anthropic is moving compute from prosumers towards enterprise.

I know of a very serious business that deployed Max to all of their developers. API pricing, from what I see, can become more expensive than just hiring another dev.

We're also not seeing much difference in real throughput at an agency. Everyone is getting decent results, output wise but it just doesn't seem to change the outcomes that much. There is also a mixed incentive at an agency, because a reduction in hours spent is a reduction in revenue.

It will be interesting to see how it all plays out, but I suspect if cost continues to increase and output only improves incrementally from here, that the cost will be the final decider rather than the competence.

I could see it being a thing we use only sometimes, for some things, but ultimately remain reliant on developers to get the work through the pipeline.

API usage is on-demand, employees are a constant cost, guess what management loves most.

That's true but employees offer more than code output, and you still need people operating the "machine" at this stage.

I am interested in how corporate politics evolves in this new environment. Usually all the way up the chain, managers and directors use head count as a measure of power and influence (and compensation). Who's going to pay a director top level pay when all they're doing is funneling requirements to various agents? That seems like a technical role that isn't particularly aligned with the soft skills management excel with either.

Management seems disconnected from reality. Real employees accumulate tribal knowledge, have an almost infinite context, and don’t keep disabling unit tests because they don’t pass. They don’t really cost money if it’s information workers that build almost all of the modern service industry. It’s management that we should see as a cost center.

Well yes it is expensive, but companies are paying for that. It is far more expensive than the Max and it does go up to or more in some cases compared to the employee salary.

Larger companies are using Claude through AWS Bedrock and are willing to easily pay $5k+ per engineer per month for it.

The thinking appears to be that a model that can do the work of a developer must be worth a significant share of a developer salary. I think this idea is flawed.

Developer salaries are driven up by scarcity - scarcity of developer skills overall and scarcity of developer skills in specific places like California. If AI models destroy the scarcity then the price worth paying for a coding agent will drop dramatically.

Maybe Anthropic can get away with it for a couple of months. But this will not last.

But if e.g. a developer can do 50% more, shouldn't it be worth it to pay up to 50% of developer salary for the product?

So the % is debatable of course. There's cases where an AI agent can save weeks worth of investigation, there's cases where you are mainly blocked due to processes, and many different circumstances. It's up to every company on their own to decide it. But if they decide it's 50%, why shouldn't they spend 50% of salary on it?

Like imagine a large company with thousands of microservices. You need to build a feature, before you had to setup cross timezone team meetings to figure out who owns what, what is happening in each microservice, how it all connects together. But now you can essentially send an AI Agent to scour and prepare all this material for you, which theoretically in this planning could save hours of back and forth meetings.

If 1 hour / 1 eng costs $200, then a 10 people 1h meeting avoided would save $200 x 10 = $2000 alone.

I don't see it as a replacement for dev, it's more of a multiplier.

I believe what GP is saying is that there is a price calculation today, but then if enough devs become unemployed, their salary will go down, making them more competitive by finops calculations, at which point the Ai prices will have to come down as well. Where equilibrium is, no one knows

I think it's an interest hypothesis but I don't think it works out like that. AI prices aren't priced in relation to the work they do, they're priced in relation to tokens (input/output). As long as it's cheaper to use those tokens than it is to pay a dev, then dev salaries will likely fall. Whenever it becomes cheaper to hire a dev than to use AI, a company will likely just hire a dev. But AI prices won't fall just because dev salaries have.

Yeah, I mean I think there's just too much work and I think devs who are effective with AI won't become unemployed, but their productivity will be multiplied. More will be expected of companies in terms of output, so it will be just more output.

>But if e.g. a developer can do 50% more, shouldn't it be worth it to pay up to 50% of developer salary for the product?

That's the upper bound but it's not the market price.

Accounting software (+ hardware) doesn't cost nearly as much as the accountant hours it saves. Accountant salaries are simply not a relevant yardstick for the price that software vendors can charge for accounting software.

Equally, the market price for code generators will not stay anywhere near the price of developer hours it saves. It will be determined by competition.

Because accounting software is cheaper due to competition. In software eng Claude is currently strongest and there's higher costs involved than normal SaaS. There are many fields in which the tools/machinery cost more than the salaries of people.

>Because accounting software is cheaper due to competition. In software eng Claude is currently strongest and there's higher costs involved than normal SaaS.

Yes, competition not salaries determines the margins that software vendors can charge. That's exactly what I'm saying.

My expectation is that competition between coding agents will stay strong and costs for the current level of software engineering performance will fall.

>There are many fields in which the tools/machinery cost more than the salaries of people.

For example?

Agriculture, oil drilling, trucking, etc...

The machines in those sectors do not cost nearly as much as doing the same work manually. Not even close.

Of course not, but they cost more than the person using them, it's multiplying the productivity of that person, so if AI multiplied enough as well it would make sense.

That's beside the point.

The question was whether the salaries that would have been paid for the working hours replaced by the machine are a realistic yardstick for the market price of the machine.

That's clearly not the case in any industry.

In my calculation a good opus developer can do 10x more, not just 50%.

Got all my tickets from the last two years fixed on a few days. And implemented all the ideas which came to my head.

But the API is incredibly expensive. I calculated that I would have spent 3000 EUR the last month, a lot more than the 100 I pay now.

Nothing for large companies though.

I am pretty sure that a hole in the pocket in the order of 50 000 000 USD/month (assuming around 20 000 people using AI in not the smartest or most optimized way possible, therefore burning A LOT of tokens) will be noticeable by even the largest companies.

It is noticeable and even promoted, large companies do pay such sums for the API, like $5k+ per person per month. Not every eng is using AI that much already, but companies are clearly willing to pay those sums.

Per employee?

This not nothing.

My startup just rolled out MAX plans for our engineers. we literally jumped into AI last week. Been in operation for 6 years and are profitable.

I work for a "very serious" company with many billions of dollars of revenue. All our SWEs have max subscriptions.

I just cancelled before seeing this news. i was already pissed about constantly hitting limits on the 20 a month plan and looking for alternatives and this seals the deal. Bye bye!

Yea, I've been fine so far, but something happened with Opus 4.6 and especially 4.7. I was able to do some actual work with a Pro plan before. Now it's just pure anxiety of hitting the limits.

With Sonnet it's a bit better, but I can get the same performance with GPT-5.4.

Now I'm pretty much paying the 20€ for Claude Pro so it can plan/review stuff and then I use pi.dev + GPT-5.4 for the actual work.

I just paid for Pro for the first time 24 hours ago. Its been great, but the limits are crazy. It's nice not dealing with ChatGPTs sycophantic gaslighting, and not having random bugs.

That said, I seem to be caught in that 2% test if I open in a private tab. What nonsense. I wouldn't be paying for Claude if it wasn't for its quality abilities, which necessarily includes Claude Code.

I can easily hit the weekly limit on Claude even on the $200 plan. I have yet to ever hit a rate limit on Codex $100. And the results are almost as good. And don't get me started on Anthropic's extra usage scam.

With Opus 4.6 on the $20 plan the limits were bad, but at least you could do a short session.

I find that with Opus 4.7 I can do two messages. Once I had a short session with 4-5 messages and it consumed $10 in extra usage.

This relegated Claude to a backup option in addition to Codex, which has the better desktop app anyway, and much better usage limits.

I’m considering to even cancel Claude entirely.

How do you hit that limit? I’m never close to it.

Not the op, but it’s fairly easy to hit if you automate a kanban and have some stuff you want to get done. All those little “wouldn’t it be great if” tasks that show up after doing a big task become very doable, it just soaks your tokens.

A/B tests only work if the subjects don't realize they are in a A/B test.

Perhaps vibe coding the A/B testing engine isn't the best idea.

Solution: don't A/B test your users.

A/B testing people without their informed consent is immoral, unethical, and should be illegal.

To play devil's advocate, without A/B testing a lot of decisions would be made with insufficient relevant data, and lead to subpar results that affect the many negatively form the road.

counter-point : the companies that are most famous for A/B testing routinely are also the ones with the most notoriously non-existent customer service departments globally, facebook/google/amazon/ebay. Groups that harbor dissatisfied customers by essentially being 'the only show in town.'.

so, what i'm saying is : I think a lot of companies align themselves with the cash first and then measure whether or not the negative image/user impact is manageable .

(in fact I know they operate this way.)

A lot of decisions made with A/B testing are also made with insufficient relevant data, but it's less obvious since it's easy to think the A/B results cover everything.

So you're saying software should never change or you're happy with A testing, but not A/B testing

> So you're saying software should never change

Generally, yes. Make your software better first before releasing it and you won't need to make changes to it.

Want a new feature that you didn't have before? That's a new software product.

> or you're happy with A testing, but not A/B testing

I'm happy with testing when the user has explicitly opted-in for it.

It is necessary to have a control group, just as in trials for new drugs.

no its not.

Depends entirely on the stakes and whether personal data is involved

> Depends entirely on the stakes and whether personal data is involved

Sure. Let me just A/B test whether or not you'll respond positively or negatively to having your news delivered via push notification or delayed by 10 minutes.

I'm sure you would appreciate being tested on without your consent, just so that I can make an extra quick buck at your expense. Nothing amoral or unethical about it.

What do you think about slow rollouts for new features? Like, we think this new push notification system will be loved but let’s ship to only 1% of users in case there’s a horrible unforeseen consequence like occasional 10min delays? Dashboard goes upside down -> revert then work through logs to figure out what the hell went wrong.

What do you think of things you purchased changing over time into something you didn't purchase?

That's literally any software subscription ever.

So you're perfectly okay with repeatedly paying for a shit product, getting shat on by the company in the form of being tested for feedback, and "maybe" getting a better product in the future. Mind you, that "better" isn't necessarily better for you but more explicitly better for the company you're paying.

Sounds like someone who doesn't care about being a sheep. Or maybe someone whose salary depends on having sheep.

I am not getting shat on by them working to improve the product. Have you got a screw loose?

I think you are making far too wide-sweeping statements. I think most people here probably agree that if Anthropic drops Claude Code from the Pro plan after people have paid with the understanding that it is part of the package, that would be wrong, and they deserve to lose business over it. However, there are plenty of situations where A/B testing is entirely benign, and I would not have any problem with a company doing that testing without getting consent first. Every form of A/B testing is not done just for the gain of the company doing the testing.

Well, duh, that's precisely what's wrong with subscriptions.

That the product might improve?

In my experience, improvements are so rare compared to regressions, they might as well not exist.

How does your example warrant such moral righteousness? The stakes of a late news notification seem strikingly low.

Agreed and I can't wait until they regulate this stuff out of existence. It's absolutely hostile software technique that is deeply anti-human.

> Will hear it from us, not a screenshot on X or Reddit.

Has this ever been true? You will almost always see some anecdotal screenshot a long time before any company would rat on themselves.

Yes the random screenshots include a lot of false positives. But official comms have a lot of their own problems given how companies behave nowadays.

> I need to know the pricing of Claude Code for NEW subscribers if I'm going to adopt it at a company with a growing team.

I agree, but can you really use Claude Code on the Pro plan as a full time developer, or professional 'knowledge worker' without hitting the usage limits fairly early in the day anyway?

It depends on the kind of work you do.

I'm in the academia, and Claude's performance in my field could be described as a very fast junior grad student. When I use Claude Code, I typically spend a few hours figuring out what needs to be done exactly, and describing it in sufficient detail. Then Claude does it in 30 minutes, while an actual student would need days. And then I spend anything from minutes to days evaluating the results, depending on if it needs to be tested with real data and how much weirdness those tests uncover.

But I also have other work to do beyond guiding the automated grad student. Which means my Claude Code usage rarely exceeds 1–2 hours/week.

I use Pro professionally and didn't hit limits most of the time. I believe I used up 5hr quota once or twice. We switched to Team sub and I'm on Standard(which is Pro x1.25 I believe). I don't vibecode entire applications, I ask it to make boilerplate, smaller, well scoped features or fix some errors. I don't let it go off with a prompt "make another netflix clone" cause I just don't see any real value in that

Just the Pro Plan Claude Code on its own? Maybe you could last a full day on just using Sonnet. Maybe one Opus dab in the morning to plan your Haiku/Sonnet day?

I have Pro Claude, Plus GPT and Pro Gemini. When one runs out I switch to another project on the next LLM. If I really need a task finished I'll restart it on another LLM, but I'm loathe to do that as it eats tokens just getting back up to speed.

I think it's more about how they approach their users in general that is the problem here.

It’s pretty reasonable to say “demand is way up, quality is up, supply is constrained, and so price needs to rise”.

It seems weird to segment this way though. Surely it’s better to just give Sonnet to your bottom tier, rather than cut out the entire Claide Code product entirely?

Give folks a taste rather than lock the whole product behind a $100/mo plan.

But if Sonnet is bad it would give bad impression of the product, no? And it also takes compute, so you give a bad hallucinating impression of your product while still losing compute.

It’s not bad though, it’s crazy good in comparison to any model older than 1y old. If you don’t have access to any vibe coding at all it’s gonna be life changing.

But I think you are right, as long as Codex and Gemini are cheap alternatives then vs. 1yo models isn’t the correct comp.

Then it’s probably better to just resegment the whole Claude Code product as an enterprise only tier. (That also has the advantage of kicking out all the Claw subscribers that screw over the token limit economics for normal $20/mo users.)

I mean, this is why they do A/B testing. This way of testing stuff is not new at all, people who act genuinely surprised need to do a reality check. Companies want to maximize profit. They do this by testing what creates the biggest profit. A/B Testing is one of the ways to do this, and it has been used for decades in precisely this way.

Haha, right, just like the recent uncommunicated changes to limits, cache, etc.

A screenshot is, however, apparently good enough for _new_ subscribers.

> I need to know the pricing of Claude Code for NEW subscribers if I'm going to adopt it at a company with a growing team

Subscriptions aren’t for company use.

Just like they gave plenty of notice regarding OpenClaw?

Maybe a silly bet where the head of sales had 1-2 glasses of wine too much... "I bet they will still pay us 20 bucks/mo without CC! Don't believe me? I'm going to prove it!"

> So we're looking at different options to keep delivering a great experience for users.

his title should be changed to Head of Corporate Bullshitting

>"his title should be changed to Head of Corporate Bullshitting"

They're hitting the physical limits of energy production and chip supply for inference capacity. There's literally nothing that can be done but reduce usage to spread it around for now.

there's nothing stopping them from saying that, which is my point which you missed

why do they need to say it? It's obvious

No, it's not, except for a small percentage of the userbase.

Hopefully the negative responses in that thread + the conversation here on HN might help them realize that totally removing Code access for Pro users isn't a good look.

And with no free trial period on top of that, nobody is going to want to pay $100+ just to check it out. I can't imagine the conversion rate of that test being positive.

A few enterprise customers I know are upgrading to the higher plan now that their limits have been nuked.

I imagine Anthropic is trying to see how many users they can push to higher tiers with these new squeezes.

I hate to say it but I imagine it will work.

It’s going to suck for me, because I had gotten used to ridiculously cheap tokens, but I guess the era of subsidized tokens is over.

I would guess that even now, they’re still subsidized. Just judging by how desperate these companies are to get ahead of each other

good reminder to me to stay in practice with manual coding for my side projects! claude is super convenient for them for now but if it goes it goes, I definitely don't want to get dependent on it. maybe the local models will improve in a year too.

Most real businesses are on API billing, not Max.

None of the companies I deal with (~40) are on the API. Some where, but that experiment lasted a month.

Until they go public, we are all just guessing.

CC has such egregious API subsidies that it’s hard to not to leverage it unless the license tells an enterprise otherwise. Love the subsidized pricing while it lasts.

> CC has such egregious API subsidies that it’s hard to not to leverage it unless the license tells an enterprise otherwise.

It's hard to tell, honestly - about half the HN population will tell you that all the token providers are running inference at a profit when using the API and only the subscriptions are subsidised, while the other half will tell you that everything, including both the API and the subscriptions, are subsidised (i.e. running at a loss).

Some days I really wish the timing had worked out for me to build a serious private inference server before hardware prices spiked.

What API subsidy? What are you talking about?

My company currently uses the Anthropic Enterprise subscription plan, but we’ve been informed that’s going away in 2027 in favor of API billing. If businesses are using subscriptions, I don’t think they will for long.

You mean the Team Plan? The Enterprise Plan has no usage contingent included.

If your definition of "real businesses" is "Fortune 500, US based tech company with more money than sense or just happy to bleed VC money", sure, 99.999% of businesses are not real businesses.

You may also have a very narrow view of how the world actually works, left as an exercise to the reader to figure out which one it is

Fortune 500 and VC money are disjoint sets.

You have said this in a few places throughout the thread. At this point, citation is needed.

I work for a real business and switched from API billing to max+overflow. It saves money. It’s crazy not to. What are you talking about?

I think they're at that stage where people know they want it so lack of a trial isn't a deal breaker per se.

I don’t get the surprise or discontent. People hooking themselves up to a paid SaaS that only two vendors can offer (Anthropic and OpenAI), no competition or regulation to speak of… of course they’ll do whatever they want with their plans.

Hope you can still resume working on your projects without AI.

> Hope you can still resume working on your projects without AI.

How often does technology really move backwards? I can already run a decent local model on a spec’d out MacBook and for better or worse electronics/computers moves one direction (with minor supply chain hiccups along the way notwithstanding)

Losing trust on them not rug pulling users

If anyone was paying any attention to how corporations run, I don't see how they could have believed this would go any differently. Seriously.

If one doesn't want rug-pulls, one signals their policy makers to create regulation to prevent it. Otherwise it's just... uncapped capitalism or what's the name

> on ~2% of new prosumer signups.

I, and everyone else I have asked, see this new updated sales UI; sounds like more than 2%.

Either they vibe coded a test that was extremely broken.

Or they vibe wrote some bullshit to try and back pedal.

Yeah I flat out don't believe the 2% thing. It's possible that I was the 1 out of 50 who checked the page and saw that Claude code was removed... but it really seems like everyone I shared it with saw the same thing which is incredibly unlikely. Also I am an existing subscriber and checked the price page while logged in, so I shouldn't be counted in "2% of new subscribers" at all...

He goes way beyond saying it's a test, he's legitimising the change in the follow-up rationale

I am confused, how is this a test? So some users get Claude Code while others don’t, when they are both paying 20 dollars … ? Wat

It's a test on sign ups, not on users, so "will they sign up without X feature for the same price" yes

Just checked. I continue to have Claude Code with my Pro plan

This is concerning though. If I lose my current usage allotment at this price point I will likely switch to codex

The cheapest plan for both Claude and Codex is the sweet spot IMO.

It also forces you to keep your workflow mostly harness-independent because Claude supports next to no standards and Codex does some.

That works until openai does the same thing. Pretty clear as an industry they want to establish a new price floor for non-trivial coding use.

Yep, and the price point theyre looking at is 95% of an engineer.

Once they get people hooked, deskilled, and paying, the money ratchet only tightens.

And the companies KNOW that theyre replacing engineers, or trying to. So each engineer replaced is X salary a year they now have available, so make it back in SaaS LLM tokens.

Thank god for the Chinese labs. Keeping us (relatively) honest.

That's what Claude is testing I guess (people often don't do what they say they do when it comes to pricing)

They confirmed that it does not affect existing users

Presumably for new subs.

This test would be a good way to lose existing subscribers perhaps.

Presumably they want to lose existing subscribers because it’s way too expensive to keep them at $20.

Is it? I’m curious because I thought they were raising prices to pay for exorbitant training costs, not because subscribers are expensive on a unit basis.

I thought inference was cheap so there was little marginal cost of a new subscriber.

This was more or less true until everyone and their dog started running agents in a 24/7 busyloop as a bit.

You’re not doing that on a $20/mo plan.

How can you run the A/B test with mismatched documentation?

It is honestly truly fucking incredible how corps still find new, innovative ways to enshittify. Regular enshittification won't cut it, they have to exercise their artistic creativity. Who the fuck comes up with the idea that what services you get with your subscription are random? It's mind-boggling that some percentage of people visiting the website will be presented with an inferior version of the same subscription for the same price. I'm not even mad (despite my colorful wording), I don't use Claude, just impressed with the bold new territory being explored here.

Claude subscription became non deterministic too

I find the whole thing a bit sad but you made me smile. Thank you.

I think of enshittification as "we're making plenty of money but let's make more." In other words greed.

Based on how much money Zitron has reported that these companies are losing on every subscription, this feels more like they're just trying to survive. In other words "ohshittification."

> In other words "ohshittification."

Brilliant coinage, if it’s yours, congrats!

My take: it is not enshittification to raise the price for a product whose demand outstrips its supply. That is basic economics. There are alternatives, it’s not a monopoly. If you think it’s the best product, then pay more for it.

Personally I would be perfectly content if the price of Max went up a bit and Pro no longer worked for CC if it meant that Max was faster and more stable.

Zitron is completely full of shit too though. I imagine they’re compute limited and so they’re moving towards price discrimination.

> It is honestly truly fucking incredible how corps still find new, innovative ways to enshittify. Regular enshittification won't cut it, they have to exercise their artistic creativity.

I had a bit of an epiphany the other day thinking about these VC companies offering products to the public at unsustainable prices. It's classic anticompetitive behavior.

You imagine anticompetitive behavior to come from a monopoly because they can afford to burn money to drive competition out before they bring prices back to profitable but the whole VC burn is the same thing. People talk about it a lot without really saying it explicitly when they talk about moats. The only moat Anthropic and OpenAI have is money and they utilize it by offering products below cost.

The two companies are just trying to outlast the other one until they are the only one left.

So it's not really enshitification as much as you were previously getting the deal of a lifetime.

In physical markets we call this kinda thing dumping and it's often regulated. Maybe offering SaaS or compute at below profitable rates should be investigatable too, to avoid killing competitors too easily?

Dumping is typically used in the context of international trade.

There are some predatory pricing laws, but they're much more narrow than most people believe. There is no law requiring things to be sold for more than it costs to produce.

I think it's funny that these topics make people angry enough to demand that we make laws to force companies to raise prices. We'll stick it to these companies by forcing them to charge us more! That will show them!

Such laws would be very bad for startups and newcomers because they'd be forced to price their new product higher than established competitors who have economies of scale. It would be a nice handout to the big companies.

> Dumping is typically used in the context of international trade.

This is dumping and it is international trade. Maybe you don't realize it because you're American and have internalized it as business as usual.

The whole Silicon Valley VC industry and the majority of the net worth of SWEs on HN is based on dumping. "Burning VC cash" is transparently dumping, and it's squarely what the US big tech dominance is founded on. Amazon, Uber, Youtube, now LLMs. The huge majority of "success stories" of the last 15 years are based on dumping their product far below cost price, running at a loss for years until they dominate the market, and then jacking up prices/enshittifying/selling user data.

I didn't think Amazon engaged in dumping.

It took about 9 years of losses before they got profitable, which is the exact mechanism I talked about.

Dumping and losing money overall are different. Selling $100 bill for $10 is dumping.

2 day shipping is dumping i guess

Yeah, that's where the realization led me too.

These companies probably need to be forced to at least try to price their products at a level that would be sustainable long term.

This happens naturally because no company can run at a loss forever.

I think it's funny that we're getting subsidized and discounted services and this makes some people so angry that the comment section is demanding laws that would force companies to charge us more.

Of course but they can run at that rate long enough to make it impossible for another company to compete and go bankrupt. Which is the problem.

Like I said, this is the iconic strategy of monopolies. They take their pool of money, move into a new market, lower prices below cost until local competition withers away then buy their assets at bankruptcy prices and raise prices to whatever they want. Those temporary discounts are designed to kill competition, innovation and choice.

VC subsidized prices are exactly as bad for the market as that. It's unclear to me if the intent is the same but intent doesn't really matter.

I'd also like to state that I'm not angry about it.

  > It's classic anticompetitive behavior.

well, "competition is for losers" isn't it?

Wait what, so they're testing giving new users misleading information about included services in each tier as an upsell tactic?

It could be an A/B test to see whether people without an existing subscription care about Claude Code (CC) at all. If they sign up then CC is disabled (or not as it is not really an issue to offer more). Capturing that info would definitely be useful to a growth team.

They need to give the non-code service a different name.

And a slightly lower price.

If it succeeds they can adjust pricing later.

Otherwise they are messing with their new and old customers heads, regarding a service with a name that ought to be reliably interpretable. And seriously messing with their own credibility. Wrong kind of A/B test.

This is incompetence which i would normally discount. But Anthropic seems to be falling all over themselves to irritate customers.

No, they're testing removing it from the Pro tier for new subscribers.

No I think the test is that some new sign ups won't get Claude code in that tier if they pick it and they're seeing if users will still pay for it without it?

I think the test is that new sign-ups won't have it and will the loss of five new Pro subscriptions be offset by more than one new Max subscribers.

Plenty of Pro subscribers never touch claude-code.

Although the ones that never touch claude code are a free $20 a month, the ones that do are potentially a seventy to eighty dollar twenty dollars a month . it’s not instantly obvious which customers you prefer (revenue vs cash negative growth- on second thought obviously they prefer the second)

They've preferred the second so far, but they might have a fair reason to see if they can keep growing with the first one instead or cut down on some loss leading, right?

That's how i read it too - they want to test if people will still pay for pro plan if it doesn't include Claude Code. At the same time they are also saying that if you subscribe having been told it does include Claude Code, they may still change their mind later and take it away!

A/B test to see how people react to changing the offerings

5000 angry users who leave? maybe keep it. 500000 users leave? pretend it was just documentation mis-prints or an oversight, etc.

Somehow a ton of people are caught in the variant.

Random data point: Guest passes apparently still include Claude Code in their Pro trial. If they are running a test this is a really sloppy way to do it.

This reeks of the start of enshittification. Very doubtful it was a "test"

Fk around and now they will find out

Soooo Sam Altman replied “ok boomer” to that message. Wtf?

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