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Comment by toraway | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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