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Comment by FuckButtons | Hacker News Reader

Nope, that’s not true, because they want you to pay for the higher subscription bracket.

Can confirm — they got me paying $100/mo this way.

Also I think it’s well known that OpenAI is the much less expensive option (in tokens and $$). For the same $20 you get a lot more mileage.

Curious if folks have strong opinions about the overall UX of OpenCode vs CC…

For me as well, at least this month to use more of Fable. We'll see if they extend Fable access because of people like me.

That strategy only makes sense if there's an abundance of tokens, but that's not the case. AI companies are spending a ton of resources on improving token efficiency because they are all severely GPU constrained. Anthropic instead nudges you to move to a higher tier by setting rate limits.

Also not true, they want you to pay for a higher subscription bracket and then use only marginally more than you would have, which I think they’re doing quite effectively for most people based on my interactions.

If they wanted to play games with sub tiers they would just change the rate limits rather than wasting inference.

Flip side is customer psychology. Choosing a more expensive tier leaves better emotion.

Also i doubt there was jira ticket with “make llm more verbose”, rather ticket with “bug makes llms too verbose” gets prioritised taking revenue impact into account.

Higher subscription brackets are likely worse for them. I recall seeing someone calculate that a fully maxed out highest subscription bracket is something like $15K in tokens?

And people paying $100 or $200 are much more likely to max it out for purely psychological reasons - it crosses that threshold where I want to see my money's worth in full. Whereas people on $20 subs are more likely to be there just to get access to better models and features, and are not necessarily even doing any substantial work.

It's always more complicated than that because the prestige and Early Adopter users are what drag other people to also be customers to avoid FOMO.

Your gym members who got a subscription aspirationally and don't show up are absolutely subsidizing the power lifter who is introducing wear on (tens of?) thousands of dollars of equipment three times a week, but if the regulars weren't there you wouldn't have sold those subscriptions at all. Without a poster child there's no poster.

They could just use less tokens and finish your quota sooner. So even tho I think are a bad company, I can’t say they do this for the reason you said.

Well since what you get for your subscription is unknown it would be trivial to get that result without burning tokens.

Especially since compute is such a scarce resource.

Generally, companies with >150 people can’t use subs. So yeah, it’s mostly a funnel for devs/small companies to eventually vet for the product and convince their enterprise to use it as well.

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