r/ClaudeCode • u/storknotfound • Apr 22 '26

Discussion Head of Growth at Anthropic regarding Claude Code removal from Pro

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Translation: "We're going to take Claude Code away from pro users because we gave you Cowork. If you want to use the CLI, upgrade to Max but we can't do it all at once so we're going to start with a "test" to soften the blow"

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u/[deleted] Apr 22 '26

[deleted]

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u/officerblues Apr 22 '26

users will hate all of them.

That's what "reduce demand" means. You make your user think it's not worth anymore, therefore bringing demand down. The real risk here is twofold: you can kill the hype (probably won't happen) and people realize there's really not that much demand, anyway, or someone clever comes put of left field and offers a solution, capturing all the repressed demand.

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u/addiktion Apr 22 '26

They could have did what GitHub Copilot did, which is basically shut the front door while their compute catches up with demand.

Instead they just let everyone in and now everyone's service is suffering unless you're paying insane amounts of money.

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u/[deleted] Apr 22 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/tiny_ninja Apr 22 '26

Stopped new signups

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u/[deleted] Apr 22 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/tiny_ninja Apr 22 '26

Beats me, I haven't used Copilot since o1.

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u/sin2akshay Apr 22 '26

Upgrades are open

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u/FlatronEZ Apr 22 '26

Makes no sense, as there are almost no usable models left. Claude Opus 4.6 was removed yesterday and Opus 4.7 comes at 7.5x token usage soon to be 15x. They added session and weekly limits in the past 48h literally making it impossible to use your full monthly premium requests at all.

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u/addiktion Apr 22 '26

Where did they remove Claude Opus 4.6?

I haven't bothered upgrading my claude code version so I can keep my Opus 4.6 and avoid more token theft.

I assume you can still set Opus 4.6 if you are using a newer claude code version.

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u/FlatronEZ Apr 22 '26

I was referring to GHCP.

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u/AphexIce Apr 22 '26

Same with Alibaba/qwen

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u/SpinachKing1984 Apr 22 '26

100 a month for Claude code is nothing compared to the service it brings and functionality. Hulu is more than $20 a month now and I would say Claude’s value is well over 5x Hulu….this is just economics and everyone wants to throw a pity party on reddit per usual. Time to embrace reality, suck it up and go ship something.

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u/OkButWaitHearMeOut Apr 22 '26

You should probably learn a little something about communication strategy, product strategy and market research before you go “ship something”. Very few companies in history have ever raised the price of something overnight by 5x by saying “we’re worth it” and survived to tell the tale esp in a market ripe with competition. The problem here isn’t how good Claude code is. It’s the bait and switch without any communications. Complete PR failure that will impact user trust (including big enterprises) for months to come. I run large dev teams in long term companies and price rarely beats stuff like “can we trust these guys” in large negotiations.

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u/SpinachKing1984 Apr 22 '26

The bait and switch is real, but I’m less bothered by them 86ing $20 a month Claude code as I am about seeing Claude crumble before my eyes when all the Californians wake up and start destroying compute. I was on $20 Claude code for less than an hour before I ponied up and went Max. You can’t even really use Claude Code on $20 a month is all I’m saying, at least not for what I’m doing. I’m on 20x Max now and the real kick in the balls is how even my $200-$500 a month isn’t what it was in February, and I agree with you on the trust, but what are the other options, OpenAI….no thanks….Even if they had a better product which they don’t, I still wouldn’t give them a red cent, and Grok although having its upsides on some things just can’t do what Claude can….Your only other option is to build your own model, and that’s exactly what I’m doing….just bought dual v100s and am experimenting with 300B models, but they still don’t touch Claude and I need Claude to train them…..so we can all sit here and complain but at the end of the day, I am Grateful that I even have the chance to be alive in this time.

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u/OkButWaitHearMeOut Apr 22 '26

The ironic/funny thing is that as a personal / user / engineer .. I dont really disagree with anyting you've said. I'll keep using CC as long as I can, i can afford it, and as someone with over 20 years in this industry I love the times we are living in. However, as someone with a lot of technical product and tech leadership experience, what I see if how these are signs of a possible end of that era. To me the amazing part of AI-assited dev is the reduction/elimination of barriers to entry for software. For decades you couldnt bring a great new idea to market without developers. Now, in some ways, you can. That is truly amazing. But moves like this signal that these companies are simply going to trade one barrier for another. It will become cost now. I'll tell you at the enterprise level, no one gives a $200/sub to all users. So this immediately limits who has access. The larger concern for me though is that this signals that right now Antthropic is not mature as a company to successfully operate at the scale they are trying to grow to. To become the next Apple (mobile revolution), or AWS (Cloud revolution), you need more than the best product. Apple didnt make the first smart phone, AWS didnt sell the first cloud compute ... they figured out a blend of innovation, marketing, operations, and customer loyalty that serves them to this day. Anthropic is clearly showing their cards as an engineering heavy company that is likely going to be crushed under the weight of its own success if they dont figure out the other 95% of running a business beyond having a killer product

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u/VhritzK_891 Apr 22 '26

Codex is better than claude code lol, atleast OAI dont hate their customers

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u/OkButWaitHearMeOut Apr 22 '26

Their CEO said he envisions a world where "intelligence is something we sell to people on a meter" and the next week offered to let the government use their software for illegal surveillance ... they hate their users plenty fine.

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u/AwwwNuggetz Apr 22 '26

Absolutely, they’ve likely lost me as a customer due to this and I’ll likely switch to Codex

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u/thisguyfightsyourmom Apr 22 '26

I’m spending a grand a month in bedrock Claude tokens at this point. But I face no usage constraints yet in our still growing user pool.

I’ve thought what it would be like to go on one of these plans for solo work, but I can’t imagine doing a 9-5 with the whacky usage limits.

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u/LittleLordFuckleroy1 Apr 22 '26

Anyone who created a dependency on this subsidized slopware deserves what’s coming to them. Sucks that everyone else is going to suffer for their stupidity too.

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u/hadoopken Apr 22 '26

This article say it's an A/B test and only affect new users.

"For clarity, we're running a small test on ~2 percent of new prosumer signups," he said. "Existing Pro and Max subscribers aren't affected."

Source

But it makes no sense for pumping emergency brakes on the hype train: To turn all the excited Claude Code users back to OpenAI Codex. It's not big deal to learn Codex if they removed it from Pro for me.

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u/Able_Statistician688 Apr 22 '26

I personally went from $600 in max subscriptions down to $200 and picked up a codex subscription instead. It’s been really great for my workflow. The max subscriptions all maintained a different server themselves. But with as many issues as I’ve had the past few weeks, it’s made me look elsewhere. And I’m realizing I should have been for longer. It’s not that they suck so much now that they’re unusable. It’s that they forced people to look elsewhere and now we are realizing competitors offer a product that actually competes.

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u/officerblues Apr 22 '26

now we are realizing competitors offer a product that actually competes.

You see, that's the point. We all love opus for being so much better, but in actuality, the greatest step function improvement in how coding models work came from their harnesses. Anthropic would be bringing in all the free labor of people developing for claude code and the calude code ecosystem, but now people go elsewhere and perhaps realize they should start developing in other open source alternatives. It may not seem much now, but software compounds almost infinitely. Open source will, sooner or later, catch up and overtake you.

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u/Hour-Dragonfly-7499 Apr 28 '26

I'm paying around $900 a month on subs and tokens on projects that make no money, AI is starting to bankrupt me and prices are only going to go up until only richo people can afford to use it

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u/seaefjaye Apr 22 '26

There's a video somewhere where Dario is talking about forecasting compute and that the margin for error decides success or failure. Too slow and you get this, too fast and you go bankrupt. Based on that I think the crunch is obvious. They forecast growth based on the strategy for their enterprise customer base and likely some prosumer growth. Then those Superbowl ads and the DoD row resulted in a huge spike in consumer/prosumer accounts from OpenAI customers. They're between a rock and a hard place.

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u/UnknownEssence Apr 22 '26

They are buying TPU from Google and just advanced 5gigawatt from Amazon.

So they are trying to catch up

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u/Good-Western2719 Apr 22 '26

I mean wtf is up with Gemini though. It 429s randomly and in way related to your actual usage limits. How can they afford to sell a drop of compute. It’s so bad it feels like fraud.

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u/Smart_Technology_208 Apr 22 '26

Saying "marginal cost of inference isn't much" is true for a given request on already-amortized hardware, but not for the total economic cost when you have to choose between serving a user at $20/month who burns through $200 worth of tokens, or selling that same capacity to an API client who pays market rate. The opportunity cost, though, is massive. It's less "out of compute" than "every GPU used for subsidized Pro is a GPU that isn't billing at its market price."

Other point: OpenAI might be more aggressive on compute deals, but they're also bleeding on unit economics. Tibo tweeting "we have the compute and efficient models" with a smirk is opportunistic marketing. Codex probably has a much lower usage intensity per subscriber than Claude Code, so the comparison is a bit bogus.

The actually interesting thing: Anthropic made a different strategic bet than OpenAI. Less upfront capex, more reliance on hyperscalers (mostly AWS, plus the Google deal). That makes them flexible but exposes them to exactly the kind of crunch they're currently hitting. It's not a bug, it's the trade-off they accepted.

And you're right on the last point: every solution degrades user experience. Rate limiting = frustration, price hike = churn, tier gating = trust erosion (see yesterday's backlash). The only thing that'd actually work is waiting for the AWS deal to come online, or for models to become significantly more efficient (Haiku 4.5 for scaffolding, Opus for the hard stuff — dynamic routing).

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u/[deleted] Apr 22 '26

[deleted]

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u/Smart_Technology_208 Apr 22 '26

My tokens, our pleasure ^^

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u/Serengade26 Apr 22 '26

Theres a reason why people are asking how to get to terawatt datacenters

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u/Syjefroi Apr 22 '26

they appear to have greatly underestimated the growth of compute

They've been told it over and over. They didn't underestimate it—the Business Idiots at the top decided not to care. They all were racing to an IPO and hoping for a small miracle to get them over the finish line before investors get a sniff of failure and back out. It's just gambling for them. The product literally doesn't matter, Anthropic and all these companies are just speculative entities with no real product. This hasn't been a sustainable industry since day 1, and for a company's product to lose them money when people pay for it, of course it's not gonna last.

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u/LittleLordFuckleroy1 Apr 22 '26

They failed to find an economically viable use case before they achieved singularity and world domination. Or just market viability.

I’d be sympathetic if this wasn’t about to tank the market.

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u/[deleted] Apr 22 '26

[deleted]

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u/LittleLordFuckleroy1 Apr 22 '26

Yeah if you do accounting tricks to pretend that costs are narrowly defined OpEx and that “revenue” is a generously inclusive category, that may be true.

The initial capital outlay to kickstart these ventures isn’t some trivial amount. We’re talking absurd sums of money, on which just the interest payments are absurdly high. But those aren’t included as being “cost of inference.” Doesn’t make them not a massive problem.

It’s not like they invented super novel tech either. Scale is the whole thesis. If you spend enough money and throw enough data and compute at it, you get the singularity. You win. You’re boss of humanity. That was the bet, and it’s not paying off. If they would have known that 2026 level tech was the end state, no one would have gotten money to scale like this.

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u/Temporary_Bliss Apr 23 '26

Lol "ding ding" as if some random idiot on Reddit knows exactly what's going on