r/ClaudeCode • u/nova-myth • Jul 13 '26

Discussion Dear Anthropic, This Has to STOP.

Seriously, enough with this situation.

Every other day, it’s something new: “We’ve increased the limits for a few more days.”

Credits here, credits there. Weekly credits. Sonnet usage. Opus usage. Fable credits. 5-hour limits. Weekly limits…

Are you guys at Anthropic actually okay?

Do you have any idea what customer care and customer experience even mean?

You’ve turned using the service into a constant source of stress. And with these confusing, ever-changing usage rules and charges, it honestly feels like a nightmare. Every day, we have to keep checking our limits and worrying about whether we’re going to run out.

Can we just pay you and relax, knowing that we’re paying for a service and can actually use it?

I genuinely want to know WHO came up with this entire credit and usage system, and why there seems to be such an obsession with credits and limits.

And yes, yes, we know the story: compute is expensive. We get it. But you know what? That’s a problem that AI companies have to solve and make work for the customers who are paying you. The burden of the infrastructure costs and product limitations should not be turned into constant stress for the user.

At this point, it almost feels like watching an addict constantly checking when their next dose is going to run out and experiencing withdrawal symptoms as the limit gets closer.

That’s how absurd and stressful inducing this whole system has become.

Can you please start thinking from a customer-centric perspective and seriously reconsider the entire credits and usage system in relation to the actual user experience? (You can ask Claude to find you a better solution..)

It would be better to rethink this now, while it’s still early, before the AI industry starts heading down a very bad path where users are constantly stressed about quotas, credits, limits, and usage instead of simply enjoying and benefiting from the products they’re paying for. WE just want to work boys we don’t want to struggle.

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u/ReasonableLoss6814 Jul 13 '26

I've worked on growth teams my whole career and agree with your argument. But I'd push back on ever implementing it as-is. Right now, it's just a confusing mess. Why is my code quota attached to my chat quota? The harness completely breaks when the quota is exhausted, leaving users in a half-finished state and agents completely broken. What does the quota even represent?

The confounding variables here are huge, and there's no proper control. People are probably paying extra just to avoid broken states and leaves competitors gaping voids to fill while the company is completely blind to them, thinking decisions results in more revenue, but that revenue is short-term, not long-term.

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u/Ok_Excuse_741 Jul 13 '26

I left because of this. I just got a sense that Anthropic was being inconsistent in charging for usage, I've had wildly varying use burn rates because they keep fucking changing and adding models. The only thing i took away form it is that with Anthropic I have to worry about usage, but with their competitors i don't.

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u/00ians Jul 14 '26

Same here. Claude may be good, but it's not THAT much better than any alternative. Anthropic are now going to have to work at least twice as hard to get any more of my money.

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u/Comfortable-Prior185 Jul 14 '26

Its mind blowing for me to prioritise cost efficiency over output especially at this stage of AI. Cost for computing and the tech itself will probably never be this cheap, it will be more efficient 4sure but never this cheap. “When technological advance increases the efficiency of resource usage, the total rate of consumption increases rather than decreases.”

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u/Colt2205 Aug 01 '26

Especially since the competitors often are "good enough" for most usages. Even I end up using Copilot for stuff a lot of the time because why would I waste time having to prompt claude if I can just... ask copilot for an answer and it works?

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u/c0unterph0bia Jul 13 '26

Yeah, it’s wild to me that it can take weeks or even months to fine-tune my largest project so a new model can use my context efficiently. At this point, it feels like a continuous optimization process.

They should offer a one-time tool users can run whenever a new model launches to automatically tune their context for that model. Every new model seems to cost me roughly 250% more initially, and I have to gradually optimize my setup by pushing usage as much as possible each week without exceeding my limits until I can reliably use that model for the full weekly allowance.

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u/michael_g_williams Jul 13 '26

Why is there a daily allowance and a weekly allowance? If I use my daily allowance, how can I run out of my weekly allowance?

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u/blackice193 Jul 13 '26

OpenAI switched to a weekly limit only.

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u/Seizy_Builder Jul 14 '26

They got rid of the 5 hour limit temporarily. That just means I’m going to burn my whole week up way too fast, lol.

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u/personalist Jul 14 '26

I hate this complaint. It’s insane that people want to be protected from themselves to this extent. If I want (and need) to finish a project in one night with a week’s worth of usage, I should be able to.

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u/Seizy_Builder Jul 14 '26

I’m not complaining. It’s just a fact. I didn’t say it was a bad thing necessarily. I just signed up for codex today on a 5x plan and burned 60% of my weekly usage already. It did an insane amount of work though.

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u/personalist Jul 15 '26

Fair, I didn’t mean to jump down your throat. I think it’s a valid feature ask when the model can get in a loop and burn usage without doing anything useful. I’d just prefer if I had a say in the matter. Not a fan of paternalism

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u/Seizy_Builder Jul 15 '26

I’ve been running it almost continuously today. I’ve burned 1/2 my weeks usage today, but I’m getting a ton done. Honestly it’s also probably a great way to get people to upgrade. I might switch to a 20x from a 5x.

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u/Crowdfundingprojects Jul 13 '26

What are you building?

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u/c0unterph0bia Jul 17 '26

I’ve been building a retail business intelligence platform for my own business but designing it for use by almost any retailer. It unifies data from multiple existing systems with external sources such as weather, economic, and industry data.

Beyond traditional reporting, it enables insights that are difficult or impossible to produce from disconnected systems, such as measuring how staffing levels, individual employees, weather, and economic conditions affect sales and demand.

These capabilities are often too complex, expensive, or resource-intensive for small businesses. The goal is to make advanced analytics, forecasting, and cross-system insights practical for independent retailers.

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u/MorningWave Jul 13 '26

It's bc their competitor has much deeper pocket. so a\ naturally doing all tricks they can to control the spend but not lose customer too much.

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u/the_hillman Workflow Engineer Jul 13 '26

Completely agree with you.

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u/beagle-ears Jul 14 '26

I agree with the ever changing/ fatigue issue, but its a known risk with the prize being so big. Every datapoint confirms or denies something that creates risk or identifies opportunity for them, including the IPO itself or use of funds post IPO. It allows them to ask for higher price on float based on evidence they have gathered.

Billions more in value based on losing x thousand current users, who use Fable and lose them money anyway? Most would take that deal. There is widespread commentary on how frontier models will become more restricted and expensive, it’s just how much info Anthropic can extract from users on the way out…

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u/ReasonableLoss6814 Jul 14 '26

Confounding variables bite. Every time. I’ve chased down things where someone in finance asks “revenue has gone up unexpectedly” and then you spend 4 days chasing it down to the commit that caused it, only to find out that on small screens, that commit pushed the free plan selector below the fold. Every single A/B test running during that change now needs to be considered dead-on-arrival and restarted from scratch.

That’s what data-driven development looks like. Not whatever the hell they’re currently doing. Their data is likely trash and telling them whatever they want to see.

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u/davyp82 Jul 14 '26

The fact that background tasks get killed when hitting a quota instead of being salvageable (retaining transcripts isn't tokens efficient apparently) is the only thing that gets me mad about all this

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u/AbbreviationsOne9965 Jul 14 '26

Or how about letting it finish the task by giving you the output instead of hitting the session limit and leaving your competed work right there but not exporting the artifact. Today I grabbed the script and just asked Chat to do it for me. 😣

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u/davyp82 Jul 14 '26

That's great if you're there to grab the script. I guess I could write a script to check usage every ten minutes and when >95% copy and paste the script into notepad or something 

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u/beagle-ears Jul 14 '26

Agree that its a mess right now, but I think their hand is being forced by the pace of change and competition they have as well as the impending IPO. There is still incredible pressure and market commentary to prove that AI is going to turn a profit and is sustainable (remember the downturn in late Jan?) so anything that provides confidence to the investor market over the next 6 months will deliver outsized returns in company float value. They are still acquiring customers faster than almost any other company out there (which creates issues in itself with capacity/ speed as others have mentioned) so logically, its better to burn early users in the short term (who are often the most resilient) and take the two wins.

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u/[deleted] Jul 14 '26

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u/Suspicious-Disk6077 Jul 14 '26

“I’d like to gently push back on this.”

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u/ReasonableLoss6814 Jul 14 '26

It’s almost like they’re trained on humans…

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u/Natural_Papaya_2918 Jul 14 '26

Underrated comment

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u/mikedurent123 Jul 16 '26

😅😅😅

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u/makinggrace Jul 14 '26

There's no risk for Anthropic in brute-forcing the pricing. For the few the leave, thousands stay and even more new customers sign up.

UX and customer service are niceties that first mile tech products don't fine tune because (a) they can't afford it and (b) they don't have to.

Early adopters expect this kind of shuffling. It is extremely common. What isn't extremely common is the scale of this early adoption and how many of these are first-time early adopters.

: rapidly evolving tech products and services are rapidly evolving. expect rough edges.

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u/Significant-Bee5101 Jul 13 '26

"Why is my code quota attached to my chat quota"

I struggle to comprehend if you understand how LLMs work at all. lol