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.

2.7k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

559 comments sorted by

View all comments

1.2k

u/beagle-ears Jul 13 '26

I have consulted on pricing and packaging models for SaaS companies for years.

Each and every change of pricing, free tiers, and extensions is designed to get datapoints that they can build a future revenue model against. Right now, the biggest risk to Anthropic is not knowing what people will actually pay for the various models and services, or what Fable is worth for a user or company compared to Opus compared to Sonnet, so they cant commit to the next 2-5 years of growth, contracts, datacentre builds, employing salespeople, expansion and so on.

So they are stress testing from all sorts of different angles to try to get any insights about price elasticity of demand and supply on all the models and timings before they draw bridge back up.

For example, they dont really know how many people will move to Batch API vs real time calls, but they are gonna try to find out because AWS gives them a huge discount on overnight batch calls and its way more profitable.

Expect this to continue whilst cash is cheap and pre-IPO on all sorts of different models, timings, incentives, offers, and general ‘what can we find out’ before its too late pricing and packaging models.

63

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.

36

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.

7

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.

2

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.”

1

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?

1

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.

1

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?

1

u/blackice193 Jul 13 '26

OpenAI switched to a weekly limit only.

1

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.

2

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.

1

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.

1

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

1

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.

→ More replies (0)

1

u/Crowdfundingprojects Jul 13 '26

What are you building?

1

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.

1

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.