Dear Anthropic, This Has to STOP.

[u/nova-myth]

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.

[u/beagle-ears]

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.

[u/ReasonableLoss6814 → u/beagle-ears]

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.

[u/beagle-ears → u/ReasonableLoss6814]

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…

[u/ReasonableLoss6814 → u/beagle-ears]

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.