Moreover, if you run a SaaS, generally somewhere from 1 in 5 to 1 in 20 users are using you for real, while the others are mostly not using you.

The stat would be more interesting if instead of 1 in 20 users, they said x in y of users with at least one commit per business day, or with at least one coding question per day, or whatever.

I suspect this could be a significantly higher percentage of professional users they plan to throttle. Be careful of defining Pro like Apple does if you market to actual professionals who earn based on using your product. Your DAUs might be a different ratio than you expect.

  … if you run a SaaS, generally somewhere from 1 in 5 to 1 in 20 users are using you for real, while the others are mostly not using you.

That is a hilarious and believable stat. Has anyone published such numbers or is it a dirty secret about how many corporate licenses are purchased and never used by the rank and file?

I can personally think of a few internally licensed products, announced with huge fan fare, which never get used beyond the demo to a VP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

Anecdotally that’s my observation as well.

I would probably show up in their metrics as an active user and one of the 95% but I barely use the product. I have a Pro subscription which I use for personal projects but I do very little, maybe using it once a week for a short session. At work I use Cursor via a corporate account.

I imagine there are lots of people like me who have a subscription to be aware of the product and do some very light work, but the "real" users who rely on the tool might be badly affected by this.

A decent chunk (more than 1/20) account shared netflix. Also there are probably some who are account sharing with more than one other person. I don't really doubt it.

Sharing Netflix passwords was literally a common enough phonomena that it purt of Netflix's advertising, that's a very unique case that I don't expect to be happening for Anthropic.