Because the goal is to extract more money from the people who have significant usage. These users are the actual targets of the product. The idea that it’s a few bad actors is misdirection of blame to distract “power users”.

They undercharged for this product to collect usage data to build better coding agents in the future. It was a ploy for data.

Anecdotally, I use Claude Code with the $20/mo subscription. I just use it for personal projects, so I figured $20 was my limit on what I’d be willing to spend to play around with it. I historically hit my limits just a few times, after ~4hrs of usage (resets every 5hrs). They recently updated the system and I hit my limits consistently within an hour or two. I’m guessing this weekly limit will affect me.

I found a CLI tool (which I found in this thread today) that estimates I’m using ~$150/mo in usage if I paid through the API. Obviously this is very different from my payments. If this was a professional tool, maybe I’d pay, but not as a hobbyist.