It is priced incorrectly, but that is intentional. You can't create a tiered paid plan for the whole world that fits everyone. You can't create nuanced extra plans to satisfy all the outliers. It's an bet to keep the customers and still having a good margin. Think of ecom, returns are a big struggle for any large company because they are unpredictable and subject to abuse, shipping fees are just an sophisticated guess to cover that cost. Not a subscription, same mechanics. The only thing here to criticize is, if it's a good thing to make everything a subscription and disguise the real cost.

>You can't create a tiered paid plan for the whole world that fits everyone.

I mean, you can. Electricity is already sold that way. Subscribers with uncharacteristic usage spikes don't get blackouts, they get a slightly larger bill, and perhaps get moved up a tier.

Very valid. My comment was fixated around the fact that big tech has the addiction to have subscriptions for everything. It's common that you provide generic subscription plans for the masses and supply "call us" custom plans for the specific (usually corporate) needs. If anthropic doesn't provide that or vibe coders are too cheap to do that, then those are issues, but the subscription models are itself valid. It is certainly misleading to a degree, but we've stopped complaining about this a while ago.

It's pretty stupid because as others in this thread have pointed out it's already not a flat plan. Even from their side it makes zero sense to bill things this way rather than based on usage. It's not like a VPS where your VM shares the hardware, which consumes electricity more or less regardless of what you use the machine for.

Those yottabytes of VRAM are also consuming electricity constantly.

The difference being that an LLM request is not an operating system. Since they're compartmentalized and ephemeral, you can very easily distribute requests among your available hardware so that you can switch off machines during periods of low activity.

Your capital costs for buying those machines don't go away.

That's a problem that already exists in power generation and delivery, and it's already been solved. Bills are sums of fixed terms and variable terms.

Custom payment schemes are late stage profit generation. It requires hoards of salespeople or an AI that can actually do math.

It's just how hyperscaling works. You are not wrong, but in the wrong timeline.

I'm not talking about custom, negotiated service contracts, I'm talking about simply charging people for what they use.

But that would be using (a special Claude code version) of the API; as it stands now, I have tried the current api for fun and I hit $200 well within an hour. So if they would charge for real use, no one would use it as there are competitors who have less harsh limits with tier plans still. If all go away then I will be running open models on vast.ai or so as those are now viable (been testing with glm 5 and it's great for coding). So tier subscriptions cannot go away as it will end those companies fast.

No, it is priced correctly.

Just because outliers can be money-losing doesn’t mean you should raise the price for everyone.

> Just because outliers can be money-losing doesn’t mean you should raise the price for everyone.

If they are losing money then it's not priced correctly. That's what I responded to.

Yes, subscriptions work as you say. Plenty of people under utilize subscriptions from prime, to credit cards, to netflix. But if they lost money overall, they too would raise prices. Because that's how economics works. Shortage of capacity, high demand, raise prices until equilibrium.

There's other knobs beyond ToS. They just didn't choose those options.

Yes, they chose the knob of ToS, because that was the way to price it correctly.

The market will determine if it was the correct choice. I don't think it's an obviously bad choice on their part.

> If they are losing money then it's not priced correctly.

Just a few years ago this was the standard business model for startups: attract VC money, offer plans at a loss, capture a huge market, boil the frog with incremental price increases to become profitable.

Companies like Uber wouldn't have been anywhere near as successful if they had been forced to make a profit from day one.

I think "offer unlimited but ban people who are extreme enough outliers" is actually a pretty normal way that things work instead of "raise prices until equilibrium is reached", including in credit cards. Credit cards do simply ban people they think are "rewards churning" based on a completely subjective TOS policy for example.

Raising prices is a bad strategy if you have a smaller base that costs enormously larger. "A million users that cost $1 and one user that costs $10 million, charge everyone $10 equilibrium", you're screwing over almost all of your users. The $20/month sub price is basically just not trying to capture the openclaw users.

Yes, it's an unsurprising strategic choice. It's just sloppy PR that places the blame on OpenClaw somehow being irresponsible, when the actual rationale has little to do with that.

Usage will be roughly a bell curve. Losing money on the extreme upper end is NOT a reason to raise prices for everyone, because that will decrease overall revenue (see: price elasticity).

ToS is the right knob here. When 0.05% of your customers use your product in a way that increases your costs 10,000%, you find ways to stop that. You don’t amortize the cost increase across everyone else.

Yes, and they are in control of Claude Code, so they are fine with that. If it causes problems they can tweak it. If OpenClaw causes problems they can’t.