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A comment on Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw. Parent comment

Re:Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscri... by Yokohiii on Friday April 03, 2026 @09:49PM (#47634785)
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.
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Re:Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscri... by fluoridation on Friday April 03, 2026 @10:35PM (#47635079)
>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.

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Re:Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscri... by Yokohiii on Friday April 03, 2026 @11:00PM (#47635232)
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.
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Re:Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscri... by fluoridation on Friday April 03, 2026 @11:08PM (#47635280)
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.
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Re:Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscri... by Yokohiii on Friday April 03, 2026 @11:15PM (#47635315)
Those yottabytes of VRAM are also consuming electricity constantly.
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Re:Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscri... by fluoridation on Friday April 03, 2026 @11:24PM (#47635369)
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.
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Re:Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscri... by jmalicki on Friday April 03, 2026 @11:42PM (#47635463)
Your capital costs for buying those machines don't go away.
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Re:Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscri... by fluoridation on Saturday April 04, 2026 @12:00AM (#47635585)
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.
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Re:Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscri... by Yokohiii on Saturday April 04, 2026 @01:25AM (#47636065)
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.

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Re:Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscri... by fluoridation on Saturday April 04, 2026 @02:08AM (#47636323)
I'm not talking about custom, negotiated service contracts, I'm talking about simply charging people for what they use.
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Re:Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscri... by anonzzzies on Saturday April 04, 2026 @02:37AM (#47636473)
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.
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