Dear sir, please think of the shareholders, they need a fair exit.

Where did they say the prompt cache is shortened?

from 1h to 5 minutes, was in the news recently

But not as a solid fact?

The HN thread in question is here (and had that info edited out of the title)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47736476

Classic VC pump playbook - run it uneconomically until everyone is addicted, then 5x prices once you have enough critical mass. See 2010s "Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy"..

It seems pretty transparent that they are heavily resource constrained, (training run for Claude 5.x, higher usage / growth than anticipated). I don’t disagree that their long play is monopolistic pricing, but what we’re observing seems better explained by the fact they have a very tight compute budget they are trying to optimize over to put as much as they can into next gen experiments / training to make sure they stay competitive over the next 6-months / year.

you know once, anthropic was supposed to be a public benefit org!

For context, my company gives each developer a decent monthly allowance for Claude and if push comes to shove, we are allowed to fallback to using AWS Bedrock hosted Anthropic models.

When you pay for a Claude subscription, what exactly were you promised?

> they will start voting with their money.

And go where? Sooner or later the party is going to be over and Claude and its competitors are going to have to start charging enough to actually be profitable when the VC money dries up.

> When you pay for a Claude subscription, what exactly were you promised?

I was promised 5x or 20x the amount of resources that the free tier would offer. I implicitly expected the same quality too, not some watered-down version of the product they allowed me to sample before committing to a subscription.

Sooner or later Anthropic will run out of VC money, yes. That's their problem, not mine. When I took an Uber while it was subsidized by venture capital, the driver did not drop me half way through my destination because they were having cash flow issues.

So how do you know that the free tier hasn’t been reduced by 5x?

It’s exhausting enough to deal with services that change around on an annual/semi-annual basis with pricing and expectations.

Now the expectation is that we should tolerate goalposts being shuffled around on a weekly/daily basis with the added requirement of digging into bug tickets because there’s no attempt at transparency? The tech is cool but this is absolutely insane.

If you’re an individual developer paying $100-200/mo for a service that keeps changing, there is a LOT of reason to keep an eye on other products.

I’m not saying that there isn’t a reason to keep an eye on other products. I’m saying that every other product in the space has the same unit economics and will eventually need to charge enough to be profitable - and to continue training and hardware expansion.

Honestly a developer paying $200 a month is a nothingburger and if using their service to the fullest is losing them money.

For context, the company I work for gives each consultant a $2000 a month allowance and I think there are probably around 500-700 people with that allowance. I’m sure everyone doesn’t use it all.

If they have limited hardware resources, where do you think they are going to focus?

That's how all companies make money, release a great product, then enshittify it by lowering budget and increasing prices as much as possible.