Apparently it's just an A/B test. Legit LMAO moment, speedrunning reputation destruction to your entire userbase just to test a question whose answer you can probably already guess.
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> For clarity, we're running a small test on ~2% of new prosumer signups. Existing Pro and Max subscribers aren't affected.
> When we launched Max a year ago, it didn't include Claude Code, Cowork didn't exist, and agents that run for hours weren't a thing. Max was designed for heavy chat usage, that's it.
> Since then, we bundled Claude Code into Max and it took off after Opus 4. Cowork landed. Long-running async agents are now everyday workflows. The way people actually use a Claude subscription has changed fundamentally.
> Engagement per subscriber is way up. We've made small adjustments along the way (weekly caps, tighter limits at peak), but usage has changed a lot and our current plans weren't built for this.
> So we're looking at different options to keep delivering a great experience for users. We don't know exactly what those look like yet - that's what we're testing and getting feedback on right now.
> When we do land on something, if it affects existing subscribers you'll get plenty of notice before anything changes. Will hear it from us, not a screenshot on X or Reddit.
Personally I love how they have increased everyone's quotas to counteract the Opus 4.7 tokenizer change a few days ago, but are immediately regretting it and trying to cut off subscription users.
If the subscriptions are unprofitable, then just communicate honestly, raise the price or lower limits for new subscribers transparently, and grandfather in existing users. That's what GLM coding plan is doing and it works fine for them. Don't ruin your reputation with opaque messaging and hidden changes. Lol
> If the subscriptions are unprofitable, then just communicate honestly, raise the price or lower limits for new subscribers transparently, and grandfather in existing users.
This. Why do so many companies fail to get this? Anthropic's user base, in particular, is intelligent enough to understand their constraints.
It's possible they don't know the actual costs. The one-time costs like hardware and training foundation models is huge. There's the ongoing costs like the PhD dudes they hire. There's the data they buy and decide not to use. There's the various offers under one payment plan - limited artifact hosting, cowork, image upload, Claude Code, Code tab on Claude. What about feature parity between the site and app? Who's working on all these?
tldr it seems really complex and by the time they've counted it they probably hired 40 new people for an unannounced feature.
I mean, if you look at the Claude subreddits, the general consensus is that Anthropic and OpenAI are money hungry corporate devils that are here to enslave all of us, and everyone should get unlimited everything on Max x20.
I think you may be overestimating the willingness of people to understand Anthropic’s concerns.
Reddit is a very small subsection of the Internet consisting mainly of basement-dweller radical leftist they/thems. We should not be taking them as a representative sample of the average Anthropic user.
MS paused Copilot subscriptions because they don't have enough capacity. Anthropic is trying to confuse new users and literally don't want 20$/mo because they don't have enough capacity. Seems like there's a trend here. A lot of people in scaling threads were saying that capacity projections and DC buildouts were "fantasy" a few years ago. Not so much anymore...
big fan of A/B tests that dehumanize the consumer into some kind of money making lab rat funnel whose only purpose is to be experimented on how you can extract more money out of it
While I feel the same way, this is nothing new at all. Basically every company does this and it's a totally normal way to test new profit models. Has been done for decades. People acting surprised here really need to get on with reality.
Usually A/B testing is just on the surface, and when you actually subscribe you get the "better" terms of the possible options.
Like, they're just advertising different terms to test how many people would still click on it and very likely start the subscription process, but after they click they go back to the usual terms. Changing the whole payment flow, account models and permissions in their backend just for a quick test is usually too much work.
But yes, basically, if you're B and not A, and B has objectively worse terms than A, then you're just unlucky. But this is the essence of A/B tests. They are done by basically every company everytime, because it's the most straightforward and simple way to test new terms or designs.
I don't think I've ever been on such a rollercoaster with a company's reputation in the developer space. I started in January on the $20 plan, essentially my first agentic AI programming. I quickly started hitting limits developing several apps at the same time. I went up to the $200 plan after seeing the value.
After seeing my own issues with 4.6 and the mega-post on Github about declining metrics in a decent dataset of claude chats by Stella Laurenzo at AMD (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796), I downgraded to the $100 plan. Hallucinations. Laziness. Lack of thinking. The responses on those mega-threads from Anthropic rubbed me the wrong way in a "you're holding it wrong" kinda way.
In the past week, I downgraded back to the $20 plan because the Codex $20 plan on 5.4 was working so well for me.
Then throw in other oddball events like the source code leak, and the super positive Anthropic events like their interactions with the current administration. It's a wild ride.
I can't understand removing Claude Code from $20. I'm interested to see whether this is confirmed or not.
I'm a career engineer and I went from being one of their most outspoken proponents (at least within my circle) and now.... I'm not.
Same loved them, told my team about them, got them to switch off of cursor, now I'm telling them to swap to Codex.
Anthropic really pissed me off with their harness crap. They're well within their rights but their communication over it was enough to get me to swap. I don't need extra hurdles when there's a perfectly valid alternative right there. They don't have the advantage they think they do.
I think we are inevitably heading to using the cheap Chinese models like Kimi, GLM, and Minimax for the bulk of engineering tasks. Within 3-6 months they will be at Opus 4.6 level.
This was literally my task today, to try out Qwen 9B locally on my, albeit a bit memory-constrained at 18GB, macbook with pi or opencode. Before reading this update.
MiniMax has its own issues. Server overloads, API errors, and failure to adhere to even the system prompt. It can happily work for hours and get no job done.
I ran OpenCode + GLM-5.1 for three weeks during my vacation. It’s okay. It thinks a lot more to get to a similar result as Claude. So it’s slower. It’s congested during peak hours. It has quirks as the context gets close to full.
But if you’re stuck with no better model, it’s better than local models and no models.
I have to say, OpenCode’s OpenUI has taught me what modern TUIs can be like. Claude’s TUI feels more like it’s been grown than designed. I’m playing around with TUI widgets trying to recreate and improve that experience
> I have to say, OpenCode’s OpenUI has taught me what modern TUIs can be like. Claude’s TUI feels more like it’s been grown than designed.
Claude's TUI is not a TUI. It's the most WTF thing ever: the TUI is actually a GUI. A headless browser shipped the TUI that, in real-time, renders the entire screen, scrolls to the bottom, and converts that to text mode. There are several serious issues and I'll mention two that do utterly piss me off...
1. Insane "jumping" around where the text "scrolls back" then scrolls back down to your prompt: at this point, seen the crazy hack that TUI is, if you tell me the text jumping around in the TUI is because they're simulating mouse clicks on the scrollbar I would't be surprised. If I'm not mistaken we've seen people "fixing" this by patching other programs (tmux ?).
2. What you see in the TUI is not the output of the model. That is, to me, the most insane of it all. They're literally changing characters between their headlessly rendered GUI and the TUI.
> Claude’s TUI feels more like it’s been grown than designed.
"grown" or "hacked" are way too nice words for the monstrosity that Claude's TUI is.
Codex is described as a: "Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal". It's 95%+ Rust code. I wonder if the "lightweight" is a stab at the monstrosity that Claude's TUI is.
Anthropic will kick and scream as those are often distilled from their latest models and is cutting into their margin. Though it is not like their hands are clean neither, it is just a different type of stealing, an approved one :-)
Getting them running is easy (check out LMstudio or ask one for some recommendations). The real question is whether you have the hardware to make them run fast enough to be useful.
One thing I enjoy about Cursor and Codex mac apps is the embedded preview window. I know it's not as hardcore as the terminal/tmux but it's hella convenient. But Cursor bugs me with the opacity around what model I'm using. It seems deliberately to be routing requests based on its perceived complexity. What draws you to codex vs cursor?
LLM monsters are deeply unprofitable, going by the industry hearsay (which is the only thing we have, given ultra secrecy of the LLM corporations). The only two LLM companies which disclosed their finances without lies, were two Chinese corporations and they, unsurprisingly, were deeply in red.
Remember the old saying about boiling a frog? LLM corporations need to make most of their users pay hundreds per month, asap. This is Anthropic increasing temperature regulator under the pot just a tiny little bit. Not the first and not the last time.
I think removing Claude Code from the $20 tier is a terrible idea, I never would've gone from nothing right into the $100/200 tier. The $20 plan let me get my feet wet and see how good it could be, and in less than a week I was on the $100 plan.
I think they need to at least have a 1 month introductory rate for the max plan at $20, or devs that decide to try out agentic coding just won't go to Anthropic.
That leads to downstream impacts, like when a company is deciding which AI coding tools to provide and the feedback management hears everyone is already used to (e.x.) Codex, then Anthropic starts losing the enterprise side of things.
I suspect a lot of people are like me. They got into this at the $20/month level individually to check things out. I'm not stressing things out, so I haven't moved up, but the moment I bump into a limit, I'll pull the trigger by default. Until then, I'm the sleeping dog, and you should let me lie.
Well, Anthropic decided to kick me. Now, I'm investing the time to figure out how to use the "open" and "Chinese" models assuming that Anthropic is about to screw me. Once I switch, Anthropic is going to have to demonstrate significant improvements over what I'm now using to get me to even consider them again.
Matches my experience very well. All the goodwill earned from taking a stand against the DoD seemingly forgotten in a month. Coincidentally, I canceled my pro subscription and got set up with OpenCode and OpenRouter last night.
> I can't understand removing Claude Code from $20
Not according to their webpage: "Claude Code is included in your Pro plan. Perfect for short coding sprints in small codebases with access to both Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.7." [1]
There are clear contradictions across their marketing site. As others have pointed out, it's being removed from some help articles and the pricing chart now shows it revoked. Confusing signals, but they seem to be changing all pages in this direction and haven't updated that one yet.
I had a similar ride, but disagree with your conclusion. Opus 4.7 is so incredibly powerful from my experience, that nothing else really matters and I think at Anthropic they know it. People will pay a lot for access to this model.
Yea, I've seen a lot of whining online, because its more expensive, but from the interactions I've had I'd say, that it's well worth it. To me it feels like another step change, similar to when 4.5 was introduced. Definitely a different beast.
EDIT: it is also surprising to me that everyone seems to believe the people at Anthropic are simply incompetent and recklessly risking their good reputation, while very few consider the possible good reasons they might have for taking such drastic measures. And I don't think it's because of financial pressures in their case
Having too much usage and not enough GPUs is a form of financial pressure, no? since you want to replace your less profitable customers with more profitable customers
I can’t say I’ve used it extensively enough to draw a conclusion, but it did seem similar to GPT 5.4 in Codex.
When I threw it at a difficult issue in an iOS app, it like GPT came up with wrongly guessed explanations. It only found the issue after I had it instrument the app and add extensive logs. Usually GPT 5.4 is the same.
Only that with GPT 5.4 it’s at least included in my subscription, while sending 3-4 messages to Opus 4.7 for this blew through my $20 plan limits and consumed $10 of extra usage on top. At that point I can’t help but bring up how much more expensive it is.
> Only that with GPT 5.4 it’s at least included in my subscription, while sending 3-4 messages to Opus 4.7 for this blew through my $20 plan limits and consumed $10 of extra usage on top. At that point I can’t help but bring up how much more expensive it is.
Rest assured OpenAI won’t want to leave that kind of money on the table…
I've had completely the opposite experience. I've asked for it to research things and it's just told me to "paste xyz into google". Just now I revisited a chat that's 5 days old and asked it to check again (because what I was looking for might have changed), and it said "no".
It's funny how experiences can be so different. I wonder if this comes down to context. My interactions so far were fairly high-level and in some cases it having a strong opinion was actually super beneficial to the outcome. To me it seemed opinionated, but in a very good way. I can see how this could backfire though and have heard similar reports.
Opus 4.7 may be incredible but for how long? And they may have Mythos but I feel like they will put it out if pressed too much by their competitors. And again for how long will they keep the advantage?
At the speed everything is advancing I don’t think it’s such an advantage. They all catch each other up pretty fast. That’s why I prefer to pay Cursors and have access to all of them instead of being lock to a single one (even if that means to lose some discounted credits). If they opened Mythos today at a good price that would be something but that’s not the case and it won’t happen.
Incredible, powerful, but I couldn't believe how fast I hit the limits compared to how it was with Opus 4.6. They removed Opus 4.6 completely from CC. I would prefer it with the previous limits.
That's not how you keep your customers. None of these agents have a moat, I moved away from Cursor when they started doing what Anthropic is doing now, and never went back even when I was a paying customer since the start.
they need the devs on board for that to matter, i can get whatever i want done with lesser models already. It is quite literally about just who is not gonna give me the shittiest experience, and at anthropic it sure seems they are determined to annoy everyone since they started gaining in popularity.
Most commercial websites, especially tech, run multiple A/B experiments in parallel to optimize signup funnels and tier conversions. Even so, there should always be a source of truth for people. We should have some way of verifying what we get for what we pay. There are laws about this as well.
This guy's casual and crass response is a sign of disrespect for customers. Unfortunately, that is pervasive in the industry. The bubbles these teams work in are corrosive to empathy and real world impact.
I think there is more here: Anthropic's whole market positioning is based on trust. It's literally their reason for being.
The Claude constitution has a major section about not being deceptive. Now this is GTM, not the model, but there is clearly a coherence problem here... and if anyone should realize the important of their market positioning it's GTM.
Agreed that it’s 100% marketing. In some ways Anthropic is more of a for-profit corporation than OpenAI which is at least partially owned by a non-profit.
I can't find an announcement yet, however the pricing page now shows it's not included, and various support articles have removed any mention of the the Pro plan including access to claude code.
See [1] and [2] for an example of a support article that's had claude code removed as a Pro feature.
I guess this is the beginning of the end for subsidised model access, at least from Anthropic.
Because 'claude -p' is a backdoor for any third party client to use subsidized token pricing, and they've flipped course again to decide they do want the OpenClaw type users as long as they're on the $100 plan.
It was obvious, which is why their earlier decision to attempt to restrict 3p access was hugely unpopular. They're now trying to walk that back but on the condition that those users need to be on the higher plan.
Now they're hurting their popularity with those who actually don't mind using Claude Code. I've been quietly swallowing a lot of performance degradation over the past few weeks as I get the resource crunch, but I'm definitely not going back to copy-pasting between browser and editor. And I have no intention of upgrading to Max or doing per token usage.
The question isn't whether anyone could have missed it, but whether Claude Code has release gates that allow people to require that obvious problems should be resolved. From their release velocity it's pretty clear that they do not.
My usage of Claude Code in the pro plan is definitely metered. Every couple hours I have to wait an hour or two and the last few weeks I've hit my weekly limit on Wednesday.
This is a risky move. I might have paid $20/month for my personal projects but the Max subscription is a bit steep.
Now I'm going to learn more about local models. I don't need to be as good as a frontier model. Good enough and free from all this drama is a win for me
Same, I'm currently unemployed and the $20 help me to initiate many small projects. The recent taxing in the token made me start testing local models on my machine. Tho, Claude works better for the front end part imo.
I've been running pi.dev + codex (GPT-5.4) for a long time for my workhorse stuff.
Actually tried caveman mode yesterday and it made everything SO MUCH BETTER. GPT-5.4 has a habit of being extremely verbose to a ridiculous degree, it's like it's writing a report for a CTO or something and padding everything as much as possible to sound smart.
With caveman it just gives me lists of stuff in a compact format. Perfect.
"free of this drama" and free is great option for companies, of course most use API billing but let's not forget that there are places that budget is limited and being good enough is just perfect.
With GLM and Kimi getting better and better, with both still providing low-cost coding plans with higher quotas, and with how trivial it is to switch to them even within Claude CLI, I'm not sure what makes Anthropic think their users would rather pay 5x than switch to the competition.
Never mind GLM and Kimi, even GPT 5.4 offers a great plan for $20/mo. Even if it gets increased rate limits after May, it's still quite likely that casual users won't be hitting them on a regular basis.
I signed up for a 3 month plan with Z.ai so I could try out GLM-5.1. That was a few weeks ago when it was still $27 for 3 months, now it's $48 for 3 months. I hit limits at least as much as I do with Claude. I hit a weekly limit at one point and it said I wasn't going be able to get access again for 6 days so I must've somehow hit their weekly limit on day one of the week. And that after several timeouts.
Why is management at Anthropic trying so hard to ruin their reputation with developers? I missed the OpenClaw hype but it was something that kept me excited about my yearly subscription.
It makes no sense to do one of the higher tier plans unless they are directly generating you money.
They care about developers from companies that are on their team/enterprise plans or using bedrock.
Individual users barely matter. That's probably also the same group that decides to switch to Codex/Kimi/[whatever the hottest agent on any given day] on a whim, which Anthropic doesn't necessarily want to do business with.
feel like its beyond optimistic on their part, just starting to hear their name be blended with companies desires on job listings, and they are destroying the goodwill of the devs who surely are the main reason their name has landed there. They aren't dug in like a microsoft, maybe they get some staying power for nocode people who feel trapped, but im done with their nonsense already and won't recommend them anywhere. Other stuff is good enough already to match.
A fraction of them do. Many just use whatever the employer provides to get their job done. HN users only represent a small sample of the overall software developers which is nowhere nearly enthusiastic about new things.
In the end, companies are made of individuals. In my previous company, I'm one of the individual who advocate for Claude Code adoption. Amongst my circle too, most who have the authority to make an impact on the AI direction. Safe to say I no longer suggest Anthropic to anyone anymore.
At my company, devs were the ones pushing for the Claude subscription. Left to management, we would have only had GitHub Copilot – we already have an existing relationship with them and the tool is good enough.
If Anthropic is intent on losing the goodwill of the devs, they might not be happy with the consequences. Their product is quite commoditized at this point – the latest GPT, Gemini or GLM is just as good for most enterprise tasks.
It is over for the little guy - home enthusiasts and vibe coders. Too many of them saturating resources for Max users.
IF you cannot afford few hundred dollars subscription go out and breathe fresh air. But if you can, watch where the ball is rolling - few thousand dollars subscriptions and even less programmers.
Agree about psychological impact outpacing likely actual impact, but that’s a relatively temporary phenomena as we are all adapting to the new way things work.
Productivity wise employment is far more than code production productivity in a vacuum, and productivity gains are rarely captured by employees (see famous chart on worker productivity where that correlation changed around 1970). I wouldn’t expect to see much in the next 1-2 years besides noticing effective teams increasing velocity of features.
I think people in forums like complaining about things and aren’t representative of the broader set of people who are just using the tools, so no real paradox. For vast majority of tech jobs, $200/mo is still an absolute steal in terms of what these tools offer. Only the dullest of companies would not realize this.
Fwiw in the 80s-90s computers also didn’t really register in productivity metrics. Qualitative changes occur long before accurate measurement catches up.
Because most people work for someone else and don't decide their own salaries. It's not doubling productivity, but even a 10-20% boost to productivity for a team of engineers means that, as a business, even $1k per month per seat is perfectly acceptable. For consumers and hobbyists that basically kills access.
Truly makes no sense. I pay for the $200/month plan and end up using about $3k/month worth of API costs. I imagine that the only reason they haven’t cut me off is because my habits serve as good training data for them.
Guess they’ve decided to move in the direction of allocating compute primarily to power users and enterprise.
But power users are not a sticky customer base. I just bought the ChatGPT Pro plan and would immediately switch over if the model performance is better and/or I get more compute.
The age of AI seems to forget some lessons from Google (and history in general).
- Rapid changes hurts the trust of your brand and product. In Google case, using a new service product became something you’ll think multiple times as you are more likely to axe it than rivals or specialized equivalents.
- While models currently has no clear winner. Anthropic’s core product is coding. But just as Skype, IE, Netscape their can always be another game changer you cannot count.
- The Pro plan is already limited for true agentinc workflows. The limits now are so bad that a business that relies on it would need bigger plans.
- Anthropic is already in a delicate situation where many devs are frustrated. Dropping or crippling the use even more just means this sector (which I can only assume is a big chunk) would switch to competitors tool that already try to compete.
- Local models, whether as Google sees it “edge” or even further would also take bigger part in the future.
“The limits now are so bad that a business that relies on it would need bigger plans.”
Isn’t this the goal to some extent? They’ll probably have the standard “light” usage plan for weekend warriors or normal folk looking to play around. Companies that mandate usage and provide the subscription for hundreds of employees will have to cough it up, and will have no problem doing so if they want to compete with the others (or so the hype would allude to).
So their minimum workable offer for devs just went from $17 to $100.
Also, I don't see how the Pro subscription is relevant anymore. Nobody pays $17 a month just to chat.
I just unsubscribed. :)
Time to try Chat GPT Codex, which even works with the free subscription (don't expect crazy token allowance, of course).
I think that Anthropic has capacity problems. They went all in on acquiring new customers but now they don't have enough capacity to both serve users and train new models, so they are trying to limit user usages.
It is pure speculation of course, but I don't have any other explanations on the stuff they are pulling in the last 2 months.
Yeah, this is pretty clearly what's going on, but I wish they'd be more transparent about it. Funneling compute to Mythos and Design, while auto-setting effort levels lower and removing user control of extended thinking. I don't think the need to shuffle compute around is unique to Anthropic, though. I suspect it's part of why Sora got killed. And everyone's having uptime issues. Are we reaching the limits of the available compute?
Either they baited people with code and flexible usage limits until march and this was planned or they realized that they did too good of an product and it costs them too much.
One thing is clear, Anthropics communications and leadership is horrible. You don't launch or remove features like this. How this is communicated and handle is something like mom+pop shop would do.
If true, very strange change when Codex (at both 20 & 100) is a much, much better deal for a model much better at most coding tasks, with way more usage even with the /fast mode enabled. Is losing most non-enterprise customers the right move for them?
Equally, will offering a presumably unprofitably large quota of Codex tokens at $20 to retain non-enterprise customers turn out to be the right move for OpenAI?
Would not be surprised to see OpenAI follow suit.
Or perhaps OpenAI's LLMs are just so more compute efficient that they can actually offer that sustainably...
Feels to me it's a battle between who has the most compute. OpenAI does not seem to be struggling with their x2 usage on the new 100 Plan, which is very close to unlimited usage with the best performing model on the highest reasoning setting. Not mentioning the resets every 1 million customers, or the other generous usage multipliers last months. Meanwhile Anthropic seems to be desperately trying to cut down on inference with their changes to reasoning effort and more lately, so they might be focusing on what they consider to be more valuable customers for their long-term strategy. The 20 plan with Opus had gotten so bad on CC they might've just pulled the plug to stop people from complaining about usage limits. If OpenAI can burn money longer and capture the market from the bottom, I think they'd win in the long run.
That's exactly what I fear- that Mythos/Glasswing has made anthropic confident that they can survive by only serving that type of customer. Would be sad to see.
It cracks me up when I hear takes like - 'if you're not using more than $20, the product isn't for you because you're not a real user.' If you use CC as an assistant rather than a replacement for your own thinking, follow SDD, and use the tool thoughtfully, you deliver a lot more and you don't need the 5x or 20x limit. It's a different story if you're vibe coding, but then we're not really talking about AI-assisted work - your three prompts barely count as doing any work. I've been on Pro for 2 years, but if this is how things are going, I'll look for an alternative. Luckily, there's plenty to choose from.
if this is accurate, and not some "oops we made a vibe-coding mistake updating our website" I am going to hit the "cancel subscription" button so hard that my desk will break in half.
I have an unlimited-usage API billing plan through my dayjob, but for obvious reasons they don't allow piggybacking personal usage onto that. so I paid for the $20/mo personal plan as an easy and relatively cheap method of professional development / keeping my skills current. I don't particularly mind paying $20/mo, but I'm absolutely not paying $100/mo.
also, part of the reason I didn't mind paying for the personal subscription is that I liked having consistency between the tools I use for my dayjob and the ones I use for side projects. if that goes away, then I might as well switch away from Claude usage at work as well. I very much doubt Anthropic's revenue predictions for this change are taking things like that into account.
making a change like this without an announcement, just sneaky updates to product pages, is also an absolutely unforgivable thing to do, in terms of me trusting them as a company.
Seems like a pretty bad business move if it's really what they're doing. They should want devs using the product on a cheaper subscription to see the value with profitable limits on usage.
I think the only reason to do this would be that they just can't scale up to service the volume they have and need to cut down significantly on the total number of users. Seems also like a rough business proposition. Most of the pro plan users would probably migrate to a competitor at a similar price point (I know I will).
The only other possibility would be if they are losing too much money on the compute power and just can't offer it at that price anymore. But then upgrading the plan gives you more compute per dollar, so maybe they're just banking on people not actually using all of what they pay for?
I had previously thought that the inference cost of using a trained model was relatively low and that most costs went into training new models, but maybe that is less true with the more powerful newer models.
If it costs a ton more to serve Opus vs serving something like Kimi or Qwen, then I think most people just won't use the more expensive version for most things.
Claude Design was iterating on the plans page and decided to remove clutter and their review bot LGTM’d it as “minor copy change human review not required” and auto-merged it.
Maybe they're putting out a weather balloon to test sentiment. That way when they're caught they can just point at the other page to say it was just a mistake.
It is perhaps better for Anthropic to do a price hike e.g. $25 or $30 for Pro with a clear/honest messaging e.g. "Running costs are high, price hike is unavoidable" than resorting to these tactics.
These shenanigans are earning them no respect. The market is already annoyed on model serving QA issues, and now (recently) Opus limits. They don't want to lose to OpenAI - understandable - but these shortcuts won't earn them anything either.
Same. I hope we're grandfathered in. Otherwise current pro subscribers who signed up with the understanding that they could use it in Claude Code are going to be extremely pissed and go off and sign up for alternatives (or start running local models instead). I mean, I guess they could say too bad, they got your money, but this would destroy their brand among people who are currently their most loyal users.
Same. I'm not a dev but I use CC a few times in a week and it's been a great help.
However, my company paid for my annual subscription, so maybe I'll ask our lawyers for advice - the only reason they paid for this was my access to CC and with my use the next tier wouldn't make sense, AND no one will expect Anthropic to not nerf it too.
Before you have lawyers look at it, wait until you’re actually impacted. Nothing has been removed from existing subscriptions yet and their employees Tweeted that existing subscriptions aren’t impacted.
Thank for the insightful comment and indeed I wouldn't without the evidence form myself and other people on the same subscription (all non-devs so we use it rarely but it feels like a superpower).
You're right. I didn't scroll down. I wonder why they didn't update the top cards that everyone see. They do it for claude Cowork but not claude code? That is not very transparent. How does it make sense? It's not like claude code is too niche to be included, it's in the main app and I know multiple non-techie people who use it.
Next they’ll slowly reduce how much CC usage you can get out of the $100 Max plan, then introduce a new $300 “Max Plus” plan with “40x” usage.
“You asked, and we listened: Introducing Max Plus, our biggest plan yet, designed for those…” blah blah
I can't believe they are yanking tool access instead of just reducing the token quota or simply pulling Opus 4.7 access. To be fair even that would be poorly received, but at least people would have a choice of working within limits. Claude Code is their real winner, and a great ramp for newcomers coming into AI assisted development. They are playing straight into OpenAIs hands.
I would assume users who have an existing subscription will be grandfathered in.
It would seem misleading to sell monthly, or even yearly, subscriptions under the guise Claude Code comes with the subscription, for it to only be yanked out underneath you. (Although depending who you ask, Anthropic have already done actions similar to this).
Anthropic clearly doesn't understand that customers see their brand as "Claude", Google's brand as "Gemini" and OpenAI's brand as "ChatGPT." They have so many plans and exclusions that they risk customer confusion. I was surprised when I was pay $200/month for Claude Code, finding it super helpful, and then I had to pay separately to get API access for an experiment. Why are so many parts of "Claude" separate from each other, especially on a $200/month subscription.
Anthropic better get this sorted out with a proper product manager and marketing or they risk customers jumping to easier to understand platforms that are good enough.
That also was really opaque to me RE: API access. I initially thought at $200/month I could get whatever I needed. I eventually set up a OpenAI API with a few bucks to try what I wanted to.
This is exactly what happens with all agentic products in near future. Demand is way higher than supply right now. Also most programmers do not use agents yet so demand will grow even more. Building data centers is not easy and price of HW is skyrocketing.
Hey, I'm a pro, and I feel genuinely insulted. I could consider going back to Claude Desktop + MCP, but I'm getting tired of this telenovela, and will probably cancel my sub and take my business elsewhere.
* change laws to accommodate it - if corporations train data, on every usage they should pay higher taxes so they can't exploit the open data, but public ledger trained model is fine to use open data
* similar tech exists (bitcoin, torrent), needs some modifications
At least for me Claude Code is still working on my Pro plan. I don't know if that's because the change simply hasn't propagated all the way through their systems yet (the change is now up on the main Claude pricing page and on their support pages, but not on the Claude Code landing page yet), or if it's because existing plans are grandfathered in, or what.
In general Anthropic seems to be pretty bad at clearly communicating what is going on. I have both Claude Pro for Claude Code and ChatGPT Plus for Codex, and lately I've been reaching for Codex first more and more often... at least for the hobby stuff I'm using Claude/Codex on, they seem pretty much equivalent in terms of practical capability/usefulness.
Everyone that is upset about this should take note: you are not a (coding) customer at $20/mo. Their coding customers spend thousands per month (week!) on claude and it's growing faster than they can keep up with (source: I'm one of them, and I know many other like me. We're budgeting 10-20% of engineering salary spend on tokens). It sucks to no longer be able to code on the cheap anymore, but don't fool yourself into thinking you have any leverage here.
My leverage is i’m canceling my plan. Openai gives me codex+chatgpt for my $20. I use my claude code sparingly, but I enjoyed it and it works great when I needed it. Access to it was a reason they got my money a few months ago and it’s been a shit show of reduction of services since.
This makes sense given Anthropic’s recent downtime and resource constraints.
Opus 4.7 consumes tokens at a faster rate and folks were complaining that the Pro plan included too few credits for real work.
And Anthropic now allows `claude -p` (which invokes Claude code) for 3rd party agents like OpenClaw, which consume far more tokens by running autonomously, 24/7.
I would hope that we'd be grandfathered in since we signed up with the expectation that we could use it in Claude Code. I could see where maybe that might lead to problems down the line where they do some kind of update and "forget" that people who signed up before a certain date were supposed to be grandfathered in.
Team plan shows “Claude code” in a main bullet point still. Which would indicate it is part of the team plan regardless if it has premium seats or not.
But it seems this is all in a state of flux.
And there’s the lovely asterisk at the bottom:
> Prices and plans are subject to change at Anthropic's discretion.
I was working in my biggest project in the last 3 years and i dont got mutch money and they go there and cut claude code from pro like wtf so why am i even paying for pro
No particular opinion on this change, but generally pricing is a great way to separate dabblers from serious users. There isn’t a great deal of value in dabblers or what they produce, I imagine that training data isn’t worth much relative to the pro users. Similar pricing story with $100 yearly price for Apple developer accounts that people complain a lot about. The reality is if you’re serious about making something, these costs are pretty cheap.
The folks hurt most by this are serious people in developing countries and young people starting out. Occasionally a dabbler turns into a serious user but I imagine that’s far less likely than people wish it were.
The value to companies who make these changes is they don’t have low value users or low value contributions to worry about, which has its own not insignificant overhead. In the age of AI slop everywhere we’re likely to see a lot more attempts to separate the wheat from the chaff.
The dabbler/serious user distinction isn't the only framing here.
Assuming this limitation applies to team seats in the same way, at $20/mo, businesses could afford to have everybody on the plan. Plenty of folks write only a few hours of code per day—or even per week in their job. These are still professionals, not dabblers.
Anthropic should be increasing the value and services they offer not reducing it.
It’s the Apple model. Yes you pay a ton more. But my 2013 MacBook Pro 15 I got in college lasted 10 years and was still fine even when it was stolen. That’s what you pay for. You pay for a ton of built in apps and functionality and quality.
Arbitrarily removing things is customer and more importantantly good will hostile.
Jesus Christ, it’s literally going to become too big of a risk to depend on Anthropic.
As someone who tries to manage usage for a small team they just added Claude Code to the Standard Team seat now they are removing it!?
Not to mention that they will ban your entire organization from a bot deciding you violated their TOS with no communication and no way to contact anyone to understand what happened.
If this is real we are switching to OpenAI or Gemini it is not worth all this non sense
Trying to chat with "fin" is like trying to argue with a bowl of congealed oatmeal.
Me:
Why is your website saying Claude Code is not included in Claude Pro subscriptions?
"Fin", the slow, dopey AI agent:
That’s confusing, but it usually comes down to what “Claude Code” means in that context. Claude Pro does include Claude Code (the Code tab in the desktop app, and Claude Code access for individuals).
What Pro does not include is API access via the Claude Console. Those are separate products: Pro is for chat, and the Console is for building apps with the API.
So if the website is saying “not included,” it’s likely referring to Console/API access, not the Claude Code feature itself.
Did that clear up the confusion?
Me:
No. It clearly states on the pricing page that Claude Code is not included.
Fin:
That’s frustrating, <NAME>. The key detail is that Claude Code is included in Claude Pro, but API access via the Claude Console is not.
So if the page you’re looking at says “Claude Code is not included,” it’s almost certainly referring to Console/API access (the developer platform), not the Claude Code feature itself.
If you tell me the exact URL or screenshot of the page that says that, I can confirm which “Code” it’s talking about.
Fin:
On https://claude.com/pricing, Pro does include Claude Code. It’s listed right there under Pro’s “Everything in Free, plus” bullets: “Includes Claude Code.”
So if you’re seeing “not included” somewhere else on that page, it’s likely referring to something different than the Claude Code feature. The one thing Pro does not include is API access via the Claude Console (that’s a separate product).
Also, the Code tab in the desktop app requires a Pro (or Max/Team/Enterprise) subscription, and it may not show for everyone yet since it’s still rolling out.
Does that clear things up for you?
Me:
there is clearly an "x" at this page. escalate to a human immediately.
and then the cycle continues. I'm cancelling my Anthropic subscription, sick of worrying about limits and getting banned and simply awful experience.
This is more ethical than what they've been doing, trying to keep those subscribers but limiting them to the point it's become unusable. But it's also kneecaping themselves because they'll miss out on any innovation and hype coming out of the hobbyist community.
Huh? I just don't understand why they're doing this. Feels like shooting themselves in the foot, given that Claude's individual subscribers are a large part of who is introducing all their enterprise customers to them. Plus removing access is never good for public perception.
And of course you never want the first tier it's included on because you need actual usage, so in reality you need Max 20x - the price of which I can't even see on the pricing page
The clusterfuck about the various pages not being all upgraded to reflect the same story...
I thought we now had advanced tools to which we could ask to do things like: "Remove all mention of Claude Code in the Pro, but not in the Pro Max plan".
But apparently the CGI-days called and asked the webmaster to manually edit .html files one by one?
People really have to internalize that these things are expensive to run, and that there isn't enough compute to go around, like actually for real for real, which is likely the source of this. My guess is its a temporary new sign up pause.
I just cancelled my plan, but still have access to Pro and Code apparently until my cycle would have renewed. Hopefully they get a clear signal from this, especially if more of us cancel with the intention to sign back up should they reverse this decision.
I’d be surprised if they’re running at less than 100% capacity after this. It’s just too useful to too many people for whom an $80/month increase is immaterial (I speculate)
They're trying to find every way to enshittify their partially unprofitable service. When they find a way that sticks, they'll go with it. This has become the preferred way of doing tech business in the US. Create a great thing, give it away for free, hook users in, try to squeeze them. In theory competition should limit this kind of behaviour, but for some reason they big companies all wait on another to start enshittification in unison. How this is legal still puzzles me but evidently that's how it goes.
Here's my hot take: Anthropic et al. are trying to make developing a subscription-only job, and they've done that by illegally pirating pretty much the whole Internet. If they were to go out of business tomorrow and serving models was to become a commoditized service like storage we'd be all better off. Sure, we would have less research on frontier models, but we don't need AGI, we need good local models, RAM and good open source / weight AI tools.
And this is all exclusively about Anthropic. It's insane. On any other tech, there would be a consensus to wait until it's stable, but not AI - we go full throttle when it's AI.
Genuinely curious how people who have implemented this in serious companies are answering these questions, because my answer is to keep it the fuck out.
Saw this coming eventually. $20/month for autonomous agents running 24/7 was clearly not sustainable at API pricing. The part that's surprising is there's still no official announcement - just a quiet page edit.
The $20/mo plan never supported 24/7 autonomous agents. With Opus 4.5 and 4.6 I would hit resource limits after a reasonable amount of work, which corresponded to a variable amount of wall clock time.
This makes me think either they’re severely resource constrained and need to focus on “high value” customers, they’re bleeding money on inference, or their sales and marketing team is incompetent.
Regardless, this feels like a pretty big rug pull. Especially without a phase-out period and a real announcement. As someone using Claude Code on a personal hobby project to get a better feel for its capabilities, I’m not sure what to do now. I can’t justify the $100+/mo plans for a hobby project.
My choices are then:
- Code this project by hand, which would be fun but defeats the point of this being my agentic coding project.
- Find another model and use Codex or OpenCode or whatever.
- Put the project on a shelf till this shakes out.
This was never the case though. There's a per week and per 5 hour quota. If you exhaust either you have to wait for the reset. What they're doing makes no sense.
And yet they're very aware that Hacker News, etc exists and so the awareness and backlash would be instant. It's like they want to get a lower rating from the community. Maybe that's their solution for the resource issue: make enough people mad so they abandon their subscriptions.
“ The standard answer here is no — Anthropic does not typically refund the unused portion of annual plans , and annual subscribers won’t see prorated refunds, retaining access for the full remaining period instead.
That said, your situation is a bit different — you’re not just canceling, you’re canceling because a feature you paid for was removed. That’s worth contacting Anthropic support directly about. Their support team can check your refund eligibility , and this kind of material change to the plan is exactly the case where a support escalation could go differently than a standard cancellation.
You can reach them through the in-app support messenger at support.claude.com or via the thumbs-down feedback button. I’d recommend explaining specifically that Claude Code was a factor in your annual plan purchase. ”
Just do a chargeback its an easy W. I dont see why you'd want to continue doing business with anthropic after a change to a 1 year contract out of cycle
Apparently it's just an A/B test. Legit LMAO moment, speedrunning reputation destruction to your entire userbase just to test a question whose answer you can probably already guess.
---
> For clarity, we're running a small test on ~2% of new prosumer signups. Existing Pro and Max subscribers aren't affected.
> When we launched Max a year ago, it didn't include Claude Code, Cowork didn't exist, and agents that run for hours weren't a thing. Max was designed for heavy chat usage, that's it.
> Since then, we bundled Claude Code into Max and it took off after Opus 4. Cowork landed. Long-running async agents are now everyday workflows. The way people actually use a Claude subscription has changed fundamentally.
> Engagement per subscriber is way up. We've made small adjustments along the way (weekly caps, tighter limits at peak), but usage has changed a lot and our current plans weren't built for this.
> So we're looking at different options to keep delivering a great experience for users. We don't know exactly what those look like yet - that's what we're testing and getting feedback on right now.
> When we do land on something, if it affects existing subscribers you'll get plenty of notice before anything changes. Will hear it from us, not a screenshot on X or Reddit.
https://x.com/TheAmolAvasare/status/2046724659039932830
---
Personally I love how they have increased everyone's quotas to counteract the Opus 4.7 tokenizer change a few days ago, but are immediately regretting it and trying to cut off subscription users.
If the subscriptions are unprofitable, then just communicate honestly, raise the price or lower limits for new subscribers transparently, and grandfather in existing users. That's what GLM coding plan is doing and it works fine for them. Don't ruin your reputation with opaque messaging and hidden changes. Lol
> If the subscriptions are unprofitable, then just communicate honestly, raise the price or lower limits for new subscribers transparently, and grandfather in existing users.
This. Why do so many companies fail to get this? Anthropic's user base, in particular, is intelligent enough to understand their constraints.
It's possible they don't know the actual costs. The one-time costs like hardware and training foundation models is huge. There's the ongoing costs like the PhD dudes they hire. There's the data they buy and decide not to use. There's the various offers under one payment plan - limited artifact hosting, cowork, image upload, Claude Code, Code tab on Claude. What about feature parity between the site and app? Who's working on all these?
tldr it seems really complex and by the time they've counted it they probably hired 40 new people for an unannounced feature.
I mean, if you look at the Claude subreddits, the general consensus is that Anthropic and OpenAI are money hungry corporate devils that are here to enslave all of us, and everyone should get unlimited everything on Max x20.
I think you may be overestimating the willingness of people to understand Anthropic’s concerns.
Reddit is a very small subsection of the Internet consisting mainly of basement-dweller radical leftist they/thems. We should not be taking them as a representative sample of the average Anthropic user.
MS paused Copilot subscriptions because they don't have enough capacity. Anthropic is trying to confuse new users and literally don't want 20$/mo because they don't have enough capacity. Seems like there's a trend here. A lot of people in scaling threads were saying that capacity projections and DC buildouts were "fantasy" a few years ago. Not so much anymore...
big fan of A/B tests that dehumanize the consumer into some kind of money making lab rat funnel whose only purpose is to be experimented on how you can extract more money out of it
peak siliconbromaxxing
Stage 2 of enshittification. A necessary prerequisite to full enshittification is lock-in, so be on the lookout for it!
While I feel the same way, this is nothing new at all. Basically every company does this and it's a totally normal way to test new profit models. Has been done for decades. People acting surprised here really need to get on with reality.
But they have red ethical redlines bs
What does it mean that they’re running a test? If you’re one of the unlucky 2% you need to pay more?
Usually A/B testing is just on the surface, and when you actually subscribe you get the "better" terms of the possible options.
Like, they're just advertising different terms to test how many people would still click on it and very likely start the subscription process, but after they click they go back to the usual terms. Changing the whole payment flow, account models and permissions in their backend just for a quick test is usually too much work.
But yes, basically, if you're B and not A, and B has objectively worse terms than A, then you're just unlucky. But this is the essence of A/B tests. They are done by basically every company everytime, because it's the most straightforward and simple way to test new terms or designs.
If it’s just a “test,” why did they update the documentation?
Actual lies - the documentation was changed.
I don't think I've ever been on such a rollercoaster with a company's reputation in the developer space. I started in January on the $20 plan, essentially my first agentic AI programming. I quickly started hitting limits developing several apps at the same time. I went up to the $200 plan after seeing the value.
After seeing my own issues with 4.6 and the mega-post on Github about declining metrics in a decent dataset of claude chats by Stella Laurenzo at AMD (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796), I downgraded to the $100 plan. Hallucinations. Laziness. Lack of thinking. The responses on those mega-threads from Anthropic rubbed me the wrong way in a "you're holding it wrong" kinda way.
In the past week, I downgraded back to the $20 plan because the Codex $20 plan on 5.4 was working so well for me.
Then throw in other oddball events like the source code leak, and the super positive Anthropic events like their interactions with the current administration. It's a wild ride.
I can't understand removing Claude Code from $20. I'm interested to see whether this is confirmed or not.
I'm a career engineer and I went from being one of their most outspoken proponents (at least within my circle) and now.... I'm not.
Same loved them, told my team about them, got them to switch off of cursor, now I'm telling them to swap to Codex.
Anthropic really pissed me off with their harness crap. They're well within their rights but their communication over it was enough to get me to swap. I don't need extra hurdles when there's a perfectly valid alternative right there. They don't have the advantage they think they do.
I think we are inevitably heading to using the cheap Chinese models like Kimi, GLM, and Minimax for the bulk of engineering tasks. Within 3-6 months they will be at Opus 4.6 level.
This was literally my task today, to try out Qwen 9B locally on my, albeit a bit memory-constrained at 18GB, macbook with pi or opencode. Before reading this update.
Minimax coding plan is $10 a month for roughly 3x the $20 Claude Pro CLI usage allowed. That would be good place to start. 200k context though.
MiniMax has its own issues. Server overloads, API errors, and failure to adhere to even the system prompt. It can happily work for hours and get no job done.
Just like me :)
Please report back, would be very interested in your findings.
I ran OpenCode + GLM-5.1 for three weeks during my vacation. It’s okay. It thinks a lot more to get to a similar result as Claude. So it’s slower. It’s congested during peak hours. It has quirks as the context gets close to full.
But if you’re stuck with no better model, it’s better than local models and no models.
I have to say, OpenCode’s OpenUI has taught me what modern TUIs can be like. Claude’s TUI feels more like it’s been grown than designed. I’m playing around with TUI widgets trying to recreate and improve that experience
To be clear, was OpenCode a better in your opinion compared to ClaudeCode?
> I have to say, OpenCode’s OpenUI has taught me what modern TUIs can be like. Claude’s TUI feels more like it’s been grown than designed.
Claude's TUI is not a TUI. It's the most WTF thing ever: the TUI is actually a GUI. A headless browser shipped the TUI that, in real-time, renders the entire screen, scrolls to the bottom, and converts that to text mode. There are several serious issues and I'll mention two that do utterly piss me off...
1. Insane "jumping" around where the text "scrolls back" then scrolls back down to your prompt: at this point, seen the crazy hack that TUI is, if you tell me the text jumping around in the TUI is because they're simulating mouse clicks on the scrollbar I would't be surprised. If I'm not mistaken we've seen people "fixing" this by patching other programs (tmux ?).
2. What you see in the TUI is not the output of the model. That is, to me, the most insane of it all. They're literally changing characters between their headlessly rendered GUI and the TUI.
> Claude’s TUI feels more like it’s been grown than designed.
"grown" or "hacked" are way too nice words for the monstrosity that Claude's TUI is.
Codex is described as a: "Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal". It's 95%+ Rust code. I wonder if the "lightweight" is a stab at the monstrosity that Claude's TUI is.
For what it's worth: here's my experience in the first 10 minutes of using Qwen locally to write some code. https://github.com/robertkarl/local-qwen-first-10-minutes it includes some token generation numbers and steps to repro.
how was it? I'm doing this today
I will report back... but I have to recommend this comment on a post about Qwen 3.6 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47843466 by daemonologist
it goes into detail about llama-server args; quants to try; and layer/kv cache splits. I plan to try the techniques there.
Kimi K3 in July-September is the big one.
Kimi 2.6 works roughly like Opus 4.6, when it used to work. Depending on the task, a bit better or a bit worse. And it's MUCH cheaper.
Anthropic will kick and scream as those are often distilled from their latest models and is cutting into their margin. Though it is not like their hands are clean neither, it is just a different type of stealing, an approved one :-)
How challenging are these to setup locally and have them running?
Getting them running is easy (check out LMstudio or ask one for some recommendations). The real question is whether you have the hardware to make them run fast enough to be useful.
The min req is probably crazy I assume but I'll take a peek :)
One thing I enjoy about Cursor and Codex mac apps is the embedded preview window. I know it's not as hardcore as the terminal/tmux but it's hella convenient. But Cursor bugs me with the opacity around what model I'm using. It seems deliberately to be routing requests based on its perceived complexity. What draws you to codex vs cursor?
LLM monsters are deeply unprofitable, going by the industry hearsay (which is the only thing we have, given ultra secrecy of the LLM corporations). The only two LLM companies which disclosed their finances without lies, were two Chinese corporations and they, unsurprisingly, were deeply in red.
Remember the old saying about boiling a frog? LLM corporations need to make most of their users pay hundreds per month, asap. This is Anthropic increasing temperature regulator under the pot just a tiny little bit. Not the first and not the last time.
I assume the Chinese corporations can operate in the red forever and be subsidized by the Chinese government.
That's true of any company in any country. If you can convince the government that your company is sufficiently important, you can get subsidized.
Their price point goal is a SWE salary.
I think removing Claude Code from the $20 tier is a terrible idea, I never would've gone from nothing right into the $100/200 tier. The $20 plan let me get my feet wet and see how good it could be, and in less than a week I was on the $100 plan.
I think they need to at least have a 1 month introductory rate for the max plan at $20, or devs that decide to try out agentic coding just won't go to Anthropic.
That leads to downstream impacts, like when a company is deciding which AI coding tools to provide and the feedback management hears everyone is already used to (e.x.) Codex, then Anthropic starts losing the enterprise side of things.
They're not losing anything. They have much more demand than they could ever fulfill to care anymore about promotional or subsidized user groups.
Until magically all their demand vaporizes.
I suspect a lot of people are like me. They got into this at the $20/month level individually to check things out. I'm not stressing things out, so I haven't moved up, but the moment I bump into a limit, I'll pull the trigger by default. Until then, I'm the sleeping dog, and you should let me lie.
Well, Anthropic decided to kick me. Now, I'm investing the time to figure out how to use the "open" and "Chinese" models assuming that Anthropic is about to screw me. Once I switch, Anthropic is going to have to demonstrate significant improvements over what I'm now using to get me to even consider them again.
I don't think they need the $20/month users when there are some who use over $1000 in tokens per day.
I agree. Why would they not keep the $20 plan as a gateway drug?
Matches my experience very well. All the goodwill earned from taking a stand against the DoD seemingly forgotten in a month. Coincidentally, I canceled my pro subscription and got set up with OpenCode and OpenRouter last night.
Got any good pointers to documentation for making the transition? I'd like to pull the trigger for OpenCode and OpenRouter as well.
> I can't understand removing Claude Code from $20
Not according to their webpage: "Claude Code is included in your Pro plan. Perfect for short coding sprints in small codebases with access to both Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.7." [1]
[1]: https://claude.com/product/claude-code
There are clear contradictions across their marketing site. As others have pointed out, it's being removed from some help articles and the pricing chart now shows it revoked. Confusing signals, but they seem to be changing all pages in this direction and haven't updated that one yet.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47854478
what happened to agentic superintelligence based development?
This is superintelligence. The mixed signals are tested to increase their revenues. Superintelligent AIs wouldn't be honest.
> I quickly started hitting limits developing several apps at the same time
> I'm a career engineer
I'm trying really hard here to be nice, but what the hell are you doing? Are you vibe coding multiple apps in parallel and calling it engineering?
Is it like those people who eat 2-3x the amount of meat to ensure they offset the positive impact 1-2 vegans are having? :D
> I can't understand removing Claude Code from $20. I'm interested to see whether this is confirmed or not.
Anthropic bleeds money per user. No matter if it's the $20 or $200 plan, every Claude Code user is unprofitable.
The only way to not bleed money is to eventually move everyone to API pricing. Hiring a personal senior engineer will likely be cheaper.
I had a similar ride, but disagree with your conclusion. Opus 4.7 is so incredibly powerful from my experience, that nothing else really matters and I think at Anthropic they know it. People will pay a lot for access to this model.
>Opus 4.7 is so incredibly powerful from my experience,
I'm not challenging your opinion, but this is an outlier in the general current public opinion about it.
This is one of the most civil disagreements I've ever seen on the internet and I intend to start using this myself
Yea, I've seen a lot of whining online, because its more expensive, but from the interactions I've had I'd say, that it's well worth it. To me it feels like another step change, similar to when 4.5 was introduced. Definitely a different beast.
EDIT: it is also surprising to me that everyone seems to believe the people at Anthropic are simply incompetent and recklessly risking their good reputation, while very few consider the possible good reasons they might have for taking such drastic measures. And I don't think it's because of financial pressures in their case
Having too much usage and not enough GPUs is a form of financial pressure, no? since you want to replace your less profitable customers with more profitable customers
I can’t say I’ve used it extensively enough to draw a conclusion, but it did seem similar to GPT 5.4 in Codex.
When I threw it at a difficult issue in an iOS app, it like GPT came up with wrongly guessed explanations. It only found the issue after I had it instrument the app and add extensive logs. Usually GPT 5.4 is the same.
Only that with GPT 5.4 it’s at least included in my subscription, while sending 3-4 messages to Opus 4.7 for this blew through my $20 plan limits and consumed $10 of extra usage on top. At that point I can’t help but bring up how much more expensive it is.
> Only that with GPT 5.4 it’s at least included in my subscription, while sending 3-4 messages to Opus 4.7 for this blew through my $20 plan limits and consumed $10 of extra usage on top. At that point I can’t help but bring up how much more expensive it is.
Rest assured OpenAI won’t want to leave that kind of money on the table…
There’s also still Google with their TPUs, xAI has some large models in the works, not to mention China.
With that much competition and ongoing improvements, I don’t have such a pessimistic view on future usage limits and cost.
I personally prefer 4.7 to 4.6 or previous model.
I've had completely the opposite experience. I've asked for it to research things and it's just told me to "paste xyz into google". Just now I revisited a chat that's 5 days old and asked it to check again (because what I was looking for might have changed), and it said "no".
It's funny how experiences can be so different. I wonder if this comes down to context. My interactions so far were fairly high-level and in some cases it having a strong opinion was actually super beneficial to the outcome. To me it seemed opinionated, but in a very good way. I can see how this could backfire though and have heard similar reports.
Curious to know what plan you're on? I was on the max 5x plan, but downgraded to pro a few days before the opus 4.7 release.
I'm on max 5x
Opus 4.7 may be incredible but for how long? And they may have Mythos but I feel like they will put it out if pressed too much by their competitors. And again for how long will they keep the advantage?
At the speed everything is advancing I don’t think it’s such an advantage. They all catch each other up pretty fast. That’s why I prefer to pay Cursors and have access to all of them instead of being lock to a single one (even if that means to lose some discounted credits). If they opened Mythos today at a good price that would be something but that’s not the case and it won’t happen.
Incredible, powerful, but I couldn't believe how fast I hit the limits compared to how it was with Opus 4.6. They removed Opus 4.6 completely from CC. I would prefer it with the previous limits.
That's not how you keep your customers. None of these agents have a moat, I moved away from Cursor when they started doing what Anthropic is doing now, and never went back even when I was a paying customer since the start.
You can just use the model parameter to bring it back
they need the devs on board for that to matter, i can get whatever i want done with lesser models already. It is quite literally about just who is not gonna give me the shittiest experience, and at anthropic it sure seems they are determined to annoy everyone since they started gaining in popularity.
Most commercial websites, especially tech, run multiple A/B experiments in parallel to optimize signup funnels and tier conversions. Even so, there should always be a source of truth for people. We should have some way of verifying what we get for what we pay. There are laws about this as well.
This guy's casual and crass response is a sign of disrespect for customers. Unfortunately, that is pervasive in the industry. The bubbles these teams work in are corrosive to empathy and real world impact.
I think there is more here: Anthropic's whole market positioning is based on trust. It's literally their reason for being.
The Claude constitution has a major section about not being deceptive. Now this is GTM, not the model, but there is clearly a coherence problem here... and if anyone should realize the important of their market positioning it's GTM.
Agreed that it’s 100% marketing. In some ways Anthropic is more of a for-profit corporation than OpenAI which is at least partially owned by a non-profit.
I can't find an announcement yet, however the pricing page now shows it's not included, and various support articles have removed any mention of the the Pro plan including access to claude code.
See [1] and [2] for an example of a support article that's had claude code removed as a Pro feature.
I guess this is the beginning of the end for subsidised model access, at least from Anthropic.
[1] https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8325606-what-is-the-p... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20260420065828/https://support.c...
It’s now being explicitly shown as unavailable on the pro plan, scroll down to the comparison matrix.
And this page as well, showing how to use Claude Code on the Max plan: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/11145838-using-claude...
Claude Code is a freely downloadable CLI Agent. Why would they not let you use that anymore?
Because 'claude -p' is a backdoor for any third party client to use subsidized token pricing, and they've flipped course again to decide they do want the OpenClaw type users as long as they're on the $100 plan.
> Because 'claude -p' is a backdoor for any third party client to use subsidized token pricing
Wasn't this obvious from day 1 though? Can't see how anyone could've missed that.
It was obvious, which is why their earlier decision to attempt to restrict 3p access was hugely unpopular. They're now trying to walk that back but on the condition that those users need to be on the higher plan.
Now they're hurting their popularity with those who actually don't mind using Claude Code. I've been quietly swallowing a lot of performance degradation over the past few weeks as I get the resource crunch, but I'm definitely not going back to copy-pasting between browser and editor. And I have no intention of upgrading to Max or doing per token usage.
It seems they were losing money on pro subscriptions with code so if people stop using them it's actually ok for them.
They have now moved to be enterprise providers and don't need the cheap pro users as loss leaders anymore.
The question isn't whether anyone could have missed it, but whether Claude Code has release gates that allow people to require that obvious problems should be resolved. From their release velocity it's pretty clear that they do not.
You have to login and authorize it? It costs money to process tokens.
Because including it in a plan results in un-metered usage?
My usage of Claude Code in the pro plan is definitely metered. Every couple hours I have to wait an hour or two and the last few weeks I've hit my weekly limit on Wednesday.
5 minutes ago, I was seeing the old version of the page in which Claude Pro included Claude Code. I refreshed and now see that it does not.
This is a risky move. I might have paid $20/month for my personal projects but the Max subscription is a bit steep.
Now I'm going to learn more about local models. I don't need to be as good as a frontier model. Good enough and free from all this drama is a win for me
Same, I'm currently unemployed and the $20 help me to initiate many small projects. The recent taxing in the token made me start testing local models on my machine. Tho, Claude works better for the front end part imo.
If you are looking at open models, check out Pi, as its very extensible and comes with a sane default. Maybe even roll your own.
Most harnesses (claude, codex, opencode etc.) assume that you use a cloud model. There’s no sense of optimization or finer control.
I've been running pi.dev + codex (GPT-5.4) for a long time for my workhorse stuff.
Actually tried caveman mode yesterday and it made everything SO MUCH BETTER. GPT-5.4 has a habit of being extremely verbose to a ridiculous degree, it's like it's writing a report for a CTO or something and padding everything as much as possible to sound smart.
With caveman it just gives me lists of stuff in a compact format. Perfect.
"free of this drama" and free is great option for companies, of course most use API billing but let's not forget that there are places that budget is limited and being good enough is just perfect.
the cursor 20$ a month plan has been working great for me. You can use most models, and unlimited use of composer 2, which is surprisingly good
It's a volatile space.
Cursor was just acquired by SpaceX, so let's see what happens.
Wait what
Front page right now.
With GLM and Kimi getting better and better, with both still providing low-cost coding plans with higher quotas, and with how trivial it is to switch to them even within Claude CLI, I'm not sure what makes Anthropic think their users would rather pay 5x than switch to the competition.
Never mind GLM and Kimi, even GPT 5.4 offers a great plan for $20/mo. Even if it gets increased rate limits after May, it's still quite likely that casual users won't be hitting them on a regular basis.
openai is too toxic for many
I signed up for a 3 month plan with Z.ai so I could try out GLM-5.1. That was a few weeks ago when it was still $27 for 3 months, now it's $48 for 3 months. I hit limits at least as much as I do with Claude. I hit a weekly limit at one point and it said I wasn't going be able to get access again for 6 days so I must've somehow hit their weekly limit on day one of the week. And that after several timeouts.
The GLM coding plan price increased dramatically
It is left unsaid, but throughput is also terrible.
Why is management at Anthropic trying so hard to ruin their reputation with developers? I missed the OpenClaw hype but it was something that kept me excited about my yearly subscription.
It makes no sense to do one of the higher tier plans unless they are directly generating you money.
They care about developers from companies that are on their team/enterprise plans or using bedrock.
Individual users barely matter. That's probably also the same group that decides to switch to Codex/Kimi/[whatever the hottest agent on any given day] on a whim, which Anthropic doesn't necessarily want to do business with.
feel like its beyond optimistic on their part, just starting to hear their name be blended with companies desires on job listings, and they are destroying the goodwill of the devs who surely are the main reason their name has landed there. They aren't dug in like a microsoft, maybe they get some staying power for nocode people who feel trapped, but im done with their nonsense already and won't recommend them anywhere. Other stuff is good enough already to match.
> Individual users barely matter.
Individuals are the ones that push for new tools at work though.
A fraction of them do. Many just use whatever the employer provides to get their job done. HN users only represent a small sample of the overall software developers which is nowhere nearly enthusiastic about new things.
Source: what I witnessed at my company
In the end, companies are made of individuals. In my previous company, I'm one of the individual who advocate for Claude Code adoption. Amongst my circle too, most who have the authority to make an impact on the AI direction. Safe to say I no longer suggest Anthropic to anyone anymore.
they don't care about their reputation with devs, they care about their reputation with people that can write them big fat checks
At my company, devs were the ones pushing for the Claude subscription. Left to management, we would have only had GitHub Copilot – we already have an existing relationship with them and the tool is good enough.
If Anthropic is intent on losing the goodwill of the devs, they might not be happy with the consequences. Their product is quite commoditized at this point – the latest GPT, Gemini or GLM is just as good for most enterprise tasks.
I suspect their ICP is changing from developers to enterprise decision makers, completely different personas
Where I work. Medium size, base in Europe company. It is paying over 1800 per dev in AI tools. Home users stand no chance.
They got contracts from Enterprises now
Also note that they are letting OpenClaw be used again with `claude -p`, so a partial reversal
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47853799 for the curious
And I thought MS was confused one on how to do pricing and business decisions.
Last I saw they have 21 products or services named Copilot. I think they still win the confusion prize.
We should have "The Copilot Award goes to..." Every year for the most confusing product name/lineup
I love it. It’ll be doubly funny when the Xbox marketing team wins the Copilot Confusion Award.
Makes sense.
It is over for the little guy - home enthusiasts and vibe coders. Too many of them saturating resources for Max users.
IF you cannot afford few hundred dollars subscription go out and breathe fresh air. But if you can, watch where the ball is rolling - few thousand dollars subscriptions and even less programmers.
Hear HN tell of it, Claude pays for itself 3× over.
Something tells me congitively it's making us misjudge how productive it's making us.
It's clearly massively increasing output, but did the market already soak up all that productivity and now it's not compensated?
If your salary is 50k. And Claude makes you 2x as productive, why aren't you earning 100k?
Why is it anyone can't afford $200/mo if it's truely increasing worker productivity?
There seems to be a paradox here.
Personally I switched to Z.ai and GLM quite some time ago. I've not noticed any decrease in quality or quantity of my work.
Agree about psychological impact outpacing likely actual impact, but that’s a relatively temporary phenomena as we are all adapting to the new way things work.
Productivity wise employment is far more than code production productivity in a vacuum, and productivity gains are rarely captured by employees (see famous chart on worker productivity where that correlation changed around 1970). I wouldn’t expect to see much in the next 1-2 years besides noticing effective teams increasing velocity of features.
I think people in forums like complaining about things and aren’t representative of the broader set of people who are just using the tools, so no real paradox. For vast majority of tech jobs, $200/mo is still an absolute steal in terms of what these tools offer. Only the dullest of companies would not realize this.
Fwiw in the 80s-90s computers also didn’t really register in productivity metrics. Qualitative changes occur long before accurate measurement catches up.
Because most people work for someone else and don't decide their own salaries. It's not doubling productivity, but even a 10-20% boost to productivity for a team of engineers means that, as a business, even $1k per month per seat is perfectly acceptable. For consumers and hobbyists that basically kills access.
yeah the more people who use it means less competitive edge you have. Benefits get devalued. And you're back to square one.
Truly makes no sense. I pay for the $200/month plan and end up using about $3k/month worth of API costs. I imagine that the only reason they haven’t cut me off is because my habits serve as good training data for them.
Guess they’ve decided to move in the direction of allocating compute primarily to power users and enterprise.
But power users are not a sticky customer base. I just bought the ChatGPT Pro plan and would immediately switch over if the model performance is better and/or I get more compute.
Or the API is overpriced. The concept of charging per tokens does not map well to the actual costs an AI company has.
Vscode agent mode and github copilot can use Claude models and has feature parity with the .md customization for agents prompts skills etc.
Not too expensive
They slapped a 7.5x “promotional” multiplier on Opus 4.7 and they are removing Opus 4.6 in short order.
I heard they disabled signups for non-business accounts too.
Best forget about using Claude Opus models in Copilot.
Odd, everyone was insisting this would "democratize" programming though.
Guess it democratizes it if you have money, huh?
The age of AI seems to forget some lessons from Google (and history in general).
- Rapid changes hurts the trust of your brand and product. In Google case, using a new service product became something you’ll think multiple times as you are more likely to axe it than rivals or specialized equivalents.
- While models currently has no clear winner. Anthropic’s core product is coding. But just as Skype, IE, Netscape their can always be another game changer you cannot count.
- The Pro plan is already limited for true agentinc workflows. The limits now are so bad that a business that relies on it would need bigger plans.
- Anthropic is already in a delicate situation where many devs are frustrated. Dropping or crippling the use even more just means this sector (which I can only assume is a big chunk) would switch to competitors tool that already try to compete.
- Local models, whether as Google sees it “edge” or even further would also take bigger part in the future.
“The limits now are so bad that a business that relies on it would need bigger plans.”
Isn’t this the goal to some extent? They’ll probably have the standard “light” usage plan for weekend warriors or normal folk looking to play around. Companies that mandate usage and provide the subscription for hundreds of employees will have to cough it up, and will have no problem doing so if they want to compete with the others (or so the hype would allude to).
So their minimum workable offer for devs just went from $17 to $100. Also, I don't see how the Pro subscription is relevant anymore. Nobody pays $17 a month just to chat. I just unsubscribed. :) Time to try Chat GPT Codex, which even works with the free subscription (don't expect crazy token allowance, of course).
> I just unsubscribed. :)
Existing subscriptions are not impacted according to Tweets from their team. It’s apparently an A/B test they’re rolling out.
If you actually wanted the $20/month Claude Code plan you may have just shot yourself in the foot.
I think that Anthropic has capacity problems. They went all in on acquiring new customers but now they don't have enough capacity to both serve users and train new models, so they are trying to limit user usages.
It is pure speculation of course, but I don't have any other explanations on the stuff they are pulling in the last 2 months.
Yeah, this is pretty clearly what's going on, but I wish they'd be more transparent about it. Funneling compute to Mythos and Design, while auto-setting effort levels lower and removing user control of extended thinking. I don't think the need to shuffle compute around is unique to Anthropic, though. I suspect it's part of why Sora got killed. And everyone's having uptime issues. Are we reaching the limits of the available compute?
Either they baited people with code and flexible usage limits until march and this was planned or they realized that they did too good of an product and it costs them too much.
One thing is clear, Anthropics communications and leadership is horrible. You don't launch or remove features like this. How this is communicated and handle is something like mom+pop shop would do.
If true, very strange change when Codex (at both 20 & 100) is a much, much better deal for a model much better at most coding tasks, with way more usage even with the /fast mode enabled. Is losing most non-enterprise customers the right move for them?
Equally, will offering a presumably unprofitably large quota of Codex tokens at $20 to retain non-enterprise customers turn out to be the right move for OpenAI?
Would not be surprised to see OpenAI follow suit.
Or perhaps OpenAI's LLMs are just so more compute efficient that they can actually offer that sustainably...
Feels to me it's a battle between who has the most compute. OpenAI does not seem to be struggling with their x2 usage on the new 100 Plan, which is very close to unlimited usage with the best performing model on the highest reasoning setting. Not mentioning the resets every 1 million customers, or the other generous usage multipliers last months. Meanwhile Anthropic seems to be desperately trying to cut down on inference with their changes to reasoning effort and more lately, so they might be focusing on what they consider to be more valuable customers for their long-term strategy. The 20 plan with Opus had gotten so bad on CC they might've just pulled the plug to stop people from complaining about usage limits. If OpenAI can burn money longer and capture the market from the bottom, I think they'd win in the long run.
Seems we were both right: https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2046740759056162816
"Codex will continue to be available both in the FREE and PLUS ($20) plans. We have the compute and efficient models to support it."
Both the compute, and the efficient models.
What does " Not mentioning the resets every 1 million customers" mean?
>To celebrate 3 million weekly codex users, we are resetting usage limits.
>We will do this every million users up to 10 million.
>Happy building!
https://x.com/sama/status/2041658719839383945
Last reset today, after the 4 million users milestone.
That's exactly what I fear- that Mythos/Glasswing has made anthropic confident that they can survive by only serving that type of customer. Would be sad to see.
It cracks me up when I hear takes like - 'if you're not using more than $20, the product isn't for you because you're not a real user.' If you use CC as an assistant rather than a replacement for your own thinking, follow SDD, and use the tool thoughtfully, you deliver a lot more and you don't need the 5x or 20x limit. It's a different story if you're vibe coding, but then we're not really talking about AI-assisted work - your three prompts barely count as doing any work. I've been on Pro for 2 years, but if this is how things are going, I'll look for an alternative. Luckily, there's plenty to choose from.
if this is accurate, and not some "oops we made a vibe-coding mistake updating our website" I am going to hit the "cancel subscription" button so hard that my desk will break in half.
I have an unlimited-usage API billing plan through my dayjob, but for obvious reasons they don't allow piggybacking personal usage onto that. so I paid for the $20/mo personal plan as an easy and relatively cheap method of professional development / keeping my skills current. I don't particularly mind paying $20/mo, but I'm absolutely not paying $100/mo.
also, part of the reason I didn't mind paying for the personal subscription is that I liked having consistency between the tools I use for my dayjob and the ones I use for side projects. if that goes away, then I might as well switch away from Claude usage at work as well. I very much doubt Anthropic's revenue predictions for this change are taking things like that into account.
making a change like this without an announcement, just sneaky updates to product pages, is also an absolutely unforgivable thing to do, in terms of me trusting them as a company.
Seems like a pretty bad business move if it's really what they're doing. They should want devs using the product on a cheaper subscription to see the value with profitable limits on usage.
I think the only reason to do this would be that they just can't scale up to service the volume they have and need to cut down significantly on the total number of users. Seems also like a rough business proposition. Most of the pro plan users would probably migrate to a competitor at a similar price point (I know I will).
The only other possibility would be if they are losing too much money on the compute power and just can't offer it at that price anymore. But then upgrading the plan gives you more compute per dollar, so maybe they're just banking on people not actually using all of what they pay for?
I had previously thought that the inference cost of using a trained model was relatively low and that most costs went into training new models, but maybe that is less true with the more powerful newer models.
If it costs a ton more to serve Opus vs serving something like Kimi or Qwen, then I think most people just won't use the more expensive version for most things.
Claude Code page still shows it included with Pro/Max. https://claude.com/product/claude-code
Claude Design was iterating on the plans page and decided to remove clutter and their review bot LGTM’d it as “minor copy change human review not required” and auto-merged it.
Shits confusing... I'm using the Claude code vscode plugin, yet my account page says I'm not using Claude code... so am I, or aren't I?
It's still included here
https://claude.com/product/claude-code
Maybe they're putting out a weather balloon to test sentiment. That way when they're caught they can just point at the other page to say it was just a mistake.
Confirmed, 2% of users don't see Claude code included https://x.com/i/status/2046724659039932830
It is perhaps better for Anthropic to do a price hike e.g. $25 or $30 for Pro with a clear/honest messaging e.g. "Running costs are high, price hike is unavoidable" than resorting to these tactics.
These shenanigans are earning them no respect. The market is already annoyed on model serving QA issues, and now (recently) Opus limits. They don't want to lose to OpenAI - understandable - but these shortcuts won't earn them anything either.
Well, if there's one way to show that you're not profitable on inference, this would be it.
I’ve got nearly 10 months left on my yearly subscription, I wonder what that means for my access.
Same. I hope we're grandfathered in. Otherwise current pro subscribers who signed up with the understanding that they could use it in Claude Code are going to be extremely pissed and go off and sign up for alternatives (or start running local models instead). I mean, I guess they could say too bad, they got your money, but this would destroy their brand among people who are currently their most loyal users.
I don't want to leave, but I'm ready. The entire reason I got a Pro sub was so I can use Claude Code instead of going between browser and editor.
Or also sue in fact or demand refunds.
Same. I'm not a dev but I use CC a few times in a week and it's been a great help.
However, my company paid for my annual subscription, so maybe I'll ask our lawyers for advice - the only reason they paid for this was my access to CC and with my use the next tier wouldn't make sense, AND no one will expect Anthropic to not nerf it too.
Before you have lawyers look at it, wait until you’re actually impacted. Nothing has been removed from existing subscriptions yet and their employees Tweeted that existing subscriptions aren’t impacted.
Thank for the insightful comment and indeed I wouldn't without the evidence form myself and other people on the same subscription (all non-devs so we use it rarely but it feels like a superpower).
If it was removed from the pro plan, then the max plan should list claude code as one of its extras, and it doesn't.
I would not jump to conclusions yet.
In the “Compare features across plans” section, Claude Code appears to be available only on the Max plan.
You're right. I didn't scroll down. I wonder why they didn't update the top cards that everyone see. They do it for claude Cowork but not claude code? That is not very transparent. How does it make sense? It's not like claude code is too niche to be included, it's in the main app and I know multiple non-techie people who use it.
If you scroll down, you can clearly see that the Pro plan has an "x" on Claude Code now.
Next they’ll slowly reduce how much CC usage you can get out of the $100 Max plan, then introduce a new $300 “Max Plus” plan with “40x” usage. “You asked, and we listened: Introducing Max Plus, our biggest plan yet, designed for those…” blah blah
Previous page, when Claude Code was included:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260421141017/https://claude.co...
Edit: fixed the url thanks to scq
> The Wayback Machine has not archived that URL.
Might have been taken down?
There seems to be some JS on the page that messes with the URL. Try this one: https://web.archive.org/web/20260421141017/https://claude.co...
I can't believe they are yanking tool access instead of just reducing the token quota or simply pulling Opus 4.7 access. To be fair even that would be poorly received, but at least people would have a choice of working within limits. Claude Code is their real winner, and a great ramp for newcomers coming into AI assisted development. They are playing straight into OpenAIs hands.
Just tried Claude Code on my Pro plan. It worked. So no, it's not removed
I would assume users who have an existing subscription will be grandfathered in.
It would seem misleading to sell monthly, or even yearly, subscriptions under the guise Claude Code comes with the subscription, for it to only be yanked out underneath you. (Although depending who you ask, Anthropic have already done actions similar to this).
I was billed $220 on Mar 1 for the pro plan
If they rugpull Claude code from my already paid for annual subscription I’ll have to issue a chargeback
Anthropic is vibe running the company.
Anthropic clearly doesn't understand that customers see their brand as "Claude", Google's brand as "Gemini" and OpenAI's brand as "ChatGPT." They have so many plans and exclusions that they risk customer confusion. I was surprised when I was pay $200/month for Claude Code, finding it super helpful, and then I had to pay separately to get API access for an experiment. Why are so many parts of "Claude" separate from each other, especially on a $200/month subscription.
Anthropic better get this sorted out with a proper product manager and marketing or they risk customers jumping to easier to understand platforms that are good enough.
>or they risk customers jumping to easier to understand platforms that are good enough.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-30-billion-s...
I reckon they'll be fine. Not agreeing or disagreeing with you, but they have enough customers who won't leave.
That also was really opaque to me RE: API access. I initially thought at $200/month I could get whatever I needed. I eventually set up a OpenAI API with a few bucks to try what I wanted to.
This is exactly what happens with all agentic products in near future. Demand is way higher than supply right now. Also most programmers do not use agents yet so demand will grow even more. Building data centers is not easy and price of HW is skyrocketing.
Hey, I'm a pro, and I feel genuinely insulted. I could consider going back to Claude Desktop + MCP, but I'm getting tired of this telenovela, and will probably cancel my sub and take my business elsewhere.
This just made me gamble on a yearly subscription for Pro, hoping they will grandfather in existing customers..
Please report back if they send you a Dear John email.
We, as a society, need Open Source SOTA models and should be able to also train new models via distributed P2P network.
Otherwise companies will keep exploiting using their dominant position.
We were taught dictators are bad, monopolies are bad, but now allowing 2 companies control most of the software development
That seems not possible.
at the moment - yes.
but why not work towards it?
* elect politicians who will support this
* change laws to accommodate it - if corporations train data, on every usage they should pay higher taxes so they can't exploit the open data, but public ledger trained model is fine to use open data
* similar tech exists (bitcoin, torrent), needs some modifications
I predict this may get reversed as it would be a huge opening for glm, kimi, and qwen offerings. I'd switch instead of upgrading to Max
Do they have their own cli agents or just the api inference services?
Some do, I know of kimi code https://www.kimi.com/code
I don't think they do but you can always use OpenCode or Pi Agent.
very easy to configure claude code to route to GLM as well.
Moonshot AI has Kimi Code and their $20 per month plan had a lot more than Anthropic's (before 4.6 and the other changes to eat up your limit faster).
Time to do research.
This is a joke, right... right??
At least for me Claude Code is still working on my Pro plan. I don't know if that's because the change simply hasn't propagated all the way through their systems yet (the change is now up on the main Claude pricing page and on their support pages, but not on the Claude Code landing page yet), or if it's because existing plans are grandfathered in, or what.
In general Anthropic seems to be pretty bad at clearly communicating what is going on. I have both Claude Pro for Claude Code and ChatGPT Plus for Codex, and lately I've been reaching for Codex first more and more often... at least for the hobby stuff I'm using Claude/Codex on, they seem pretty much equivalent in terms of practical capability/usefulness.
How long until OpenAI remove Codex from their cheap plan?
Should we instead use a generic coding agent with a particular model and just pay per token?
pretty sure the codex cli itself is open source (and written in rust!) and can be used with any model.
They'll remove it.
Then some genius intern will say "if we offer it to the lowest level plans, the users will get hooked on how awesome it is!"
Then Anthropic will put it back.
Or they could just ask Claude if it is a good idea to remove.
Every person who signs up for a pro subscription on that advertising has cause to sue for being miss-sold the product.
Everyone that is upset about this should take note: you are not a (coding) customer at $20/mo. Their coding customers spend thousands per month (week!) on claude and it's growing faster than they can keep up with (source: I'm one of them, and I know many other like me. We're budgeting 10-20% of engineering salary spend on tokens). It sucks to no longer be able to code on the cheap anymore, but don't fool yourself into thinking you have any leverage here.
I agree about the leverage point, but it was definitely possible to be a coding customer at $20/mo before, especially with Sonnet.
My leverage is i’m canceling my plan. Openai gives me codex+chatgpt for my $20. I use my claude code sparingly, but I enjoyed it and it works great when I needed it. Access to it was a reason they got my money a few months ago and it’s been a shit show of reduction of services since.
They should allow existing Pro plan users to keep using Claude Code.
Cool, first remove OpenCode support so I have to use their shitty TUI, then remove that too. What a loss. Good thing GLM 5.1 is good enough
Practically speaking, the $20 plan is useless anyway given the limits and the way Claude Code consumes tokens with very little caching.
I don't see it mentioned in the Max plan there either.
This makes me less likely to choose Claude Code, as this feels unreliable... Who says they will not change a few months down the line again.
This makes sense given Anthropic’s recent downtime and resource constraints.
Opus 4.7 consumes tokens at a faster rate and folks were complaining that the Pro plan included too few credits for real work.
And Anthropic now allows `claude -p` (which invokes Claude code) for 3rd party agents like OpenClaw, which consume far more tokens by running autonomously, 24/7.
only if it actually improves the downtime, people were expecting the same when they revoked openclaw access but that didn't change anything
I know this would add to pricing/model/plan confusion but what about Claude Pro plan can only access Sonnet and Haiku Models via Claude Code?
Opus is fairly useless on Pro given the rate limits anyways.
Can't you use Claude Code without a Claude model? E.g. can't you use this with a local model?
Folks are assuming that only the $100 plan will include Claude Code access. I think a more likely scenario is that everyone will be able to use CC.
It works for me at the moment on the pro plan. Is there a grace period until they enforce the new pricing?
I would hope that we'd be grandfathered in since we signed up with the expectation that we could use it in Claude Code. I could see where maybe that might lead to problems down the line where they do some kind of update and "forget" that people who signed up before a certain date were supposed to be grandfathered in.
Will definitely discontinue my Pro subscription if it's true. Claude Code is the only reason I signed up in the first place.
Anthropic reverts the “prosumer” AB testing, but damage is done.
They will lose the individual subscribers for sure. My day job can pay up to the roof for ai access in this climate but personally I cannot.
Believe me, plenty of "day jobs" are already stretching to pay for $20/mo for their users.
Others in non-tech sectors are forced to use Copilot. Who knows what I would pay for a usable LLM out of my own pocket. Probably more than $200.
Curious how this will play out (if true) for folks who signed up for that annual plan - expecting Claude Code to be included.
That’s too bad, I just purchased a one year pro plan for my dad just for him to play around with CC when he retires next week.
How about team plan standard customer?($25) I suppose its only natural it would follow suit if not already
Does this mean that for enterprises using per-seat pricing, only the $100 premium seat gets access to claude code?
Enterprise doesn’t have premium. Just api usage.
Business accounts are like max 6x accounts.
Team plan shows “Claude code” in a main bullet point still. Which would indicate it is part of the team plan regardless if it has premium seats or not.
But it seems this is all in a state of flux.
And there’s the lovely asterisk at the bottom:
> Prices and plans are subject to change at Anthropic's discretion.
Chickens have come home to roost. Someone had to pay for the servers and the debt, and its us!!
Bubble stress test, stage 1.
I can't even sign up for Max (last tried yesterday), their credit card processor has issues.
Ahh couldn’t they vibe a solution to make CC cheaper?
I was working in my biggest project in the last 3 years and i dont got mutch money and they go there and cut claude code from pro like wtf so why am i even paying for pro
Funny, I just signed up for Pro a couple hours ago, to check how Claude Code works using this plan, instead of using my API keys.
I got rate limited after about 30mins of coding and was thinking, who the hell i going to work like this?
So they really seem to be running into extreme capacity issued now.
No particular opinion on this change, but generally pricing is a great way to separate dabblers from serious users. There isn’t a great deal of value in dabblers or what they produce, I imagine that training data isn’t worth much relative to the pro users. Similar pricing story with $100 yearly price for Apple developer accounts that people complain a lot about. The reality is if you’re serious about making something, these costs are pretty cheap.
The folks hurt most by this are serious people in developing countries and young people starting out. Occasionally a dabbler turns into a serious user but I imagine that’s far less likely than people wish it were.
The value to companies who make these changes is they don’t have low value users or low value contributions to worry about, which has its own not insignificant overhead. In the age of AI slop everywhere we’re likely to see a lot more attempts to separate the wheat from the chaff.
The dabbler/serious user distinction isn't the only framing here.
Assuming this limitation applies to team seats in the same way, at $20/mo, businesses could afford to have everybody on the plan. Plenty of folks write only a few hours of code per day—or even per week in their job. These are still professionals, not dabblers.
Is this confirmed?!
Anthropic should be increasing the value and services they offer not reducing it.
It’s the Apple model. Yes you pay a ton more. But my 2013 MacBook Pro 15 I got in college lasted 10 years and was still fine even when it was stolen. That’s what you pay for. You pay for a ton of built in apps and functionality and quality.
Arbitrarily removing things is customer and more importantantly good will hostile.
;) - use the Chinese models ;,>
Jesus Christ, it’s literally going to become too big of a risk to depend on Anthropic.
As someone who tries to manage usage for a small team they just added Claude Code to the Standard Team seat now they are removing it!?
Not to mention that they will ban your entire organization from a bot deciding you violated their TOS with no communication and no way to contact anyone to understand what happened.
If this is real we are switching to OpenAI or Gemini it is not worth all this non sense
I'm asking for a full refund of my plan via amex if this actually happens. Fuck them.
does anyone have recommendations on replacing CC with something else for around $20-30 / month?
It's going to be interesting seeing the AI companies gouge people who are incapable without it.
Some top tier PR yet again... does Claude run their PR team on its own?
They have till morning to clean up this giant PR mess. I think people will leave for codex
Vibe coded ui bug?
That sucks, I guess I'll cancel my Claude account. Not paying 100 dollars. That's crazy
Trying to chat with "fin" is like trying to argue with a bowl of congealed oatmeal.
Me: Why is your website saying Claude Code is not included in Claude Pro subscriptions?
"Fin", the slow, dopey AI agent: That’s confusing, but it usually comes down to what “Claude Code” means in that context. Claude Pro does include Claude Code (the Code tab in the desktop app, and Claude Code access for individuals).
What Pro does not include is API access via the Claude Console. Those are separate products: Pro is for chat, and the Console is for building apps with the API.
So if the website is saying “not included,” it’s likely referring to Console/API access, not the Claude Code feature itself.
Did that clear up the confusion?
Me: No. It clearly states on the pricing page that Claude Code is not included.
Fin: That’s frustrating, <NAME>. The key detail is that Claude Code is included in Claude Pro, but API access via the Claude Console is not.
So if the page you’re looking at says “Claude Code is not included,” it’s almost certainly referring to Console/API access (the developer platform), not the Claude Code feature itself.
If you tell me the exact URL or screenshot of the page that says that, I can confirm which “Code” it’s talking about.
Was that explanation helpful?
Me: https://claude.com/pricing
Fin: On https://claude.com/pricing, Pro does include Claude Code. It’s listed right there under Pro’s “Everything in Free, plus” bullets: “Includes Claude Code.” So if you’re seeing “not included” somewhere else on that page, it’s likely referring to something different than the Claude Code feature. The one thing Pro does not include is API access via the Claude Console (that’s a separate product).
Also, the Code tab in the desktop app requires a Pro (or Max/Team/Enterprise) subscription, and it may not show for everyone yet since it’s still rolling out.
Does that clear things up for you?
Me: there is clearly an "x" at this page. escalate to a human immediately.
and then the cycle continues. I'm cancelling my Anthropic subscription, sick of worrying about limits and getting banned and simply awful experience.
I'm very happy with GLM 5.1, MiniMax M2.7 and Kimi K2.5. My wallet is happy, too.
This is more ethical than what they've been doing, trying to keep those subscribers but limiting them to the point it's become unusable. But it's also kneecaping themselves because they'll miss out on any innovation and hype coming out of the hobbyist community.
Their chat bot claims that pro users still have access to Claude Code.
"You are absolutely right!"
No way
Annoying, signed up for a personal pro account a couple of weeks ago. No way I’m going to spend $200 just for a few personal projects.
For $20, it seems like a no-brainer to switch to Codex.
However, if you think you'll need the extra capacity of Max, it's $100, not $200.
no, most likely you will try codex and get more value (as I did)
Huh? I just don't understand why they're doing this. Feels like shooting themselves in the foot, given that Claude's individual subscribers are a large part of who is introducing all their enterprise customers to them. Plus removing access is never good for public perception.
I'm not going on max. I barely hit 20% of my weekly limits on pro, to hell with Anthropic if they drop this plan.
And of course you never want the first tier it's included on because you need actual usage, so in reality you need Max 20x - the price of which I can't even see on the pricing page
Wait. What is Anthropic without Claude? Serious question.
Feels like a very strong chance that this is related to trying to find a way to navigate letting OpenClaw users on. https://docs.openclaw.ai/providers/anthropic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47844269
The clusterfuck about the various pages not being all upgraded to reflect the same story...
I thought we now had advanced tools to which we could ask to do things like: "Remove all mention of Claude Code in the Pro, but not in the Pro Max plan".
But apparently the CGI-days called and asked the webmaster to manually edit .html files one by one?
People really have to internalize that these things are expensive to run, and that there isn't enough compute to go around, like actually for real for real, which is likely the source of this. My guess is its a temporary new sign up pause.
Related perhaps to GitHub pausing signups for Copilot? https://github.blog/changelog/2026-04-20-changes-to-github-c...
You know you can just code by typing and thinking, right? Like you don’t need to use AI if you’re a software engineer.
I know, crazy idea. When we told you they’re getting you hooked and would rug pull you called us permanent underclass or something.
Meh, $20 Codex is better at this moment anyway.
I just cancelled my plan, but still have access to Pro and Code apparently until my cycle would have renewed. Hopefully they get a clear signal from this, especially if more of us cancel with the intention to sign back up should they reverse this decision.
I’d be surprised if they’re running at less than 100% capacity after this. It’s just too useful to too many people for whom an $80/month increase is immaterial (I speculate)
“Let’s see how they react, and they will be ok and we will be rich.”
The enshitification intensifies.
They're trying to find every way to enshittify their partially unprofitable service. When they find a way that sticks, they'll go with it. This has become the preferred way of doing tech business in the US. Create a great thing, give it away for free, hook users in, try to squeeze them. In theory competition should limit this kind of behaviour, but for some reason they big companies all wait on another to start enshittification in unison. How this is legal still puzzles me but evidently that's how it goes.
Here's my hot take: Anthropic et al. are trying to make developing a subscription-only job, and they've done that by illegally pirating pretty much the whole Internet. If they were to go out of business tomorrow and serving models was to become a commoditized service like storage we'd be all better off. Sure, we would have less research on frontier models, but we don't need AGI, we need good local models, RAM and good open source / weight AI tools.
I posted this question two weeks ago: "What is your plan when the AI you have implemented throughout your company changes the results you've come to trust?" (https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/06/anthropic_claude_code...).
Since then, I had to add:
"or won't let you log in?": https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/44257
"or makes stuff up?": https://dwyer.co.za/static/claude-mixes-up-who-said-what-and...
"or when it's down?": https://status.claude.com/incidents/6jd2m42f8mld
"or when you get banned?": https://bannedbyanthropic.com/
"or installs spyware?": https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/anthropic-spyware/
And this is all exclusively about Anthropic. It's insane. On any other tech, there would be a consensus to wait until it's stable, but not AI - we go full throttle when it's AI.
Genuinely curious how people who have implemented this in serious companies are answering these questions, because my answer is to keep it the fuck out.
Saw this coming eventually. $20/month for autonomous agents running 24/7 was clearly not sustainable at API pricing. The part that's surprising is there's still no official announcement - just a quiet page edit.
The $20/mo plan never supported 24/7 autonomous agents. With Opus 4.5 and 4.6 I would hit resource limits after a reasonable amount of work, which corresponded to a variable amount of wall clock time.
This makes me think either they’re severely resource constrained and need to focus on “high value” customers, they’re bleeding money on inference, or their sales and marketing team is incompetent.
Regardless, this feels like a pretty big rug pull. Especially without a phase-out period and a real announcement. As someone using Claude Code on a personal hobby project to get a better feel for its capabilities, I’m not sure what to do now. I can’t justify the $100+/mo plans for a hobby project.
My choices are then:
Fun times.> running 24/7
This was never the case though. There's a per week and per 5 hour quota. If you exhaust either you have to wait for the reset. What they're doing makes no sense.
Choosing to do it quietly instead of letting everyone know is actually not that surprising.
And yet they're very aware that Hacker News, etc exists and so the awareness and backlash would be instant. It's like they want to get a lower rating from the community. Maybe that's their solution for the resource issue: make enough people mad so they abandon their subscriptions.
Wonder where this leaves folks who paid the annual rate? Here’s what Claude said:
https://claude.ai/share/1a4293bd-b2d4-41b7-a887-eb42b3ae8b6e
“ The standard answer here is no — Anthropic does not typically refund the unused portion of annual plans , and annual subscribers won’t see prorated refunds, retaining access for the full remaining period instead. That said, your situation is a bit different — you’re not just canceling, you’re canceling because a feature you paid for was removed. That’s worth contacting Anthropic support directly about. Their support team can check your refund eligibility , and this kind of material change to the plan is exactly the case where a support escalation could go differently than a standard cancellation. You can reach them through the in-app support messenger at support.claude.com or via the thumbs-down feedback button. I’d recommend explaining specifically that Claude Code was a factor in your annual plan purchase. ”
Just do a chargeback its an easy W. I dont see why you'd want to continue doing business with anthropic after a change to a 1 year contract out of cycle