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- Hacker News
- It really is the doordash/uber playbook all over again eh? Sell at a massive loss, gain userbase, then gradually boil the frog by adding fees, removing features, and increasing prices. Except instead of doing this a few years down the line, they're speedrunning the tighten-the-noose phase.
Unfortunately the competition is nipping at their heels so there's a good chance this blows up in their faces.
by parliament32 - “Unfortunately”?
Uh, that’s a good thing
by Aboutplants - How do we tell the doordash/uber playbook from the moviepass playbook? Because the latter would be awful to build your business on.by AlexandrB
- As far as I can tell, it seemed very clear that was the playbook for about a year now. Its been regularly assumed they're selling plans as a major loss-leader because people can "spend" thousands of dollars a months on a plan if they were charged at API rates. I think there's good evidence that even the API rates are sold at a loss.
I think its assumed in the LLM model business that the models themselves are not a good moat, the next model by another company is just as likely to be as good as the current model. So companies like Anthropic have to tighten the noose slowly to start recovering their costs. This appears to be one of those steps.
- There is competition. And there is no moat nor network effect. I don't think it'll blow up in their faces if they provide a product and service that people value which demonstratively they have. But it may not be so lucrative to them or their shareholders.by intrasight
- I think people are being too generous with these comparisons. Not defending Anthropic but at the same time they are releasing new features and adjusting cost at pretty record speed for a new industry. Uber/doordash were subsidizing cost for what felt like a decade. Anthropic and related companies are adjusting price within months.
To me the bigger takeaway is that these business are seeing massive volume in use and figuring out how to price the products accordingly.
by infecto - It was very clear from the beginning purely from how much it costs to train and run the inference.
Someone has to pay the 7 trillion (the current projections for the AI datacenter build up)
by doikor - I still think/hope/pray the future will be on-device models that don't need constant retraining. That will blow up the existing business model but I think a company could still make good money with a "majority local/remote for the really challenging stuff" model.
The problem is that today's AI companies have taken on so much funding that a reasonable, not crazy profit ratio isn't enough for them.
by afavour - > At Anthropic, we build AI to serve humanity’s long-term well-being.
If Anthropic actually cared about humans, they would have the best customer support (staffed by humans, for humans) and communications team (again, staffed by humans, for humans).
As both of these are actually on par with Silicon Valley standards (between medicore and atrociously bad), Anthropic cannot and should not be trusted with anything to do with AI, because whatever they do will not benefit humanity.
by jameskilton - How would you staff a support line for a product with a billion users?by adampunk
- Extremely cynical take, but they're probably being honest. They wanna serve humanity. But maybe they only consider a small part of the population to be relevant humans.
- > If Anthropic actually cared about humans, they would have the best customer support (staffed by humans, for humans)
I know Anthropic support is slow from firsthand experience, but it has to be pretty difficult to scale support 10-80x per year. And even more so when you have a long-tail of very low revenue usage in the form of $20/month subscriptions.
by alach11 - LLMs represent a big shift of power towards capital until such time as local ones are 'good enough'.by davidw
- Yes, this is the main point, employees will have less and less leverage (I'm even seeing AI doing interviews now, good luck). Soon we'll be explaining to an AI why we aren't as productive as two weeks ago.by adamors
- That's true. But keep in mind capital can be trivially used to influence policy so that local ones are eventually disallowed.by dormento
- Max x20 usage is so cheap, that it's pretty obviously subsidized. And the non-interactive usage is the easiest to explode. They could play games with "reasonable use" and whack a mole accounts that are obviously farming it, but their approach is ultimately more fair.
And I say this as somebody who just discovered agent orchestration and would absolutely love their limits to remain as they are.
- > Impacting devrel is just collateral damage, which is on par for a company which believes coding is going away any time now.
This makes sense.
by frangonf - Yeah, claude code is mostly unusable at this point. It's been in a constant decline for a good 1-2 months. It's more like a scam now.by ochronus
- What are the biggest problems you've seen? Is it mostly related to limits for the subscription plans?
Within my circles (mostly big enterprises), I see more and more of my friends using Claude, and spending money on it, so they must be getting some sort of value out of it. For my uses, I've also been successful with Claude Code, though someone else is paying for my tokens.
- I really wish Anthropic would consult some monetization experts. Their recent strategy has been all over the place and they are burning early goodwill.
- They asked Claude, what more can they do?!by Henchman21
- I don't think they are clueless, but rather, struggling. Being an AI provider is a money burner, and they probably don't have enough fuel for the fire anymore, so they are trying things to squeeze more $$$ and limit usage at the same time.by ochronus
- What's the subtext here? I don't live under a rock, but there have been so many Anthropic kerfuffles that I have lost track.by jadar
- by walthamstow
- Using -p (non-interactive mode) now uses API pricing, not subscription (so it's now more expensive). But if you have a subscription you get some free credits for it.
- by qaz_plm