30 points nsoonhui 2 hours ago 20 comments

nryoo 2 hours ago | parent

One of their three identical accounts had ~20% lower limits and the explanation was an "extremely tiny" A/B test. Makes the "5x" kind of a joke. I'd honestly take a slightly worse plan if it just published the actual token limits.

CodingJeebus 5 minutes ago | parent

They would never do this because it would allow customers to see how often and to what degree they're shifting account limits. Token transparency costs extra, full API price to be exact.

dude250711 1 hour ago | parent

Let's hope they don't nerf Opus 5.5

gigatexal 2 minutes ago | parent

im legit praying this doesn't happen

davidguetta 1 hour ago | parent

Submarine ?

redhale 1 hour ago | parent

> subscription gross margins are way lower than API and meaningfully reduce revenue per MW for both OpenAI and Anthropic

I don't know about everyone else, but there is no way in hell I would pay even $200 for API-priced tokens for personal use. So at least for my sample size of one, Anthropic's revenue would not be higher if they dropped their subscription plan (they would get $0 from me instead of $200 per month).

_fw 1 hour ago | parent

I’m not everyone else but I am SOMEBODY else and you’re absolutely right. I was paying for Claude since they first offered subscriptions, right up until this summer.

I respect Anthropic (and OpenAI to a lesser extent) but I’m not going to play these games.

bob1029 30 minutes ago | parent

I exclusively pay for API tokens. This is the primary way I consume these models.

The flat monthly subscriptions seem too tempting for the providers to screw with. I prefer to paygo and to be responsible with my consumption. I also want the ability to scale substantially beyond what a typical consumer plan may offer on occasion.

My monthly usage ranges from $10-$1000. I don't have to worry about quotas or anything. If I need to use several thousand dollars worth of tokens, I can just pull out the Amex and everything works. It's constant performance all day every day. I have long since maxed out my org level with OAI, so it would be very difficult to exceed any realistic limits.

pu_pe 11 minutes ago | parent

What's stopping you from using the subscription plan and then topping up with API if you need?

himata4113 7 minutes ago | parent

Spending 5/10 months equiv of subscription cost that have significantly lower revenue for X company (or even costs money) when 1 week of $200 subscription gets you $800~$1200 sure is something.

throwuxiytayq 1 hour ago | parent

This says “Anthropic gives you 5× more API-priced model usage”, which is not equivalent to “Anthropic is 5x as much value”. This does not take into account model/harness efficiency. I tried looking up some benchmarks and Claude seemingly uses roughly 5x as many tokens while taking its sweet time to complete a task. No such thing as a coincidence.

yube01 1 hour ago | parent

but ai credit runs out really really fast

_fw 1 hour ago | parent

My theory is that for a large amount of people, “work are paying anyway so what do I care?”.

I lost my job recently, so gave myself an AI budget of $100 to help with search and applications.

If I put that in OpenAI or Anthropic, I’d hit limits quickly and lose whatever I didn’t use.

Or… I could put the same money in OpenRouter, use open models at 1/25th the price, and only need to pay more when I’ve spent what I put in.

Back in January when Claude Cowork was new and Claude Code was one of the only performant harnesses, it would have been a tougher decision.

But Hermes, dsh, agy, codex, opencode, pi… they make it so easy to achieve so much with such a low budget.

I know it’s a cliche nowadays to say “just use cheaper models” but the value they offer is SO much greater. And i can switch to GPT6, or Opus 5.5 in two clicks for tasks anyway.

My point is this: OpenAI and Anthropic are pulling stunts like this because they don’t care about you and your subscription. So stop caring about them.

piva00 54 minutes ago | parent

> My point is this: OpenAI and Anthropic are pulling stunts like this because they don’t care about you and your subscription. So stop caring about them.

Exactly where I landed, I had a personal subscription last year that shifted between OpenAI and Anthropic depending on who had the better model for that month.

This year? I don't need that, I can do the same as you: budget and pre-pay for some tokens in OpenRouter, and use very cheap models for absolutely anything I need on my personal projects. I can use open source harnesses that give me similar results, my projects do not need the absolute most-expensive frontier model at all, that's just a waste.

And if absolutely needed to use some frontier capability I can pay the tokens for that instead of committing to US$ 200-500 for a subscription that they can just pull the rug from me at any point.

I still have my job where they give me access to all the shiny expensive models with their enterprise agreements about data retention, the legal stuff that a company cares about and my personal projects don't, if I keep my usage under the newly implement monthly budget no one will bother me about it and so I just use what I'm told to.

nicman23 22 minutes ago | parent

i am partial to qwencloud

gizajob 51 minutes ago | parent

What’s news to me is that Anthropic reports that it has 88% gross margin. I find that extremely hard to believe with the capex required to build and run the models.

viraptor 45 minutes ago | parent

This is a joke.

> Token efficiency is also an extremely relevant factor, but the industry unfortunately lacks reliable data here. Many people like to cite this chart from Artificial Analysis, but we do not believe the benchmark tasks in the AA Intelligence Index are at all representative of real work people do with LLMs.

Right, so they just ignore the fact that different models use very different number of tokens to achieve the same thing. Ignoring that means they can't say anything about "value". This is like comparing numbers with different units. They're Atokens and Otokens.

esperent 14 minutes ago | parent

My chatgpt pro account gave me 62k of their "credits" which they try to sell you at extortionate rates when your subscription runs out. I spent two days hammering it and used about 4k of those.

This is clear manipulation to prevent me from complaining about lower limits until it's out of the news cycle, but I don't care. As soon as those are gone, if my $200 account doesn't give me the value it used to, I'm out.

The random resets are also clear manipulation in this regard as well. Rather than just give me a fixed weekly limit which I could then get a sense of and know if it's getting reduced, they throw out a ~0-3 resets a week at random, unexpected intervals so that I'll never know.

himata4113 10 minutes ago | parent

if anyone wants a lifehack just get $100 sub from anthropic, get $80 sub from z.ai, download omp.sh, set task/advisor to glm 5.3 flash with max thinking, default opus 5.5 with medium thinking, slow set to xhigh thinking and design set to xhigh/max - max will produce significantly more complete designs.

day2day performance difference is negligible, there's less refusals and you always have glm 5.3 for whenever opus 5.5 arbitrarily decides to terminate your conversation.

This is enough to run 2 concurrent sessions 16 hours a day.

Alifatisk 3 minutes ago | parent

These prices are getting ridiculous, we’re talking about 180$ / month here.