Anthropic just pulled the oldest trick in SaaS pricing. I pay $200/mo for Claude Max. My limits have been noticeably worse this past week. Now they announce 2x off-peak usage for two weeks. Sounds generous. But here’s what actually happens: limits quietly drop, a temporary 2x makes the reduced limit feel normal, the promo ends, and you’re left at a baseline lower than where you started. You just didn’t notice the downgrade because the 2x absorbed the transition. These AI plans are massively subsidized. The raw compute behind a heavy user costs multiples of the subscription price. Every move like this is the subsidy quietly correcting. Very sneaky, Anthropic.

Anthropic is burning customer goodwill over something they already know how to fix They price every API call to the cent but won't tell subscription users what their plan actually buys People can accept tighter limits What they can't accept is being told they all started using Claude wrong on the same day People are reporting 40% of their Pro limit gone in 2 prompts. Full weekly allowances drained in 19 minutes. Single-word messages eating 1-4% of sessions That is not a context window problem. It's a transparency problem Anthropic is precise where it benefits them and vague where it protects them The API pricing page is exact: Opus 4.6 runs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output. Every call metered The subscription page says "more usage" and "5x or 20x more usage than Pro" More than what? Anthropic has never published how many tokens each plan gets You can see what percentage of your limit you've used, but you can't see what the limit actually is. And you have no way to verify that what you're getting today is the same as last month When Codex users started hitting rate limits faster than expected, OpenAI reset everyone's limits while they investigated. They said they didn't fully understand why and chose the cautious path Anthropic's response was to tell paying users to downgrade - Switch from Opus to Sonnet - Turn off extended thinking - Cap your context at 200k instead of the 1M they advertise - Start new sessions instead of resuming old ones In short, 'this is a skill issue' Every one of those is a feature people are paying to access Paying users should not have to reverse-engineer what their plan buys If Anthropic wants to rebuild trust, the fix is straightforward - Publish actual token budgets per tier, the same way they already do for the API - Show what each message costs against the budget - Let people verify for themselves whether the deal changed They already do this on the API side. The choice not to do it for subscriptions tells you everything