dimmke
Joined 13 years ago
Joined 13 years ago
It's the biggest thing that stuck out to me using local AI with open source projects vs Claude's client. The model itself is good enough I think - Gemma 4 would be fine if it could be used with something as capable as Claude.
And that's gonna stay locked down unfortunately especially on mobile and cars - it needs access to APIs to do that stuff - and not just regular APIs that were built for traditional invoking.
The same way that websites are getting llm.txts I think APIs will also evolve.
It's their E2B and E4B variants (so 2B and 4B but also quantized)
https://ai.google.dev/gemma/docs/core/model_card_4#dense_mod...
If the actual concern is use pattern, enforce that directly. What we have instead is metered usage + behavioral restrictions + product fragmentation across three separate offerings.
That's not a clean billing philosophy, it's layers of control stacked on top of each other with no coherent logic tying them together.
If subscriptions are for humans and API is for automation, fine. But then don't meter the human product arbitrarily and don't sell a subscription tier for automation while also restricting automation. Pick a lane.
Setting that aside, even if we accept your argument that gym costs barely scale with usage, then that makes gyms a bad comparison case for Anthropic, whose costs directly scale with usage. You can't use the gym model to defend Anthropic's pricing decisions if the two cost structures are nothing alike.
I'm arguing that both gyms and Anthropic have usage costs that scale with usage, but gym business model assumes a large margin of under-utilization and there's a hard cap to "power user" - I think both of those extremes don't apply to Anthropic's situation. Under-utilizers aren't paying for AI they have a free tier. There's also a natural ceiling on how much any one person can use a gym. There's no equivalent constraint on API usage.
The machine doesn't care about the number of people using it. If it's constantly being used, it will wear out faster. You are conflating "we price based on expected under-utilization" with "costs don't scale with usage." Those are different things.
The inverse correlation you talk about isn't relevant here - People buy gym memberships intending to go, feel good about the intention, and then don't follow through. The business model is built on that gap. That's pretty specific to fitness and a handful of similar industries where aspiration drives purchase.
Anthropic doesn't sell based on a "golly gee I hope people dont use this" gap - they sell compute. Different business.
Then they should figure out how to structure an offering that accommodates this type of usage not just blanket ban it
Your comparisons are all also "unlimited" situations to Claude's very much limited situation. You can't buy a plan for Claude that is marketed as being unlimited. They're already selling people metered usage. They're just also adding restrictions on top of that.
They already have the regular subscription plans (Pro, Max) and a separate billing process for direct API usage. They could absolutely introduce another type of plan optimized toward this kind of usage or just accept that it's a dumb pipe that is being paid for and having these random arbitrary limitations is just making things more confusing and a bad plan for the future.
I downgraded from my $200 a month plan to my $20 plan and hit limits constantly. I try to use the API access I purchased separately, and it doesn't work with Claude Code (something about the 1 million context requiring extra usage) so I have to use it Continue. Then I get instantly rate limited when it's trying to read 1-2 files.
It just sucks. This whole landscape is still emerging, but if this is what it's like now, pre enshittification, when these companies have shitloads of money - it's going to be so much worse when they start to tighten the screws.
Right now my own incentive is to stop being dependent on Claude for as much as I can as quickly as I can.
I've also owned a house before that had old electricity - knob and tube (this was before I had an electric car) and paid less than 10k to get the entire electricity system upgraded to something modern. I dont think your 5k-10k thing is accurate for the vast majority of houses.