4 ms·

Claude Pro: Opus model will only be available if extra usage is enabled

70 points by yrds96 5mo ago

ukuina 5mo ago
Opus was consuming so much usage that it was basically unusable on anything but the Max plan.
- colechristensen 5mo ago
  It was even burning out much too fast on Max, but I found moving from xhigh -> high thinking got me equivalent quality with fewer tokiens.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
Aboutplants 5mo ago
Turns out when the bills start rolling in you need the revenue to pay them. Here comes the bumpy ride
- pupppet 5mo ago
  A few years from now we’ll probably look back and laugh at how AI used to be essentially free.
- this_user 5mo ago
  OpenAI and Anthropic are both planning IPOs this year. They are clearly trying to polish their finances before filing their S-1s. Because their advisors will have told them that it's going to be a very difficult sell at these valuations if they cannot at least present the idea of a path towards profitability.
- ceroxylon 5mo ago
  i've been using the API for a portion of my work to prepare for this and test to see how much it will cost in the long term, turns out that was the short term. it is rough, but it has taught me to treat every prompt and process with care since i watch the pennies and dollars burn instead of tokens, which is a good habit to get into anyway
  - Incipient 5mo ago
    Copilot has said they'll be giving out previous months "if you did token pricing, it would cost $x" so a lot of us will have real numbers to actually anticipate our spend. Personally I'm anticipating agentic coding will be out of my price bracket (a single agent run costing US$20+ is far beyond what I can justify, especially with how often it fails). I'm planning on going back to optimised prompts on one-pass edits.
  - a10c 5mo ago
    I use pi (https://pi.dev/ https://pi.dev/) as my coding agent which allowed you to use your subscription until Claude recently introduced extra usage and I was routinely using the equivalent of my Claude Max subscription in an hour multiple times a day. The writing is on the wall.
underyx 5mo ago
> this is an outdated support article from before we had Opus in Pro plans, we rolled it out for Opus 4.5 in Jan and never updated, you can see in the wayback machine here: https://web.archive.org/web/20251204151142/https://support.claude.com/en/articles/11940350-claude-code-model-configuration https://web.archive.org/web/20251204151142/https://support.c... > apologies for the confusion response from @thariq
- esperent 5mo ago
  I don't see any evidence of that, the current, live page clearly states: > Model access: When using a Pro plan with Claude Code, you will only be able to use Opus models after enabling and purchasing extra usage. And your extremely slow loading archive link is just the same page with the same text.
  - helsinkiandrew 5mo ago
    > I don't see any evidence of that, the current, live page clearly states The live page - last edited 15 minutes after your comment - no longer has that passage.
- xer0x 5mo ago
  Thank-you for posting this update. EDIT: However purchasing extra-usage for Pro/Max accounts is a new feature.
  - strictnein 5mo ago
    It's been a feature on the Max accounts for a while now.
  - theshrike79 5mo ago
    I've had an extra-usage quota for months now. They even gave people free credits for that some time ago. It's useful once in a while when you're like 90% done, run out of usage and the next refresh is hours away. Then you can push that feature to completion and swap to another model that's not on cooldown.
thoughtlede 5mo ago
Investor funds have been subsidizing the inference costs so far. Investors might move from funding the model providers to funding the enterprises that use those models. That is, they might move from funding the cost of the experiment to funding the value of the result. No funding if there are no demonstrable AI gains. This is a reasonable shift if this happens. If enough gains have been demonstrated, then investors might go back to funding the model providers. Investors always move towards the highest leverage point. As long as AI delivers, this would be the rhythm.
- j45 5mo ago
  Investors can try to subsidize while the cost of delivery, evolution, and efficiency improves, while at the same time completing market capture.
batshit_beaver 5mo ago
This is going to be interesting. At least for coding, there's little correlation between token spend and the quality (and impact) of the resulting AI suggestion. This is fine when inference prices are capped (eg via a monthly subscription plan or self-hosting), but rapidly discombobulates the relationship between provider and user otherwise. It still seems like OpenAI has no moat and neither does anyone else, as the only reasonable way to use the coding slot machines is going to be via open source models on inference-optimized hardware. Still better than the secret lobotomization they were doing on subscription plan models though.
- Incipient 5mo ago
  >there's little correlation between token spend and the quality My sentiment exactly! I have a very similar scaffold to each of my prompts, and feel I provide similar context files, however sometimes I get a truly inspired, complex, and functionally complete response...and sometimes I'd have been better off running lorem ipsum through a python interpreter. I can't find any rhyme or reason to success. I'm not sure if prompting is significantly more nuanced than I realise, or it's the statistical magic that's having a laugh at me. >open source models on inference-optimized hardware. Is this actually a thing? Or are you talking about some hypothetical "opus 4.7 ASIC"?
spudlyo 5mo ago
The messaging around what is and isn't allowed with the various Claude plans has been so very muddled as of late. Add to that declining model performance, changes to default reasoning efforts, expanded token usage, caching bugs, corporate denials and gaslighting -- I don't think it's overstating matters to say they've suffered some major self-inflected reputational damage. As it stands now, there is so much FUD surrounding their offerings, I'm not sure what they could do in the short term to turn things around.
- colechristensen 5mo ago
  It's just an organizational maturity thing. They need to start shifting from "move fast and break things" to "move faster by slowing down". Their public communication, feature set, and organization as a whole needs to start matching the scale and level they're competing at. They won many hearts and minds by being better and are losing them by being chaotic. Different outcomes from the same internal behavior because they needed to change gears and haven't.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
yrds96 5mo ago
Basically the title. Anthropic is doing changes on their help support pages on what looks like it will be the next pricing change regarding how users will use Opus models on Pro Plan.
6Az4Mj4D 5mo ago
It's just matter of time that price become so high that Enterprise cannot afford these tools unless they self-host open models. Only problem is open models are coming from China and not many countries trust that to use inside companies. How will it play?
- ihsw 5mo ago
  [dead]
- tipiirai 5mo ago
  Many people trust China more than US
- still_grokking 5mo ago
  Looks like the Chinese are, again, winning the long game. There is simply nothing that could compete with their open models. At the same time more and more corps got "AI addicted", so they will either have to pay ridiculous amounts of money, or use the Chinese stuff.
  - 6Az4Mj4D 5mo ago
    You are right about addiction; the instant gratification is on peak with tools like Claude. I use $200 plan and my token usage for last 30 days is 30M , If I do basic math, it will be equivalent to $1500. Assuming companies get 50% discount, still that cost is too much multiplier. My usage might be outliner here, but 200->400 is an average case.
- kingleopold 5mo ago
  US investors can't afford price being too high tho. This thing would wipe trillions if they make prices a lot higher. Interesting times ahead
  - arvid-lind 5mo ago
    Yep, it is their responsibility to make all of this worth caring about.

70 points by yrds96 5mo ago

ukuina 5mo ago

Opus was consuming so much usage that it was basically unusable on anything but the Max plan.

colechristensen 5mo ago
It was even burning out much too fast on Max, but I found moving from xhigh -> high thinking got me equivalent quality with fewer tokiens.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

Aboutplants 5mo ago

Turns out when the bills start rolling in you need the revenue to pay them. Here comes the bumpy ride

pupppet 5mo ago
A few years from now we’ll probably look back and laugh at how AI used to be essentially free.
this_user 5mo ago
OpenAI and Anthropic are both planning IPOs this year. They are clearly trying to polish their finances before filing their S-1s. Because their advisors will have told them that it's going to be a very difficult sell at these valuations if they cannot at least present the idea of a path towards profitability.
ceroxylon 5mo ago
i've been using the API for a portion of my work to prepare for this and test to see how much it will cost in the long term, turns out that was the short term. it is rough, but it has taught me to treat every prompt and process with care since i watch the pennies and dollars burn instead of tokens, which is a good habit to get into anyway
- Incipient 5mo ago
  Copilot has said they'll be giving out previous months "if you did token pricing, it would cost $x" so a lot of us will have real numbers to actually anticipate our spend. Personally I'm anticipating agentic coding will be out of my price bracket (a single agent run costing US$20+ is far beyond what I can justify, especially with how often it fails). I'm planning on going back to optimised prompts on one-pass edits.
- a10c 5mo ago
  I use pi (https://pi.dev/ https://pi.dev/) as my coding agent which allowed you to use your subscription until Claude recently introduced extra usage and I was routinely using the equivalent of my Claude Max subscription in an hour multiple times a day. The writing is on the wall.

underyx 5mo ago

> this is an outdated support article from before we had Opus in Pro plans, we rolled it out for Opus 4.5 in Jan and never updated, you can see in the wayback machine here: https://web.archive.org/web/20251204151142/https://support.claude.com/en/articles/11940350-claude-code-model-configuration https://web.archive.org/web/20251204151142/https://support.c... > apologies for the confusion response from @thariq

esperent 5mo ago
I don't see any evidence of that, the current, live page clearly states: > Model access: When using a Pro plan with Claude Code, you will only be able to use Opus models after enabling and purchasing extra usage. And your extremely slow loading archive link is just the same page with the same text.
- helsinkiandrew 5mo ago
  > I don't see any evidence of that, the current, live page clearly states The live page - last edited 15 minutes after your comment - no longer has that passage.
xer0x 5mo ago
Thank-you for posting this update. EDIT: However purchasing extra-usage for Pro/Max accounts is a new feature.
- strictnein 5mo ago
  It's been a feature on the Max accounts for a while now.
- theshrike79 5mo ago
  I've had an extra-usage quota for months now. They even gave people free credits for that some time ago. It's useful once in a while when you're like 90% done, run out of usage and the next refresh is hours away. Then you can push that feature to completion and swap to another model that's not on cooldown.

thoughtlede 5mo ago

Investor funds have been subsidizing the inference costs so far. Investors might move from funding the model providers to funding the enterprises that use those models. That is, they might move from funding the cost of the experiment to funding the value of the result. No funding if there are no demonstrable AI gains. This is a reasonable shift if this happens. If enough gains have been demonstrated, then investors might go back to funding the model providers. Investors always move towards the highest leverage point. As long as AI delivers, this would be the rhythm.

j45 5mo ago
Investors can try to subsidize while the cost of delivery, evolution, and efficiency improves, while at the same time completing market capture.

batshit_beaver 5mo ago

This is going to be interesting. At least for coding, there's little correlation between token spend and the quality (and impact) of the resulting AI suggestion. This is fine when inference prices are capped (eg via a monthly subscription plan or self-hosting), but rapidly discombobulates the relationship between provider and user otherwise. It still seems like OpenAI has no moat and neither does anyone else, as the only reasonable way to use the coding slot machines is going to be via open source models on inference-optimized hardware. Still better than the secret lobotomization they were doing on subscription plan models though.

Incipient 5mo ago
>there's little correlation between token spend and the quality My sentiment exactly! I have a very similar scaffold to each of my prompts, and feel I provide similar context files, however sometimes I get a truly inspired, complex, and functionally complete response...and sometimes I'd have been better off running lorem ipsum through a python interpreter. I can't find any rhyme or reason to success. I'm not sure if prompting is significantly more nuanced than I realise, or it's the statistical magic that's having a laugh at me. >open source models on inference-optimized hardware. Is this actually a thing? Or are you talking about some hypothetical "opus 4.7 ASIC"?

spudlyo 5mo ago

The messaging around what is and isn't allowed with the various Claude plans has been so very muddled as of late. Add to that declining model performance, changes to default reasoning efforts, expanded token usage, caching bugs, corporate denials and gaslighting -- I don't think it's overstating matters to say they've suffered some major self-inflected reputational damage. As it stands now, there is so much FUD surrounding their offerings, I'm not sure what they could do in the short term to turn things around.

colechristensen 5mo ago
It's just an organizational maturity thing. They need to start shifting from "move fast and break things" to "move faster by slowing down". Their public communication, feature set, and organization as a whole needs to start matching the scale and level they're competing at. They won many hearts and minds by being better and are losing them by being chaotic. Different outcomes from the same internal behavior because they needed to change gears and haven't.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

yrds96 5mo ago

Basically the title. Anthropic is doing changes on their help support pages on what looks like it will be the next pricing change regarding how users will use Opus models on Pro Plan.

6Az4Mj4D 5mo ago

It's just matter of time that price become so high that Enterprise cannot afford these tools unless they self-host open models. Only problem is open models are coming from China and not many countries trust that to use inside companies. How will it play?

ihsw 5mo ago
[dead]
tipiirai 5mo ago
Many people trust China more than US
still_grokking 5mo ago
Looks like the Chinese are, again, winning the long game. There is simply nothing that could compete with their open models. At the same time more and more corps got "AI addicted", so they will either have to pay ridiculous amounts of money, or use the Chinese stuff.
- 6Az4Mj4D 5mo ago
  You are right about addiction; the instant gratification is on peak with tools like Claude. I use $200 plan and my token usage for last 30 days is 30M , If I do basic math, it will be equivalent to $1500. Assuming companies get 50% discount, still that cost is too much multiplier. My usage might be outliner here, but 200->400 is an average case.
kingleopold 5mo ago
US investors can't afford price being too high tho. This thing would wipe trillions if they make prices a lot higher. Interesting times ahead
- arvid-lind 5mo ago
  Yep, it is their responsibility to make all of this worth caring about.