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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

Until the rug inevitably gets pulled on those as well. It's not in your interest buy a $200/mo subscription unless you use >$200 of tokens per month, and long term it's not in their interest to sell you >$200 of tokens for a flat $200.

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> It's not in your interest buy a $200/mo subscription unless you use >$200 of tokens per month

This is only true if you can find someone else selling them at cost.

If a company has a product that cost them $150, but they would ordinarily sell piecemeal for a total of $250, getting a stable recurring purchase at $200 might be worthwhile to them while still being a good deal for the customer.

The pricing model works as long as people (on average) think they need >$200 worth of tokens per month but actually do something less, like $170/month. Is that happening? No idea.

Maybe that is what Anthropic is banking on, from what I gather they obscure Max accounts actual token spend so it's hard for subscribers to tell if they're getting their moneys worth.

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/1109

Well, the $200/mo plan model works as long as people on the $100/mo plan is insufficient for some people which works as long as the $17/mo plan is insufficient for some people.

I don't see how it matters to you that you aren't saturating your $200 plan. You have it because you hit the limits of the $100/mo plan.

I don't know about for people using CC on a regular basis, but according to `ccusage`, I can trivially go over $20 of API credits in a few days of hobby use. I'd presume if you are paying for a $200 plan then you know you have heavy usage and can easily exceed that.

It's probably easier (and hence, cheaper) to finance the AI infrastructure investments if you have a lot of recurring subscriptions.

There is probably a lot of value in predictability. Meaning it might be visible for a $200, to offer more tokens than $200.

meanwhile me hiding from accounting for spending $500 on cursor max mode in a day

Did you actually get 500 bucks worth of work out of it?

How should they know? It's not like they're checking what it does.

No way to measure it directly, but it did write 4kLOC of mostly working angular... whether non-max would manage the same feat in the same time is an open question.

It depends on the salary, right? If you're in Silicon Valley paying 500k TC it probably makes sense to let your employees go wild and use as much token spend as they like.

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