Hacker News

Apparently it's just an A/B test. Legit LMAO moment, speedrunning reputation destruction to your entire userbase just to test a question whose answer you can probably already guess.

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> For clarity, we're running a small test on ~2% of new prosumer signups. Existing Pro and Max subscribers aren't affected.

> When we launched Max a year ago, it didn't include Claude Code, Cowork didn't exist, and agents that run for hours weren't a thing. Max was designed for heavy chat usage, that's it.

> Since then, we bundled Claude Code into Max and it took off after Opus 4. Cowork landed. Long-running async agents are now everyday workflows. The way people actually use a Claude subscription has changed fundamentally.

> Engagement per subscriber is way up. We've made small adjustments along the way (weekly caps, tighter limits at peak), but usage has changed a lot and our current plans weren't built for this.

> So we're looking at different options to keep delivering a great experience for users. We don't know exactly what those look like yet - that's what we're testing and getting feedback on right now.

> When we do land on something, if it affects existing subscribers you'll get plenty of notice before anything changes. Will hear it from us, not a screenshot on X or Reddit.

https://x.com/TheAmolAvasare/status/2046724659039932830

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Personally I love how they have increased everyone's quotas to counteract the Opus 4.7 tokenizer change a few days ago, but are immediately regretting it and trying to cut off subscription users.

If the subscriptions are unprofitable, then just communicate honestly, raise the price or lower limits for new subscribers transparently, and grandfather in existing users. That's what GLM coding plan is doing and it works fine for them. Don't ruin your reputation with opaque messaging and hidden changes. Lol

I don't think I've ever been on such a rollercoaster with a company's reputation in the developer space. I started in January on the $20 plan, essentially my first agentic AI programming. I quickly started hitting limits developing several apps at the same time. I went up to the $200 plan after seeing the value.

After seeing my own issues with 4.6 and the mega-post on Github about declining metrics in a decent dataset of claude chats by Stella Laurenzo at AMD (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796), I downgraded to the $100 plan. Hallucinations. Laziness. Lack of thinking. The responses on those mega-threads from Anthropic rubbed me the wrong way in a "you're holding it wrong" kinda way.

In the past week, I downgraded back to the $20 plan because the Codex $20 plan on 5.4 was working so well for me.

Then throw in other oddball events like the source code leak, and the super positive Anthropic events like their interactions with the current administration. It's a wild ride.

I can't understand removing Claude Code from $20. I'm interested to see whether this is confirmed or not.

I'm a career engineer and I went from being one of their most outspoken proponents (at least within my circle) and now.... I'm not.

Most commercial websites, especially tech, run multiple A/B experiments in parallel to optimize signup funnels and tier conversions. Even so, there should always be a source of truth for people. We should have some way of verifying what we get for what we pay. There are laws about this as well.

This guy's casual and crass response is a sign of disrespect for customers. Unfortunately, that is pervasive in the industry. The bubbles these teams work in are corrosive to empathy and real world impact.

This is a risky move. I might have paid $20/month for my personal projects but the Max subscription is a bit steep.

Now I'm going to learn more about local models. I don't need to be as good as a frontier model. Good enough and free from all this drama is a win for me

I can't find an announcement yet, however the pricing page now shows it's not included, and various support articles have removed any mention of the the Pro plan including access to claude code.

See [1] and [2] for an example of a support article that's had claude code removed as a Pro feature.

I guess this is the beginning of the end for subsidised model access, at least from Anthropic.

[1] https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8325606-what-is-the-p... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20260420065828/https://support.c...

With GLM and Kimi getting better and better, with both still providing low-cost coding plans with higher quotas, and with how trivial it is to switch to them even within Claude CLI, I'm not sure what makes Anthropic think their users would rather pay 5x than switch to the competition.

Why is management at Anthropic trying so hard to ruin their reputation with developers? I missed the OpenClaw hype but it was something that kept me excited about my yearly subscription.

It makes no sense to do one of the higher tier plans unless they are directly generating you money.

The age of AI seems to forget some lessons from Google (and history in general).

- Rapid changes hurts the trust of your brand and product. In Google case, using a new service product became something you’ll think multiple times as you are more likely to axe it than rivals or specialized equivalents.

- While models currently has no clear winner. Anthropic’s core product is coding. But just as Skype, IE, Netscape their can always be another game changer you cannot count.

- The Pro plan is already limited for true agentinc workflows. The limits now are so bad that a business that relies on it would need bigger plans.

- Anthropic is already in a delicate situation where many devs are frustrated. Dropping or crippling the use even more just means this sector (which I can only assume is a big chunk) would switch to competitors tool that already try to compete.

- Local models, whether as Google sees it “edge” or even further would also take bigger part in the future.

Makes sense.

It is over for the little guy - home enthusiasts and vibe coders. Too many of them saturating resources for Max users.

IF you cannot afford few hundred dollars subscription go out and breathe fresh air. But if you can, watch where the ball is rolling - few thousand dollars subscriptions and even less programmers.

It is perhaps better for Anthropic to do a price hike e.g. $25 or $30 for Pro with a clear/honest messaging e.g. "Running costs are high, price hike is unavoidable" than resorting to these tactics.

These shenanigans are earning them no respect. The market is already annoyed on model serving QA issues, and now (recently) Opus limits. They don't want to lose to OpenAI - understandable - but these shortcuts won't earn them anything either.

Either they baited people with code and flexible usage limits until march and this was planned or they realized that they did too good of an product and it costs them too much.

One thing is clear, Anthropics communications and leadership is horrible. You don't launch or remove features like this. How this is communicated and handle is something like mom+pop shop would do.

So their minimum workable offer for devs just went from $17 to $100. Also, I don't see how the Pro subscription is relevant anymore. Nobody pays $17 a month just to chat. I just unsubscribed. :) Time to try Chat GPT Codex, which even works with the free subscription (don't expect crazy token allowance, of course).

I think that Anthropic has capacity problems. They went all in on acquiring new customers but now they don't have enough capacity to both serve users and train new models, so they are trying to limit user usages.

It is pure speculation of course, but I don't have any other explanations on the stuff they are pulling in the last 2 months.

If true, very strange change when Codex (at both 20 & 100) is a much, much better deal for a model much better at most coding tasks, with way more usage even with the /fast mode enabled. Is losing most non-enterprise customers the right move for them?

if this is accurate, and not some "oops we made a vibe-coding mistake updating our website" I am going to hit the "cancel subscription" button so hard that my desk will break in half.

I have an unlimited-usage API billing plan through my dayjob, but for obvious reasons they don't allow piggybacking personal usage onto that. so I paid for the $20/mo personal plan as an easy and relatively cheap method of professional development / keeping my skills current. I don't particularly mind paying $20/mo, but I'm absolutely not paying $100/mo.

also, part of the reason I didn't mind paying for the personal subscription is that I liked having consistency between the tools I use for my dayjob and the ones I use for side projects. if that goes away, then I might as well switch away from Claude usage at work as well. I very much doubt Anthropic's revenue predictions for this change are taking things like that into account.

making a change like this without an announcement, just sneaky updates to product pages, is also an absolutely unforgivable thing to do, in terms of me trusting them as a company.

It cracks me up when I hear takes like - 'if you're not using more than $20, the product isn't for you because you're not a real user.' If you use CC as an assistant rather than a replacement for your own thinking, follow SDD, and use the tool thoughtfully, you deliver a lot more and you don't need the 5x or 20x limit. It's a different story if you're vibe coding, but then we're not really talking about AI-assisted work - your three prompts barely count as doing any work. I've been on Pro for 2 years, but if this is how things are going, I'll look for an alternative. Luckily, there's plenty to choose from.

Seems like a pretty bad business move if it's really what they're doing. They should want devs using the product on a cheaper subscription to see the value with profitable limits on usage.

I think the only reason to do this would be that they just can't scale up to service the volume they have and need to cut down significantly on the total number of users. Seems also like a rough business proposition. Most of the pro plan users would probably migrate to a competitor at a similar price point (I know I will).

The only other possibility would be if they are losing too much money on the compute power and just can't offer it at that price anymore. But then upgrading the plan gives you more compute per dollar, so maybe they're just banking on people not actually using all of what they pay for?

I had previously thought that the inference cost of using a trained model was relatively low and that most costs went into training new models, but maybe that is less true with the more powerful newer models.

If it costs a ton more to serve Opus vs serving something like Kimi or Qwen, then I think most people just won't use the more expensive version for most things.

Claude Code page still shows it included with Pro/Max. https://claude.com/product/claude-code

It's still included here

https://claude.com/product/claude-code

Well, if there's one way to show that you're not profitable on inference, this would be it.

I’ve got nearly 10 months left on my yearly subscription, I wonder what that means for my access.

Next they’ll slowly reduce how much CC usage you can get out of the $100 Max plan, then introduce a new $300 “Max Plus” plan with “40x” usage. “You asked, and we listened: Introducing Max Plus, our biggest plan yet, designed for those…” blah blah

If it was removed from the pro plan, then the max plan should list claude code as one of its extras, and it doesn't.

I would not jump to conclusions yet.

Previous page, when Claude Code was included:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260421141017/https://claude.co...

Edit: fixed the url thanks to scq

This is exactly what happens with all agentic products in near future. Demand is way higher than supply right now. Also most programmers do not use agents yet so demand will grow even more. Building data centers is not easy and price of HW is skyrocketing.

I can't believe they are yanking tool access instead of just reducing the token quota or simply pulling Opus 4.7 access. To be fair even that would be poorly received, but at least people would have a choice of working within limits. Claude Code is their real winner, and a great ramp for newcomers coming into AI assisted development. They are playing straight into OpenAIs hands.

We, as a society, need Open Source SOTA models and should be able to also train new models via distributed P2P network.

Otherwise companies will keep exploiting using their dominant position.

We were taught dictators are bad, monopolies are bad, but now allowing 2 companies control most of the software development

Just tried Claude Code on my Pro plan. It worked. So no, it's not removed

Anthropic clearly doesn't understand that customers see their brand as "Claude", Google's brand as "Gemini" and OpenAI's brand as "ChatGPT." They have so many plans and exclusions that they risk customer confusion. I was surprised when I was pay $200/month for Claude Code, finding it super helpful, and then I had to pay separately to get API access for an experiment. Why are so many parts of "Claude" separate from each other, especially on a $200/month subscription.

Anthropic better get this sorted out with a proper product manager and marketing or they risk customers jumping to easier to understand platforms that are good enough.

Hey, I'm a pro, and I feel genuinely insulted. I could consider going back to Claude Desktop + MCP, but I'm getting tired of this telenovela, and will probably cancel my sub and take my business elsewhere.

This just made me gamble on a yearly subscription for Pro, hoping they will grandfather in existing customers..

I predict this may get reversed as it would be a huge opening for glm, kimi, and qwen offerings. I'd switch instead of upgrading to Max

This is a joke, right... right??

At least for me Claude Code is still working on my Pro plan. I don't know if that's because the change simply hasn't propagated all the way through their systems yet (the change is now up on the main Claude pricing page and on their support pages, but not on the Claude Code landing page yet), or if it's because existing plans are grandfathered in, or what.

In general Anthropic seems to be pretty bad at clearly communicating what is going on. I have both Claude Pro for Claude Code and ChatGPT Plus for Codex, and lately I've been reaching for Codex first more and more often... at least for the hobby stuff I'm using Claude/Codex on, they seem pretty much equivalent in terms of practical capability/usefulness.

They'll remove it.

Then some genius intern will say "if we offer it to the lowest level plans, the users will get hooked on how awesome it is!"

Then Anthropic will put it back.

Or they could just ask Claude if it is a good idea to remove.

Every person who signs up for a pro subscription on that advertising has cause to sue for being miss-sold the product.

Cool, first remove OpenCode support so I have to use their shitty TUI, then remove that too. What a loss. Good thing GLM 5.1 is good enough

Practically speaking, the $20 plan is useless anyway given the limits and the way Claude Code consumes tokens with very little caching.

Everyone that is upset about this should take note: you are not a (coding) customer at $20/mo. Their coding customers spend thousands per month (week!) on claude and it's growing faster than they can keep up with (source: I'm one of them, and I know many other like me. We're budgeting 10-20% of engineering salary spend on tokens). It sucks to no longer be able to code on the cheap anymore, but don't fool yourself into thinking you have any leverage here.

They should allow existing Pro plan users to keep using Claude Code.

I don't see it mentioned in the Max plan there either.

This makes me less likely to choose Claude Code, as this feels unreliable... Who says they will not change a few months down the line again.

This makes sense given Anthropic’s recent downtime and resource constraints.

Opus 4.7 consumes tokens at a faster rate and folks were complaining that the Pro plan included too few credits for real work.

And Anthropic now allows `claude -p` (which invokes Claude code) for 3rd party agents like OpenClaw, which consume far more tokens by running autonomously, 24/7.

I know this would add to pricing/model/plan confusion but what about Claude Pro plan can only access Sonnet and Haiku Models via Claude Code?

Opus is fairly useless on Pro given the rate limits anyways.

Can't you use Claude Code without a Claude model? E.g. can't you use this with a local model?

Folks are assuming that only the $100 plan will include Claude Code access. I think a more likely scenario is that everyone will be able to use CC.

It works for me at the moment on the pro plan. Is there a grace period until they enforce the new pricing?

Will definitely discontinue my Pro subscription if it's true. Claude Code is the only reason I signed up in the first place.

Anthropic reverts the “prosumer” AB testing, but damage is done.

They will lose the individual subscribers for sure. My day job can pay up to the roof for ai access in this climate but personally I cannot.

Curious how this will play out (if true) for folks who signed up for that annual plan - expecting Claude Code to be included.

How about team plan standard customer?($25) I suppose its only natural it would follow suit if not already

That’s too bad, I just purchased a one year pro plan for my dad just for him to play around with CC when he retires next week.

Bubble stress test, stage 1.

Chickens have come home to roost. Someone had to pay for the servers and the debt, and its us!!

Does this mean that for enterprises using per-seat pricing, only the $100 premium seat gets access to claude code?

I can't even sign up for Max (last tried yesterday), their credit card processor has issues.

Ahh couldn’t they vibe a solution to make CC cheaper?

I was working in my biggest project in the last 3 years and i dont got mutch money and they go there and cut claude code from pro like wtf so why am i even paying for pro

Funny, I just signed up for Pro a couple hours ago, to check how Claude Code works using this plan, instead of using my API keys.

I got rate limited after about 30mins of coding and was thinking, who the hell i going to work like this?

So they really seem to be running into extreme capacity issued now.

Anthropic should be increasing the value and services they offer not reducing it.

It’s the Apple model. Yes you pay a ton more. But my 2013 MacBook Pro 15 I got in college lasted 10 years and was still fine even when it was stolen. That’s what you pay for. You pay for a ton of built in apps and functionality and quality.

Arbitrarily removing things is customer and more importantantly good will hostile.

No particular opinion on this change, but generally pricing is a great way to separate dabblers from serious users. There isn’t a great deal of value in dabblers or what they produce, I imagine that training data isn’t worth much relative to the pro users. Similar pricing story with $100 yearly price for Apple developer accounts that people complain a lot about. The reality is if you’re serious about making something, these costs are pretty cheap.

The folks hurt most by this are serious people in developing countries and young people starting out. Occasionally a dabbler turns into a serious user but I imagine that’s far less likely than people wish it were.

The value to companies who make these changes is they don’t have low value users or low value contributions to worry about, which has its own not insignificant overhead. In the age of AI slop everywhere we’re likely to see a lot more attempts to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Some top tier PR yet again... does Claude run their PR team on its own?

Is this confirmed?!

It's going to be interesting seeing the AI companies gouge people who are incapable without it.

Jesus Christ, it’s literally going to become too big of a risk to depend on Anthropic.

As someone who tries to manage usage for a small team they just added Claude Code to the Standard Team seat now they are removing it!?

Not to mention that they will ban your entire organization from a bot deciding you violated their TOS with no communication and no way to contact anyone to understand what happened.

If this is real we are switching to OpenAI or Gemini it is not worth all this non sense

;) - use the Chinese models ;,>

No way

I'm asking for a full refund of my plan via amex if this actually happens. Fuck them.

does anyone have recommendations on replacing CC with something else for around $20-30 / month?

They have till morning to clean up this giant PR mess. I think people will leave for codex

Vibe coded ui bug?

That sucks, I guess I'll cancel my Claude account. Not paying 100 dollars. That's crazy

Trying to chat with "fin" is like trying to argue with a bowl of congealed oatmeal.

Me: Why is your website saying Claude Code is not included in Claude Pro subscriptions?

"Fin", the slow, dopey AI agent: That’s confusing, but it usually comes down to what “Claude Code” means in that context. Claude Pro does include Claude Code (the Code tab in the desktop app, and Claude Code access for individuals).

What Pro does not include is API access via the Claude Console. Those are separate products: Pro is for chat, and the Console is for building apps with the API.

So if the website is saying “not included,” it’s likely referring to Console/API access, not the Claude Code feature itself.

Did that clear up the confusion?

Me: No. It clearly states on the pricing page that Claude Code is not included.

Fin: That’s frustrating, <NAME>. The key detail is that Claude Code is included in Claude Pro, but API access via the Claude Console is not.

So if the page you’re looking at says “Claude Code is not included,” it’s almost certainly referring to Console/API access (the developer platform), not the Claude Code feature itself.

If you tell me the exact URL or screenshot of the page that says that, I can confirm which “Code” it’s talking about.

Was that explanation helpful?

Me: https://claude.com/pricing

Fin: On https://claude.com/pricing, Pro does include Claude Code. It’s listed right there under Pro’s “Everything in Free, plus” bullets: “Includes Claude Code.” So if you’re seeing “not included” somewhere else on that page, it’s likely referring to something different than the Claude Code feature. The one thing Pro does not include is API access via the Claude Console (that’s a separate product).

Also, the Code tab in the desktop app requires a Pro (or Max/Team/Enterprise) subscription, and it may not show for everyone yet since it’s still rolling out.

Does that clear things up for you?

Me: there is clearly an "x" at this page. escalate to a human immediately.

and then the cycle continues. I'm cancelling my Anthropic subscription, sick of worrying about limits and getting banned and simply awful experience.

I'm very happy with GLM 5.1, MiniMax M2.7 and Kimi K2.5. My wallet is happy, too.

This is more ethical than what they've been doing, trying to keep those subscribers but limiting them to the point it's become unusable. But it's also kneecaping themselves because they'll miss out on any innovation and hype coming out of the hobbyist community.

Their chat bot claims that pro users still have access to Claude Code.

Annoying, signed up for a personal pro account a couple of weeks ago. No way I’m going to spend $200 just for a few personal projects.

Huh? I just don't understand why they're doing this. Feels like shooting themselves in the foot, given that Claude's individual subscribers are a large part of who is introducing all their enterprise customers to them. Plus removing access is never good for public perception.

I'm not going on max. I barely hit 20% of my weekly limits on pro, to hell with Anthropic if they drop this plan.

Wait. What is Anthropic without Claude? Serious question.

And of course you never want the first tier it's included on because you need actual usage, so in reality you need Max 20x - the price of which I can't even see on the pricing page

Feels like a very strong chance that this is related to trying to find a way to navigate letting OpenClaw users on. https://docs.openclaw.ai/providers/anthropic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47844269

The clusterfuck about the various pages not being all upgraded to reflect the same story...

I thought we now had advanced tools to which we could ask to do things like: "Remove all mention of Claude Code in the Pro, but not in the Pro Max plan".

But apparently the CGI-days called and asked the webmaster to manually edit .html files one by one?

People really have to internalize that these things are expensive to run, and that there isn't enough compute to go around, like actually for real for real, which is likely the source of this. My guess is its a temporary new sign up pause.

Related perhaps to GitHub pausing signups for Copilot? https://github.blog/changelog/2026-04-20-changes-to-github-c...

You know you can just code by typing and thinking, right? Like you don’t need to use AI if you’re a software engineer.

I know, crazy idea. When we told you they’re getting you hooked and would rug pull you called us permanent underclass or something.

Meh, $20 Codex is better at this moment anyway.

I just cancelled my plan, but still have access to Pro and Code apparently until my cycle would have renewed. Hopefully they get a clear signal from this, especially if more of us cancel with the intention to sign back up should they reverse this decision.

“Let’s see how they react, and they will be ok and we will be rich.”

They're trying to find every way to enshittify their partially unprofitable service. When they find a way that sticks, they'll go with it. This has become the preferred way of doing tech business in the US. Create a great thing, give it away for free, hook users in, try to squeeze them. In theory competition should limit this kind of behaviour, but for some reason they big companies all wait on another to start enshittification in unison. How this is legal still puzzles me but evidently that's how it goes.

Here's my hot take: Anthropic et al. are trying to make developing a subscription-only job, and they've done that by illegally pirating pretty much the whole Internet. If they were to go out of business tomorrow and serving models was to become a commoditized service like storage we'd be all better off. Sure, we would have less research on frontier models, but we don't need AGI, we need good local models, RAM and good open source / weight AI tools.

The enshitification intensifies.

I posted this question two weeks ago: "What is your plan when the AI you have implemented throughout your company changes the results you've come to trust?" (https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/06/anthropic_claude_code...).

Since then, I had to add:

"or won't let you log in?": https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/44257

"or makes stuff up?": https://dwyer.co.za/static/claude-mixes-up-who-said-what-and...

"or when it's down?": https://status.claude.com/incidents/6jd2m42f8mld

"or when you get banned?": https://bannedbyanthropic.com/

"or installs spyware?": https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/anthropic-spyware/

And this is all exclusively about Anthropic. It's insane. On any other tech, there would be a consensus to wait until it's stable, but not AI - we go full throttle when it's AI.

Genuinely curious how people who have implemented this in serious companies are answering these questions, because my answer is to keep it the fuck out.

Saw this coming eventually. $20/month for autonomous agents running 24/7 was clearly not sustainable at API pricing. The part that's surprising is there's still no official announcement - just a quiet page edit.

Wonder where this leaves folks who paid the annual rate? Here’s what Claude said:

https://claude.ai/share/1a4293bd-b2d4-41b7-a887-eb42b3ae8b6e

“ The standard answer here is no — Anthropic does not typically refund the unused portion of annual plans , and annual subscribers won’t see prorated refunds, retaining access for the full remaining period instead. That said, your situation is a bit different — you’re not just canceling, you’re canceling because a feature you paid for was removed. That’s worth contacting Anthropic support directly about. Their support team can check your refund eligibility , and this kind of material change to the plan is exactly the case where a support escalation could go differently than a standard cancellation. You can reach them through the in-app support messenger at support.claude.com or via the thumbs-down feedback button. I’d recommend explaining specifically that Claude Code was a factor in your annual plan purchase. ”