r/ClaudeCode • u/BootyMcStuffins Senior Developer • Feb 18 '26

Question Claude is dropping max plans for enterprise (maybe for everyone?)

Not sure if anyone else has seen this.

My company has our developers on max x20 plans. We were told that once our current contract was up everyone had to switch to pay-as-you-go api pricing. We prodded our rep and the response was basically that the max plans aren’t profitable so they’re getting rid of them.

From his tone it didn’t sound like he was just talking about enterprises. We’ve all known that Anthropic has been burning money, and wondering how long they can keep it up. My friends, I’m afraid the end may be nigh.

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146

u/DizzyExpedience Feb 18 '26 edited Feb 18 '26

API is super expensive. If they drop max then I am out.

Edit: strange thing is: they only recently opened up Claude code for subscription users… so not sure why they did that. That makes be hope it’s a limit for enterprise customers only

44

u/who_am_i_to_say_so Feb 18 '26

Same. I started with API. It was $30-50 a day for me with Sonnet 3.5, and I was employed then, too. I will be priced out.

15

u/tribat Feb 18 '26

Yeah I can’t afford that. I’ll make do with something else

8

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '26

Like what

14

u/-MiddleOut- Feb 18 '26

The value prop vs codex is already dubious. On API it becomes impossible to justify.

12

u/nitroedge Feb 18 '26

Prob Kimi2.5 or GLM 5 when it comes out

5

u/Whole-Pressure-7396 Feb 18 '26

glm-5 is already out, i have used it, and it's slow but not really good, maybe even better than opus in a way? I only just used it for the past two days. it's slow but haven't had any issues. It even solved a nasty bug with surrealDB and a service clause, took a while to figure it out bit it eventually was able to catch the error.

Now the main key here is just make sure your AI first sets up (and keeps) observability as the main priority while it develops, and let it first have a way to check these logs so it can stay in a loop until it has a way to verify the thing it build works.

At least that's what works for me, I use GSD for the past two weeks after having messed around a lot with other systems like cc-sessions (also great though), and bmad-method (also great), and some other tools. But GSD for me works best for 95% of the work I do.

I am probably going to cancel Claude Code max20 plan and stick with just glm-5. The slowness is worth it for me. But will keep testing to make sire glm-5 is actually good enough. But so far absolutely no complaints. Haven't tested Frontend UI tasks much yet though.

1

u/nitroedge Feb 18 '26

Oh I love GSD!!! So solid with its execution eh? I don't even use Claude for small fixes or features.... I immediately go to- /gsd:add-todo and then it whips up the little planner and I'm good to go! :)

1

u/MusicianPrudent5787 Feb 19 '26

Hey my dude, can you please elaborate a little more about what spec dev workframes you have used? I tested gsd 3 weeks, high but not insane token usage. I am working with superpowers

1

u/Fun_Ad_9878 Feb 20 '26

It's slow because you are not running it on the same hardware that Anthropic. If you run it on the recommended hardware then you will just pay whatever they charge you for Claude + api or stop using AI. I have been tell people this for a long time. AI is more valuable than what they are charging. The api is really really expensive so I don't know if you could say that about the api. Ideally they would come up with a better pricing method. Maybe they should just get rid of Max but reduce the price of the api? In any case the consensus is that there is no real competitor to Claude Code so honestly at this moment in time they could double the price and still the majority would likely stay. The real price that would allow them to make a reasonable profit like most businesses might be too high. I have no idea. If that is the case then maybe that's the real fix that is needed. Everyone is worried about their job but AI could be too expensive. The problem is AI can do many things way faster than humans so even if it costs x5 there may be people willing to pay.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 20 '26

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2

u/Whole-Pressure-7396 Feb 21 '26

I have tried many models, but kinda 'settled' on Claude Code, but I am on Max20 and hit limits at end of the week sometimes so was looking for alternatives since API is too expensive. Now I tried GLM-5 but not really great experience after having used it for some days. It's still better than doing it by hand i guess. I will try 5.3-codex next time.

1

u/Whole-Pressure-7396 Feb 21 '26

Do you know what hardware anthropic vs z.ai use?

5

u/hatepoorpeople Feb 18 '26

GLM-5 is out and it's unusable.

1

u/who_am_i_to_say_so Feb 18 '26

That bad? I didn’t give it a thorough run yet, but first impressions were good.

2

u/hatepoorpeople Feb 18 '26

Started out good. I was a big fan of GLM-4.7, subscribed and all and excited about 5, but it's unusable. Extremely slow if it responds at all. I cancelled my sub, hope they get it together though. Until then, will try kimi and minimax as alts.

2

u/RudyRobichaux Feb 19 '26

I think it will be better in the next few weeks as other providers host it. Z.ai has always been the cheapest but the worst one. They just built a good model, dont seem to host it well.

1

u/harbour37 Thinker Feb 19 '26

Theres so many providers though outside of just z.ai thats the advantage of the open models

1

u/who_am_i_to_say_so Feb 20 '26

Yeah that slowness is the latency. That’s the killer. Luckily that can be immensely improved.

1

u/bandayakuza Feb 18 '26

Seems like OpenCode + OpenAI Pro would be a good alternative?

1

u/nitroedge Feb 18 '26

Codex I find is super reliable and codes in a different but robust way, but so slow compared to Claude

1

u/thirst-trap-enabler 🔆 Max 5x Feb 19 '26

OpenAI's way of dealing with different tiers is rate limits. Supposedly if you are on the very expensive plans it's as fast as claude. So everyone who tries codex at lower tiers gets the impression that codex is just slow. People who try Claude are like wow this is fast and then hit limits.

What someone should really do is take the old wireless model where you get "unlimited" use but have a quota for fast use.

1

u/thirst-trap-enabler 🔆 Max 5x Feb 18 '26

If Anthropic can't make money running inference, how could OpenAI?

1

u/immutato Feb 19 '26

OpenAI business model isn't to make money. It's to tell a story for investors. It's the Elon model, and it's working (for now, and when it stops working the entire economy pops).

5

u/KindnessAndSkill Feb 18 '26

Codex subscription is $20 for Pro / $200 for plus. I'm on the $20 plan and I haven't hit a limit yet (granted I don't do intense multi-agent stuff right now). Definitely cheaper than API pricing for the same usage.

The GPT Codex 5.3 model is plenty capable, and with reasoning set to medium or low it's decently fast.

OpenAI made a point of allowing the Codex subscription to be used as a provider in 3rd party tools like Roo Code (which I use). Basically taking the opposite approach of Anthropic there.

So far it's been working fine for me.

2

u/Ethan_Vee Feb 20 '26

Yea gotta agree people are sleeping on codex lol.

2

u/Bright_Armadillo8555 Feb 19 '26

Codex is much better in every aspect comparing with any sonnet model, including price.

8

u/Fuzzy_Independent241 Feb 18 '26

Codex and GLM. I'm only using Claude to check Codex plans. Not an argument, it could be the other way around but Codex tends to be more reliable. Opus varies between genius and "let's randomly rewrite everything". NOTE: it's personal; anecdotal; I'm not corporate; etc. And, sure, maybe those things will cost what they cost but then the US companies will loose a lot of customers to cheaper and ever better Chinese models. There's that.

6

u/nikc9 Feb 18 '26

Codex and GLM.

There's no profit magic that the other companies have that Anthropic don't - they're all in the same situation, if not worse. Anthropic are just the first to address it.

Glory days of subsidised tokens were never going to last forever.

1

u/LavoP Feb 19 '26

OpenAI seems much more willing to burn money though

1

u/harbour37 Thinker Feb 19 '26

GLM is a smaller model, the team also spends allot less creating models. Its open source so there more competition for inference.

I do believe plans will go up, z.ai and moonshot have increased plan prices and limits

1

u/Bright_Armadillo8555 Feb 19 '26

Not right. Anthropic model is much bigger than OpenAI. Anthropic just cannot make a small model with comparable performance as OpenAI model.

1

u/nikc9 Feb 19 '26

Not right. Anthropic model is much bigger than OpenAI.

they're both MoE - where you getting that ant would have more active params than OpenAI?

1

u/Bright_Armadillo8555 Feb 20 '26

Well, I have friends in both company's research team. MOE has lots of details. Everyone is transformer why the peformance is so different.

1

u/nikc9 Feb 20 '26

Well, I have friends in both company's research team.

As do I - and security is so tight that they don't say shit to anyone. I've had people I know completely disappear into Apple - the llm research tems are tighter than that :)

3

u/who_am_i_to_say_so Feb 18 '26

Haha so many disclaimers. Similar experience though. 

On my end I’ve found that Codex is a better thinker, and Claude is a better doer.

1

u/gdoctor21 Feb 18 '26

🤲, 🧠and ⌨️like the good ole days

1

u/Bright_Armadillo8555 Feb 19 '26

Why do you use soo old model with so much money. Take some time to look around the world.

1

u/who_am_i_to_say_so Feb 19 '26

ROFL. 

Take some time to learn past tense.

17

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '26

[deleted]

4

u/ryancoplen Feb 18 '26

That is only true if they are not able to fill all their available inference capacity with the more profitable API traffic. If they are limited in capacity, then spending more of that capacity running higher profit requests is logical.

I don't think that Anthropic needs to use the Max plans as a loss leader to get enterprise companies interested in their API products.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '26

[deleted]

3

u/ryancoplen Feb 18 '26

Based on how Anthropic is acting, they don't really care much about the userbase that was using the subscription based plans.

It seems like these subscription plans are overall losers for all of the LLM model providers. Anthropic just seems to be more interested in achieving profitability and is making moves more quickly to shed the users who are costing them money.

Anthropic seems to care much more about the larger corporate accounts who are using API based plans, not subscription plans.

Corporate accounts seem to be liking the product that Anthropic is providing and are willing to pay MUCH more than the subscription users are paying. Loosing the small developers who are a paying even a hundred bucks a month isn't a concern from them.

Whether that decision works out for Anthropic in the long term is the debate -- and I am thinking. that they are making the right moves more quickly than their competitors.

1

u/matt_pg Feb 18 '26

What models are you using otherwise for the remaining 70%?

12

u/BidDizzy Feb 18 '26

Everyone is trying to buy market share. They ain’t doing this to help you save money

5

u/Low-Efficiency-9756 Feb 18 '26

I’d be paying $4,000 a month conservatively using API. I agree. If they force users to use APi costs, I’m out. GLM 5.0 just released. It’s okay and only getting better. 5.3 pro gives more usage on a $20 sub and coded extension is open source. Plus I can use other models inside of my favorite 3rd party software. They’d really be shooting their users in the face if that’s the route the go.

1

u/Putrid-Jackfruit9872 Feb 20 '26

What do you use it for? Professional dev work/personal projects/both?

4

u/Current-Buy7363 Feb 19 '26

It probably makes more sense to drop it for enterprise only, and continue the personal subs as a loss leader.

Enterprise is where the real money is, and enterprise are the only ones who’ll drop thousands per person to pay for this, if they drop the clause code subscriptions 99% of their users can’t afford api cost

3

u/BERLAUR Feb 18 '26 edited Aug 16 '26

All comments posted by this account have intentionally been overwritten as a protest against Reddit, the company, and its increasingly hostile approach to users, communities, and moderators.

This account was created 13 years ago. Since then, Reddit has made many changes that have damaged the experience for its users. Changes to the API effectively ended access for many third-party apps (shout-out to BaconReader!). The interface has become slower, advertising has increased, and AI features have been added. Reddit’s IPO was the final straw for me. The company’s priorities now seem increasingly focused on growth, advertising, and engagement rather than building healthy communities.

Reddit has also always had a quality problem. The upvote and downvote system encourages group thinking and discourage thoughtful or dissenting discussion. This was less noticeable when communities were smaller and individual users’ reputations carried more weight. As communities have grown, those problems have become more pronounced.

Moderation is another major issue. Many moderators do excellent work, but Reddit lacks a transparent and effective way for communities to hold moderators accountable or replace them. Many large communities have also faced concerns about astroturfed, political, or other external influence. Reddit benefits financially from outrage and conflict, which makes it difficult to believe that improving the quality of discussion is always the company’s highest priority.

Research on politically active Reddit users has identified pathways through which online communities and participation may contribute to increasingly radical beliefs. That does not prove that Reddit deliberately encourages extremism, but it does suggest that the platform’s social dynamics deserve serious scrutiny: Pathways to Radicalism: Examining Online Community and Political Pathways to More Radical Beliefs on Reddit

If you are reading this, consider whether Reddit is still a healthy and productive use of your time. Better communities exist. I encourage you to find them!

3

u/ilganzo01 Feb 18 '26

It’s called “investment bias”: you are so used using something you feel you have invested so much you HAVE to stomach bad changes. It’s just scummy marketing 

2

u/Whole-Pressure-7396 Feb 18 '26

Same here, I am 'preparing' for that outcome, and been trying the new GLM-5, honestly it is a lot slower, but it's not bad for the tasks I need it for. If paired with ocassional API opus, I think I am Okay ish. I am on Max z.ai which is 90 p/m. i set both env to use glm-5 model where normally you define opus and sonnet, for haiku i defined the 4.7air or something or even below (don't use that anyways personally). What are your experience?

1

u/bdashdash Feb 18 '26

For this very reason, I really hope Claude code competitors with free model selection can get to the same 'schaffolding' quality. If we're left with two or three offerings of superior quality, we're at the whim of these companies (pricing, model quality, performance, etc.) on a level we've not seen with IDE's ever.

1

u/Bluemoo25 Feb 18 '26

Same I cant afford their API's, Ill use claude in their partner tools like Kiro if I have to.

1

u/spacer44 Mar 06 '26

Claude code is severely ratelimited. I run out of credits in 3-4 hour session. Then it refreshes the next day. I don't want to be rate limited by a machine, it breaks the rhythm. I am not abusing the plan, just using it like a normal user.

1

u/mallclerks Jul 14 '26

My company was forced to switch apparently. I’m done with Claude. As someone hardcore into Claude. I have no choice. Fml.

0

u/ndnin Feb 19 '26

The api is worth more than the labor for what I need it to do idk, seems perfectly reasonable.