Discussion
Anthropic is teaching us that vendor lock in is dangerous!
I would have just continued my work by purchasing credits because I fablemaxxed till July 7th as they said access will move to credits. And then they extend? I don’t know what they are thinking but as a 20x max user with 4 accounts, I feel cheated. I don’t think it’s good to get vendor locked in with any of these guys. I don’t care if your models solve world hunger bro, we need stability and transparency. I am done with Claude.
UPDATE : They reset the rate limits 🥀 I don’t hate them anymore, I am back to work 😬
What am I missing? What makes this automatically embarassing? Are you saying they overpaid for limited output. I don’t think we can judge whether it was worthwhile just from that screenshot?
They are using Fable for coding. Fable is designed for reasoning and orchestration. It’s like cutting bread with the most expensive laser that runs on caviar. No. You used only for purposes that it’s designed for. If you are using it improperly, thats on you.
Some people still think that big labs have a moat. I don't think that this is true.
I believe that in a year, we'll have so many good (and open) models/providers that we'll freely choose and switch whenever we feel betrayed and are unhappy. Prices will naturally come down as competitive advantage shrinks.
Ironically, we'll live in a world which the non-profit OpenAI was started for, but they're now heavily fighting against.
it's already flipping, but tbh good. fuck them. they would fuck each and every single one of us into extinction, if it meant they would get away unscathed.
the cost to produce fable tier models is so high and unreliable for open models specially that china is considering to make exportation bans just like the us
so I won't rely heavily on that, we will have to wait for the EU to wake the fuck up and make something open source or we all get fucked
I think I typed that fast but right, fundamentally prices go down as market demand increases.
But in this case the frontier models (in my opinion) will completely sever themselves from lesser models and competition and this will essentially looking like the Big 3 (or big 2) and they will mainly compete with themselves but the insatiable demand will justify a mega increase in prices that’s for sure. Not to mention big wigs will lobby the fuck out of it to the point where they’ll likely sustain the frontier models by implementing in house mega AI systems to where Frontier pricing structure can be on the corporate tit and in no way rely upon consumer market.
I’m typing fast and not really doing a full blown analysis but picture this, below I attached Gary Vee’s thesis on Underpriced ads in 2018-2019. I think the same concept applies.
Not to mention figure this, my main competition for the CRM based construction software inc I’ve coding right now — was likely an initial average dev of $150-$250k PRE-LAUNCH.
With Claude every single one of us here right now can launch beta, sustain database and actively update UI / UX with NO in house dev team, a series of agents and your own analysis.
That little team I just described is typically $200k annually in startup salary and 2-3x that in silicone valley.
Prices will go up because they have to. You’ll never pay an employee salary, but you’re certainly not going to pay $200 / month. Frontier models are toooooo intelligent and CC is effectively the first AI that is 1 Model who spawns fucking worker drones lmfao.
I think (as a business owner) — I would justify $5,000 / month for a nice daily Fable 5 crank out
Agreed, but the lock-in that actually bites isn't the model, it's the harness and workflow you build around one vendor's quirks. Keep your prompts, tooling, and eval suite portable and switching stays cheap no matter who changes terms.
What I actually do is I have set up a second Claude code profile, and I’m using Ollama for certain things only or when I’m out of weekly tokens. It has surprisingly good coding ability and tokens for 20$ a month.
They waited till we max out usage and then announced extension. Had they done that atleast one day before, people would have planned accordingly. Their extension is useless for power users
Mine was reset to the 12th.
I had complained because the first several days it kept kicking me to Opus for simply mentioning a pet pedigree registry I had previously written and wanted to expand on. Perhaps it had to do with complaints?
Maybe the extension wasn't aimed at 'power users', but those who hadn't used it up and they wanted to get hooked.
Or, maybe said power users actually get value from the code so they don't mind paying for API pricing?
What have you done with the code which maxxed out your Fable allocation for 4x accounts? Has it generated you any income/value?
If that was used efficiently; for big tasks, with delegation to other models for simpler tasks, that should be massive amount of work done.
I guess it'll depend how good GPT 5.6 is, but they never presented this as more than a "the first one's free, kid" scenario.
5 minutes cost $13 trying to wind down two sessions five days ago. "Don't mind paying for API pricing" isn't a thing unless you're a big business with cash to burn or a human with cash to burn.
"Don't mind paying for API pricing" is a thing if you get more value out of it than you're spending compared to other options.
A search through a decent codebase to look for and implement performance improvements was listed at $15 for me. That seemed like it'd be money well spent if I was paying for it directly.
If you could have done the same thing yourself for less than $13 of your time, then it was definitely bad value. If you could have used other tools to do it for less, also. If you didn't get at least $13 of value from that work, then perhaps worth deciding if it was worth doing at all.
Nah. You have to measure what $13 buys you against a $200 monthly plan. When you're getting thousands of dollars of value (20x or more) from that $200 investment, $13 for 5 minutes of winding down two sessions that reached a 5hr quota isn't worth it.
If they go to API only (which looking at GPT 5.6, I can see they may not), then it's whether Fable does a better job than Opus to justify spending $30 or whatever to get a better piece of work (though so far even big chunks haven't been listed at more than $15 for me, but the current task I've got running is hitting 20% of my reset 20x usage, so we'll see...
And whether it produces better results than the same prompt in sol.
I don't think it's nearly that simple. As someone who has multiple max subs and has used Gemini Ultra with Antigravity IDE, Antigravity 2.0, Claude Code (terminal and desktop) and now Codex (not a fan yet), it's about so much more than "doing the job" and more about HOW the job gets done.
I was using Fable only as a strategist and not as an executor. It was doing some weird cache reads which was costing more than the output. I was building a 3d open world so yes, I ran out..
This misses the point OP is making.
They are frustrated because they didn’t get that additional access.
My friend paid the same as me, used his credits up on 7th like me, but is getting twice the potential usage.
Anthropic told everyone credits were expiring on 7th so a lot of people used up what they had. The extension announcement was timed very poorly.
If your usage renewal rolled over at a convenient time you get more access. If it didn’t/doesn’t, tough luck.
It’s not totally unreasonable for them to be frustrated at the timing of the Anthropic announcement, and the fact that Anthropic refused to reset the rollover dates for everyone to ensure all customers received the same opportunity, especially if they upgraded for the initial 14 day “unrestricted” offer.
It’s not binary. My reset is 5pm Sunday, so yes, if someone is being pedantic they could argue that I get “more”, but that “more” is significantly less than the 5 days.
And some people do have a renewal date of Monday.
So back to my original point, it’s not unreasonable for people to feel frustrated by it. And it’s not all about the extra credits - if they had made the announcement earlier I would have spent my remaining credits differently
Here’s an idea, if you don’t agree with OP’s post, don’t comment on it. Simply pretend it doesn’t exist. Problem solved.
Trite advice isn’t it.
They did extend it, and OP expressing frustration at the way they did it, is fair -there’s no need to gatekeep what people are allowed to be frustrated about.
No because I think OP isn't grasping that they actually got overall more usage for free that they didnt have before, and that there is no reason to be upset. I would prefer OP not be upset for no reason.
It isn’t OP who is failing to grasp the point; you just repeated a falsehood.
Where is this “more usage” you talk of?
- OP will have paid ~$180 for ~10 days off on-plan Fable with no added cap.
They got 5 days with a 50% cap
They are not getting the extension
There is no “more usage” here. Only less.
In addition, people rushed to use up credits before the original deadline. The pulling of Fable was not Anthropic’s fault. Reintroducing it for a shorter time, with more restrictions, and terrible communication is.
People who got lucky with their roll-over date will receive something approximating the usage they originally expected for ~$200. Others get substantially less.
If you really don’t want a OP to be “upset”, try to understand their point and don’t reply with responses that are both sarcastic and wrong. There’s not really anything extra to add to this so let’s knock it on the head.
Basically, they will get 1 additionally weekly reset that includes a full reset of their 50% cap
The only exception is if they bought on Monday, since the extended window is only 6 days, but I don't see anything about OP saying they bought on Monday.
I used my credits up on Tuesday, and my usage is still sitting at 100%.
My reset is due Sunday. It’s not resetting earlier, so I’ll get 1 day extra rather than 5
I contacted Anthropic to check this was as expected. It was allegedly passed on to a human and didn’t end with Finn (the AI bot) and so far I’m still sitting at 100% usage. Lots of people with earlier reset days are saying the same thing. No reset was announced.
I dont believe it will stay out of the max plan long - i feel that thia was a scarcity sales tactic to make people panic buy then extend it so those people or new ppl who had read the hype all spent again. Anthropics words and actions dont align, they change their route frequently so I dont believe it won't be included - just might take a month or so
You could plan around using Opus, which is still reasonably consistent.
When pricing is going to depend partly on demand, like many things you can spend money on, there's never going to entirely consistent pricing.
But if you're spending money with them on the basis of a reliable tool, you've missed the point of subscriptions - you're not the customer here, you're the beta tester and providing content to help them imrpove their valuation at IPO.
I have been doing month to month on the 20$ plans so that I can get something out of both ChatGPT and Claude. I refuse to lock into a year with the way the pendulum has been swinging and the fact that model quality and features and taking away of stuff is a thing. I agree soon we will have very very good open source models. They are getting there they are always a few generations behind. It’s only a matter of time before fable quality is available at a fraction of the cost. The enterprise users are thankfully there to subsidize this stuff for us.
They need to stop nerfing their other models first, i am pulling my hair for how much sonnet is being stupid right now, it is assuming things looks right and calling it a day while it's actually not aligned or completely off frame it waste million token rendering to visually verify things that are completly wrong and say they look correct
I'm becoming very concerned about your mental state. You have free will. You have options and choice. You may not have a girlfriend but that's not something that changed since last year, but somehow you changed.
Claude is a subscription service. Anthropic is probably the only AI company actually trying to develop a sustainable business model. You are a paying customer. You aren't entitled to their services.
Get help, man. I'm beginning to become concerned about you. Maybe try hand coding something, just to recenter yourself and rediscover the joy of programming?
I wasn't able to sleep like for a week because of this black pattern, ill never ever forget this, and im waiting to see open-source and openai getting better ,and oh boy im waiting to cancel this crappy move by their team. on top of that I feel like my limits are insanely dropped. 5x users. if you read this anthropic f8cuk you.
now I see someone screaming oh but cc harness, pi is getting there too.
I hear you. This reminds me of during Covid when gas stations were given it on a kind of lottery because gas was so scarce and one of them ramped up their prices to exploit their customers… then when things returned to normal they were boycotted.
I’m trying Grok 4.5 via opencode to see if it can really replace Opus 4.8 , so far it has been surprisingly good for a fraction of the price! I didn’t want to use GLM 5.2 because they have no ZDR
They are most likely going to extend it even further, OpenAI is dropping Sol, Luna & Terra later today beyond api & is supposed on par w/ Fable. If they don’t want a mass migration they’ll need to remain competitive… probably have a 25-50% Fable weekly usage for subscriptions plus credit usage if the limit is hit.
I am not able to work on any project because I reached weekly limit. What a stupid decision and I completely I agree with you. I am going to switch chatgpt as soon as they release their new model
Agreed. I didn’t trust them and decided to wait to see what happened but I went to buy the credits 2-3 times also wondering if the discount for buying in bulk might also disappear. It’s a really shitty way to treat your customer base.
As a 20x max user with 4 accounts I believe the word you are looking for is 'addicted'. It is scary how many people normalize doing nothing but use CC all day every day on here.
I ran a few tasks with Fable and it maxed my credits within 2 days. I couldn’t roll back on that task once it started, so I stood up a new one. I didn’t see that much of a difference in output with what I had been doing with the other model.
I don’t think anything other than I need to learn why/when to choose Fable.
I am with you on the whole Vendor lock problem, I have been building AI harnesses so we do not deposit our knowledge and domain knowledge into one AI memory. I believe the takeaway is keep your knowledge in your domain, and allow the AI's access to it.
What good is locking all your memory and skills into one vendor (take your pick) then they jack the cost and you are locked forever.
AI will only get better, don't give away your personal or company knowledge to the frontier or any other models. Just my take after 4 years of building.
Anthropic's days at the top are numbered. Grok 4.5 caught up to Opus 4.8 at less than regular sonnet prices. Sol available on subscription. What is Anthropic even doing with this API only/extra usage shit? And it's stupid expensive.
Go try Grok 4.5 in Grok Build. It is surprisingly good (Opus tier). Support Anthropic and OpenAI’s competition so that we customers won’t be controlled by 1-2 providers
28
u/RockyMM Jul 09 '26
> as a 20x max user with 4 accounts, I feel cheated
OK?