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Claude Code weekly rate limits

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Re: Claude Code weekly rate limits

#321

Post by jononor »

vFunct wrote: post #9

Seems like their business plan is unsustainable. What's a sustainable cost model? Say an 8xB200 server costs $500,000, with 3 years depreciation, so $166k/year costs for a server. Say 10 people share that server full time per year, so that's going to need $16k/year/person to break even, so ~$1,388/month subscription to break even at 10x users per server. If they get it down to 100 users per server (doubt it), then th…

I do not think they are aiming to be cashflow positive now. That might not be possible. Though if it is within range they might want to go for it. Because the stamina needed to win this race is going to be immense. Especially since OpenAI is going hard for scaling up via investor funding, and Google can afford to loose/invest a couple billions annually by diverting from their main revenue sources.

A realistic business plan would be to burn cash for many years (potentially more than a decade), and bank on being able to decrease costs and increase revenue over that time. Investors will be funding that journey.

So it is way too early to tell whether the business plan is unsustainable. For sure the unit economics are going to be different in 5 and 10 years.

Right now is very tough though- since it is basically all early adopter power user types, which spend a lot of compute. Later one probably can expect more casuals, maybe even a significant amount of "gym users" that pay but basically never uses the service. Though OpenAI is currently stronger for casuals, I suspect.

Over the next decade, hardware costs will go down a lot. But they have go find a way to stay alive (and competitive) until then.

Re: Claude Code weekly rate limits

#322

Post by actsasbuffoon »

nharada wrote: post #236
arach wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if it affects only a minority of accounts, why not figure out how to special case them without affecting everyone else is the primary question I would ask myself if I worked on this the principle: let's protect against outliers without rocking the behavior of the majority, not at this stage of PMF and market discovery i'd also project out just how much the compute would cost for the outlier cohort - are we talking $5…

What do you think they should have done instead?

At a bare minimum there needs to be some way to understand how close you are to these limits. People shouldn’t be wondering if this is going to impact them or not.

Re: Claude Code weekly rate limits

#323

Post by arach »

Uehreka wrote: post #279
arach wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if it affects only a minority of accounts, why not figure out how to special case them without affecting everyone else is the primary question I would ask myself if I worked on this the principle: let's protect against outliers without rocking the behavior of the majority, not at this stage of PMF and market discovery i'd also project out just how much the compute would cost for the outlier cohort - are we talking $5…

> why not figure out how to special case them without affecting everyone else I’m guessing that they did, and that that’s what this policy is. If you’re talking about detecting account sharing/reselling, I’m guessing they have some heuristics, but they really don’t want the bad press from falsely accusing people of that stuff.

fair enough - DS probably ran through data and came up with 5% and some weekly cutoff as a good starting point until they have better measures in place

my point is that 5% still a large cohort and they happen to be your most excited/creative cohort. they might not all want to pay a surchage yet while everyone is discovering the use cases / patterns / etc

having said that, entirely possible burn rate math and urgency requires this approach

Re: Claude Code weekly rate limits

#324

Post by jjice »

As part of the 95% here, I'm totally cool with this. I'm just a Pro plan user, but holy shit I hit problems with their service constantly. Claude is my preferred LLM currently, but sometimes during a normal 9-5, I can't use it at all due to outages, which really gets in the way while developing an MCP server.

Anthropic seems like they need to boost up their infra as well (glad they called this out), but the insane over-use can only be hurting this.

I just can't cosign on the waves of hate that all hinges on them adding additional limits to stop people from doing things like running up $1k bills on a $100 plan or similar. Can we not agree that that's abuse? If we're harping on the term "unlimited", I get the sentiment, but it's absolutely abuse and getting to the point where you're part of the 5% likely indicates that your usage is abusive. I'm sure some innocent usage will be caught in this, but it's nonsense to get mad at a business for not taking the bath on the chunk of users that are annihilating the service.

Re: Claude Code weekly rate limits

#325

Post by stuaxo »

blitzar wrote: post #307
ketzo wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does your Claude code usage look like if you’re getting limited in 30 minutes without running multiple instances? Massive codebase or something?

I set claude about writing docstrings on a handful of files - 4/5 files couple 100 lines each - couple of classes in each - it didnt need to scan codebase (much). Low danger task so I let it do as it pleased - 30 minutes and was maxed out. Could probably have reduced context with a /clear after every file but then I would have to participate.

I hope you thoroughly go through these as a human, purely AI written stuff can be horrible to read.

Re: Claude Code weekly rate limits

#326

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

Terretta wrote: post #228
_jab wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anthropic is saying that one out of every 20 users will hit the new limit. Very good point, I find it unlikely that 1/20 users is account sharing or running 24/7 agentic workflows.

Moreover, if you run a SaaS, generally somewhere from 1 in 5 to 1 in 20 users are using you for real, while the others are mostly not using you. The stat would be more interesting if instead of 1 in 20 users, they said x in y of users with at least one commit per business day, or with at least one coding question per day, or whatever. I suspect this could be a significantly higher percentage of professional users the…

  … if you run a SaaS, generally somewhere from 1 in 5 to 1 in 20 users are using you for real, while the others are mostly not using you.
That is a hilarious and believable stat. Has anyone published such numbers or is it a dirty secret about how many corporate licenses are purchased and never used by the rank and file?

I can personally think of a few internally licensed products, announced with huge fan fare, which never get used beyond the demo to a VP.

Re: Claude Code weekly rate limits

#329

Post by cheema33 »

malthaus wrote: post #16

im really tired of all those ai players just winging it can someone please find a conservative, sustainable business model and stick with it for a few months please instead of this mvp moving target bs

Agree with the other reply here. You are complaining about a problem that does not exist. Want price predictability? Use the API pricing! It is pay per use.

The Buffet-style pricing gets you more bang for the buck. How much more? That bit is uncertain. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

Re: Claude Code weekly rate limits

#330

Post by blitzar »

tlbsofware wrote: post #320
blitzar wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I set claude about writing docstrings on a handful of files - 4/5 files couple 100 lines each - couple of classes in each - it didnt need to scan codebase (much). Low danger task so I let it do as it pleased - 30 minutes and was maxed out. Could probably have reduced context with a /clear after every file but then I would have to participate.

You can tell it to review and edit each file within a Task/subagent and can even say to run them in parallel and it will use a separate context for each file without having to clear them manually

Every day is a school day - I feel like this is a quicker way to burn usage but it does manage context nicely.
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