541–550 of 752 posts
Is this how tech companies operate now... 1) Stand up a service 2) ??? 3) Profit ??? - worry about any substantial support later
What later? You still can't get support from Google beyond their "community forum" with their condescending volunteer "diamond product experts" who have no power to help with anything account related.
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Netflix very much was priced below the cost of production for years and had to borrow money to make Netflix originals.
I'm not familiar with their originals economics, but the original streaming Netflix was not priced below the cost. As evidenced by them keeping the same subscription cost for years.
Netflix borrowed $16 billion over a decades
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/business/netflix-earnings...
Because subscriptions didn’t make enough money to fund its business. Were they being “anti competitive”?
Additional information from Google employee https://x.com/_mohansolo/status/2025766889205739899 : "We’ve been seeing a massive increase in malicious usage of the Anitgravity backend that has tremendously degraded the quality of service for our users. We needed to find a path to quickly shut off access to these users that are not using the product as intended. We understand that a subset of these users were not aware…
That's not what support has been telling their $250 a month customers.
we are unable to reverse the suspension [1]
I get the need to move fast to stabilise the service but similar to an outage it doesn't take much to put a banner on the support page to let customers know bans are temporary until they can come up with a better way of educating customers. Further more it doesn't much to instruct ban appeal teams to tell customers all bans are under review no matter what the reason is to buy them time to separate Claw bans from legitimate abuse bans that need to be upheld.
The fact that users are paying $250 for a service they can't use for at least the last 11 days kills any sympathy I had that Google needed "quickly shut off access", it's like they just sat on their hands until the social media storm hit flash-point.
After 11 days there still isn't even an official statement, just a panicked tweet from a dev likely also getting hammered on socials, goodness knows how long before accounts are restored and credits issued.
Even the original Google employee in the forum thread just ghosted everyone there after the initial "we're looking into it".
If you go to an all you can eat buffet, ignore the plates they give you, and start filling up your own takeaway boxes with days worth of food, you'd expect to be kicked out. No one would think this is unreasonable. You're not paying for unlimited food forever, you're paying for all you can eat in the restaurant right there.
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While I see the point of limited capacity, it also shows that Google did not plan for rate limiting / throttling of high usage customers. This is ALWAYS the problem with flatrate pricing models. 2% of your customers burn 80+% of your capacity. Did see that in former times with DSL, not too long ago with mobile and now with AI subscriptions. If you want to provide a "good" service for all customers better implement (a…
> it also shows that Google did not plan for rate limiting / throttling of high usage customers. There is a (pretty generous and imo reasonable) request quota that reset every 24h
I subscribe to the AI Pro plan. I knew of a published limit of 100 Pro prompts per day, but before this month it seemed they were relaxed about it. I have now started to be rate limited on Pro when nowhere near that quota, due to too many prompts within a short time window (probably due to short prompts and not aggregating my questions). So now I use the Thinking (basically Flash) model and bump up to Pro for certain queries only.
There will always be a minority who spoil it for the majority.
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I'll bite. I suspect that these plans aren't as intensely subsidized as people assume. I believe that API usage is probably also not subsidized at all. First, yes, subs are probably subsided, but I bet a significant % of users are profitable to serve, especially the "chat" users who don't use dev tools and have short context window conversations. Yes, I think the subs also exist as a driver to get lock-in and market…
> First, yes, subs are probably subsided, but I bet a significant % of users are profitable to serve, especially the "chat" users who don't use dev tools and have short context window conversations. Why would WebChat users need a subscription? It's free; I've even pasted tarballs of entire repos in there, and haven't hit limits! >
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> Suspending customers for using a fairly expensive subscription plan -- especially forfeiting an annual prepayment for a day or two of coloring outside the lines they're being suspended for using a private api outside of the app for which the api was intended. If you make a clone of the hbo app, so that you can watch hbo shows without ads by logging in with your discounted ads-included membership, your account will…
The facts are straightforward, even without analogies. But since we're using them... You are at the grocery store, checking out. The total comes to $250. You pay, but then remember you had a coupon. You present it to the cashier, who calls the manager over. The manager informed you that you've attempted to use an expired coupon, which is a violation of Paragraph 53 subsection d of their Terms of Service. They keep yo…
Of course Google can restrict how their API is accessed. But locking paid accounts with no warning, no explanation email, and no functioning support path while continuing to charge $249/month is a different problem entirely. A reasonable enforcement process would have been a warning email, grace period to stop using the tool, then restriction. What an awful way to lose trust, locking out their users but billing them…
Additional information from Google employee https://x.com/_mohansolo/status/2025766889205739899 : "We’ve been seeing a massive increase in malicious usage of the Anitgravity backend that has tremendously degraded the quality of service for our users. We needed to find a path to quickly shut off access to these users that are not using the product as intended. We understand that a subset of these users were not aware…
> We understand that a subset of these users were not aware that this was against our ToS and will get a path for them to come back on but we have limited capacity and want to be fair to our actual users. It feels like a good default for this would be something similar to video game bans: where you get a "vacation" from the service with a clear reason for why that is, but can return to using it later. Given how much…