Facing Anthropic's New Usage Limits

0:00Anthropik is cracking down and tightening their usage limits for Cloud code. And this is interesting for a number of reasons. This is a problem that we had over the weekend, basically, and a little bit last week. But I think it's interesting because this is a problem that basically every AI company is going to face in the future at some point. And you, as a user of AI tools, are going to get this issue, whether you use Cloud or Google or OpenAI or anyone else. This is a problem that I think anyone can have. And it all is kind of rooted in the not very transparent way that some of these models are talking about their usage limits.

0:35We're going to get into all of that, what you can do and what these AI companies are doing on the podcast today. But before we get into it, I wanted to mention if you want to try the top 40 different AI models, including everything from Claude and everything from OpenAI, check out my own startup, which is AIbox.ai. We have a platform which is in beta right now and essentially get access to the top 40 models. You get Anthropic, Cohere, DeepSeek, Google, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Quen, XAI, a bunch of image models, text-to-speech, speech-to-text models. It's all$20 a month. You can try all of them.

1:09You can use all of them. And you can use them on the same thread, which personally I actually find way more useful because I'll be talking to ChatGPT to get me to brainstorm something analytical. I'll switch to Cloud Code and just pick up the conversation of Cloud Code, make it have a better tone. and then I'll pull in something like Ideogram to generate images of what I'm working on all inside of the same thread. It's super, super nice. So in any case, if you want to try it out, it is AIbox.ai. There is a link in the description and I'd love to hear what you have to, what you think about the platform.

1:39All right, let's get into what Anthropic is doing here. So the first thing that I think people were upset about, and also I'll explain why you can't be too upset. So the main thing people are upset about, they have this thing called the Max plan. It is $200 a month, like all these platforms have$200 a month plans, right? So big whoop. It's for developers specifically for people using Claude code. So this is actually something we use at AI box and, and our CTO, he like sent me this article before I even saw it because he was like, Oh, dang it. Maybe the party's over. And basically what was happening is before we got on the max plan, we were spending$100 every two days on Claude code credits.

2:17We're just like, that's just how much it costs, right? So you can imagine$100 every two days gets very expensive. And we were actually thrilled because we're getting so much done. We're doing front end, back end, cloud code, pretty much just ties into your whole code base. And it's a text interface where you're like, hey, you know, go to all of our, you know, all of our sales pages and go update the footer to be like X, Y, and Z. Or you could say, hey, go and create a new, you know, feature on this tool that we have that's able to automatically upload and generate images that do X, Y, Z. Like you could do really impressive things.

2:51It's, you know, not quote unquote vibe coding where all these guys are over on Lovable or these other apps and kind of making like these, you know, front end interfaces. Like it was doing some serious stuff. Now, was it perfect? No, sometimes it would just break everything and you got to revert the change and go figure out why and change, you know, how you asked it a question. But we got very good and essentially came up with some really good steps in order to, you know, ask Cloud Code questions. very elaborate stuff. And so essentially, we're able to generate tons and get a ton done for what we would be paying engineers in way more money for.

3:22The problem was, it still was pretty expensive, because we're getting so much done. And there's this max plan, which is essentially$200 a month. And once we realized, because you know, I've seen comments on Twitter, people talking about that they just launched this thing. And so we tried it out. And it was kind of complicated, because you actually can't get it just by like clicking on it, you got to contact them and like send them a message and get them to add it to your account and do all this, I don't know, sort of annoying stuff, but whatever. Basically we went from paying a hundred dollars every two days to$200 a month, which seems incredible.

3:52And we are not the only ones because, um, there's someone else that was commenting on a story over on tech crunch and they are a super heavy user of, um, Claude code. And they, they're, they want to remain anonymous because they don't want to know, they don't want people to know who they were, but they said that this, you know, this max plan lets them make about$1 ,000 worth of calls. So he was measuring their API pricing, he was just looking at how much like output he was getting and looking at what their API cost was. And he's like, look, I'm getting$1 ,000 worth of calls every single day on a$200 a month plan, right?

4:26So he's getting$30 ,000, or, you know, if he's$20 ,000, if he's not working in the weekends, it's getting$20 ,000 worth of outputs for$200 a month. It's like insane, right? It's so is way too much, way too generous. I mean, we love it, but it's probably too generous for the company. And he, so basically this guy said he wasn't surprised the usage limits were coming and becoming more restrictive, but pretty much I think what he said and what everyone said is like, just be transparent. He said the lack of communication just causes people to lose confidence in them. We're all also kind of crying and whining as we're saving thousands and thousands of dollars.

5:03So you like, take it with a grain of salt. So basically what happened and what could other what what could be the implication for other ai companies basically there's a kind of this arbitrage where you're getting very cheap output for code for um you know 200 bucks a month they started restricting it but they didn't tell people they were restricting it basically um people were just you just get kind of this error message that said cloud code limit reached and then you were given a time which was typically within a matter of hours when your limit was going to reset but there was like basically nowhere online could you see any sort of uh announcement about a change of limits.

5:38A lot of people just thought that their subscription had been downgraded and that their usage was being inaccurately tracked. One person was complaining over on GitHub. So basically, you can go to GitHub and see, you know, people's comments and complaints on what's going on. But one user specifically said, your tracking of usage limits has changed and is no longer accurate. There's no way in the 30 minutes of a few requests, I've hit the 900 messages, right? So some people like us are going crazy on it. Some people are using it less, but it's still useful to them, right? What was really interesting is Anthropic basically, like said, yes, like when they were someone reached out to them about it, they're like, Yeah, we know we have this problem.

6:19And there's something going on, but they didn't really elaborate further. And it's kind of hard for them to elaborate, right? Because if they said, Hey, look, we had some sort of outage or GPUs went down, or our server was went down, or like, something like that, then people be like, Okay, well, we want like a refund and like, or like some sort of discount or whatever, Right. So they're kind of like very not transparent about the whole thing other than saying like, yeah, we see an issue. We're trying to fix it, basically. What's interesting is like it's kind of funny to me because people that I heard talk about this issue basically were like, OK, we're going to go try different platforms.

6:51If you you know, so one person in particular said I just stopped the. Well, OK, so this is kind of crazy. They said pretty much the whole project got killed from this usage limit. They couldn't work on it at all. I'm assuming they're doing some crazy stuff with front end and back end. And when we do that, we use an insane amount of compute. But anyways, this user said that it has been impossible to get their project to move forward with all these limits. They said, quote, it just stopped the ability to make progress. I tried Gemini and Kimmy, but there's really nothing else that's competitive with the capability set of Claude code right now.

7:23And this is true. Like Gemini, I'll tell you the amazing thing about Google Gemini is it's got a million token context window. So you put this huge file in there, but guess what? some code bases are way bigger than that. And plus, you don't want to copy and paste your entire code base into Gemini to ask it to do a little question. Cloud code is amazing because it's built right into your terminal. And so, you know, VS code or whatever. And so you can be coding in where you're usually looking at your code, where all your code is hosted and held. And it's, you know, editing everything right in there.

7:54You're not copying and pasting it off site somewhere else, like Elon Musk recommended you with Grok for like, and like, I welcome Grok or Gemini to build tools like CloudCode. But right now, CloudCode is just the best because it plugs into what you currently use. It does the front end and the back end. It's insane and does all the design as well. It looks at your designs. Anyways, it's amazing. I'm sure you've heard me talk about it too much, but it is really impressive. And like this person was saying, like there are no other options. So it's kind of interesting. We had this really big unlock in coding capabilities thanks to it, but there's not a lot of other options.

8:25And I would love for there to be other options. They just don't exist right now with what Claude's able to do. So what does this mean and why were they able to do this and really no one kind of get mad at them? So what's interesting is if you go to their website and look at basically the terms for Claude's max plan usage, like how much usage you get out of it, it doesn't say you get a certain amount of tokens. It doesn't say you get a certain amount of compute or basically anything. All it says is that they actually have one plan lower than max, which is called expanded usage and that's$100 a month.

8:58So there's regular Claude,$20 a month, expanded usage,$100 a month and max$200. So like, what do you get? They don't really explain. All they say is that the expanded usage is five times more usage than Pro and that the maximum is 20 times more usage than Pro. So theoretically, if they were throttling everyone on the Pro tier as well, you're still getting 20 times more usage than the Pro. Just everyone equally gets throttled. So, you know, there's like nothing people can really do to complain or like get compensated or something for it because like they never said you got a certain amount they just said a certain percentage and if they drop how much uh you know how much how many tokens that the pro plan gets then everyone else drops 5x or 20x so in any case i think that's kind of a sneaky thing they did and i think other ai companies are thinking along the same lines there where they don't really say like oh you can generate like five videos an hour.

9:52They just say like, they're just like really not transparent about it. And it's like five times as many videos as our free tier and the free tier can be whatever they decide to throttle it out. So I think this is kind of interesting. If you go to their website, it still says that their network has 100 % uptime for the week. So they're not really calling it an outage. It's basically probably a lot of usage and they just had to dial back what they were allowing people to use. As of now, I think it's mostly sort of regulated. But I think over the weekend, it was a really big deal. A lot of people were complaining and getting this air.

10:23And I think it's something that will be brought back as usage spikes in the future. And I don't think that Anthropics, the only company that will do this, I think we're going to see this from basically every company, we even see when opening, I makes a big new product announcement, a big launch, and everyone's trying to test it out. You know, I remember like Sam Altman, I think it was with memory or something was like, hey, everyone gets memory like tomorrow. And then like, the next day was like, actually, too many people wanted to try memory. So basically, it's going to take like three weeks to roll it out to everyone.

10:51So we can like ramp up our capability to support it. So it's, these things get very popular, and it's really hard to supply all of the demand sometimes, but it's going to be interesting. And I think at the end of the day, it'd be great if these companies are like transparent about it, like, hey, we're reaching high, you know, volumes of usage, we've kind of pulled up throttled everyone a little bit right now. We hope to have this regulated soon, spin up more servers, etc, etc. That's not typically the way they want to communicate, though, because they're worried that people are going to, you know, complain and try to get some sort of compensation for it.

11:23So, in any case, fascinating time. If you learned anything in the podcast today, the number one thing that you could do to say thank you is to leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcast. It helps to show out a ton. And also, if you want to try the top 40 AI models, go check out AIbox.ai, my startup. I've been thrilled by how many of you guys have tried it and given me amazing feedback. We're working on implementing anyone that sent me a message, sent a, you know, found a bug or sent a feature request. We're working on all of them right now and are going to have a really exciting update soon with some incredible new features.

11:56So go check it out. It's$20 a month, AIbox.ai. The link's in the description and I will catch you guys all next time.