I use Pro for hobby projects. I am a dev by trade. I don’t use it for work but I understand best practices, settings use of mcps, etc. to optimize/minimize context churn and cost. For my small/medium hobby projects, I was getting into a rhythm of 2-3 hours/day and generally getting to 100% per week. When the “50% off non-core hours for 2 weeks” came out - my first reaction was “oh they are planning to roll out some increase in cost model and are hoping this will soften the blow”. If it was purely to relieve capacity issues at core hours, why only a 2 week promo period? A week went by and I noticed no big changes. Used during non-core hours and was satisfied. There is always a low level din of posts of people complaining their sessions get eaten up too fast, but when they are relatively few it is easy to chalk that up to their specific situations. As everyone knows, things changed late last week. It wasn’t a modest say 20-30% increase, it was easily 3-5x. I went thru my weekly session in a day and a half with the same setup and things I had been doing prior weeks. There was an immediate explosion of complaints online, echoing my experience. This was not business as usual. Silence from Anthropic. I contacted the help desk and was ignored. Days went by, waiting for some kind of explanation. Nothing. Eventually some muted response from Anthropic that they fixed some issues and were looking into things. But nothing that explains a huge jump. And some frankly infuriating posts by some Anthropic employees suggesting basic best practices as if most of us aren’t already doing that, and implying that our usage practices were to blame. I have no doubt they know exactly why the cost model changed so drastically. Their claims that there are no bugs responsible for any massive increase leads me to conclude that it was an unannounced, planned massive cost increase - and they were hoping by having the promo it would just blow over as part of the din. If they were up front about it, that would be one thing. If they are losing lots of money on people like me on the $20 plan, I get it. I would consider paying more, but the way they have gone about this is totally unacceptable. They are forcing my hand to try out their competitors. And if they continue not being forthright, it will be a big factor in any future move to another platform. submitted by /u/DistantDrummer
Originally posted by u/DistantDrummer on r/ClaudeCode
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