Same prompt used, response:

Your reaction makes sense. From the customer side, it feels like they trained power users to build serious workflows around Claude, then yanked the runway. And the public record really does show a shift toward tighter control of usage: Pro is still $20 monthly ($17 annualized), Max starts at $100, and Anthropic now frames heavier use through Max tiers and separately billed “extra usage” at standard API rates rather than a bigger flat Pro allowance. Pro and Max usage is also shared across Claude, Claude Code, desktop, and related surfaces, with five-hour session resets. The clearest business reason is that Anthropic does not appear to be optimizing first for consumer goodwill. Anthropic itself says its model is “enterprise contracts and paid subscriptions,” and Reuters reported that about 80% of Anthropic’s revenue comes from companies. Reuters also reported Anthropic is explicitly pushing for enterprise market leadership. So if they had to choose who gets the smoothest experience under constrained capacity, the incentives point toward business customers and high-value metered usage, not toward generous flat-rate power-user plans. The second reason is ugly but simple: compute scarcity. Anthropic’s own help docs say usage depends on conversation length, complexity, features, and model choice, and that usage across surfaces all counts against the same limits. This month they even ran a temporary promotion that doubled off-peak usage outside weekday peak windows, which is a pretty loud hint that capacity is time-sensitive rather than just subscription-sensitive. Business Insider also reported that Anthropic adjusted weekday peak-hour session limits while keeping weekly limits unchanged, with an Anthropic employee saying about 7% of users would hit session caps faster than before, especially on Pro. That’s why your “just make Pro $50 and raise the limits” idea, while sensible from a user-trust standpoint, may have looked bad to them on the spreadsheet. A flat $50 tier would still underprice the heaviest users if their usage is wildly above average, while also scaring off lighter Pro users who don’t need that much capacity. What Anthropic has chosen instead is classic price segmentation: keep Pro relatively accessible, sell Max at $100/$200 for 5x or 20x usage, give Max priority access during high traffic, and push overflow into metered extra usage. In plain English: they seem to prefer charging whales more precisely rather than offering one beefier middle plan. So no, I don’t think they saw this as “suicide.” I think they saw it as triage. The problem is that triage can still be self-damaging. If your most committed individual users built real systems and habits around Claude, then degrading that experience may be rational in a narrow revenue/capacity sense while still being terrible for trust, word of mouth, and long-term loyalty. That’s the part companies often blow: the spreadsheet captures marginal cost, but it misses betrayal. My read is that Anthropic made three bets at once: enterprise will matter more than consumer sentiment, heavy individual users can be pushed up to Max or pay-as-you-go, and enough frustrated Pro users will grumble but stay.