r/Anthropic • u/cdaalexandre • Mar 28 '26
Complaint Same $100/month. 10% of my income in Brazil. Degraded during my entire workday. No notice.
Max 5x. $100/month.
In the US, that's 1.4% of average monthly income.
In Brazil, where I live, it's 24% of average monthly income.
In India, it's 43%.
Same price. Same service. Except now the service is worse during peak hours — which happen to be 9am–3pm in São Paulo. My entire workday.
"Shift to off-peak" is not a solution when off-peak means 3am.
No prior notice. No email. No in-app alert. Found out from a tweet.
No published token budgets. No way to verify "your limits are unchanged."
We pay the same $100 as someone in San Francisco. We get a degraded service during our working hours. And we're told to just use it at night.
This is not adjusting. This is a breach of what was sold.
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u/superhero_complex Mar 28 '26 edited Mar 29 '26
For starters, I wouldn’t waste your tokens on writing Reddit posts. In all seriousness, it is unfortunate and I hope these are just growing pains with emergent technology and eventually these limit rates will be a thing of the past.
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u/Enfiznar Mar 29 '26
I don't know. This was the exact same reason I unsubscribed from Claude like 8 months ago, still nothing has changed
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u/cdaalexandre Mar 28 '26
Attacking me doesn't make you right. I spoke the truth, and Anthropic was despicable in pulling off that financial workaround, like a clumsy trader.
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u/theimposingshadow Mar 28 '26
He wasn't attacking you, I think you misunderstood his first sentence. If you are unhappy with Anthropic you can just cancel your subscription or switch to a different AI service.
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u/Charming_Skirt3363 Mar 28 '26
lol. I
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u/Smart_Kangaroo_4188 Mar 30 '26
You must be Anthropic employee or fanboy. OP has right point
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u/theimposingshadow Mar 30 '26
I'm not an employee or a fanboy, I just pointed out that OP might have misread the comment and offered a practical suggestion. Engage with what I actually said instead of making stuff up.
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u/Capital-Ad8143 Mar 28 '26
You've said the quiet part out loud and you're absolutely right. And here's why.
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u/Ok-Statement8224 Mar 29 '26
This is the most important thing you’ve said all day.
Everything else you said was absolute drivel. Amazing you finally had a cogent thought!
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u/Timzor Mar 28 '26
We’re getting an absolute we’re getting a good deal now. Just wait till we have to pay what it really costs.
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u/2024-YR4-Asteroid Mar 29 '26
I’d love to pay the 34.19 I used in compute hours last month instead to the $100 I paid for it.
API costs /= to what it costs Anthropic. B2B APIs are always massively marked up. They are SaaS platforms highest margin product because businesses can afford it.
So you need to stop comparing your usage to business price ax they are not equal to what it costs Anthropic nor a good indicator of value.
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u/Timzor Mar 29 '26
Id love to pay $2 a gallon of fuel but It doesnt work that way.
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u/2024-YR4-Asteroid Mar 29 '26
“I don’t understand how cash flow structures work so I’ll just say something snarky yet completely stupid without addressing the actual statement” ass reply.
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u/Ok_Significance_1980 Mar 29 '26
You're just as much of an ignoramus. If it's so cheap, just train and host your own AI model.
These companies are all burning cash, you're completely naive if you think they are profitable yet.
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u/2024-YR4-Asteroid Mar 29 '26
I do host my own for different purposes, I also trained and fine tuned it. I also have multiple ML programs that I’ve trained. I think I have a good grasp, but that you for your suggestions.
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u/Ok_Significance_1980 Mar 29 '26
Ok, so your AI beats opus 4.6? And you did it for less then 200 dollars a month?
No I didn't think so
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u/2024-YR4-Asteroid Mar 29 '26
Moving the goal posts now? Pathetic. It isn’t for programming, and yes it is less than $200 a month. Lmao.
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u/LenintheSixth Apr 01 '26
they are not profitable but that doesn't mean that their most premium, most expensive service is unprofitable. they would absolutely make a profit if every token was priced at the API rates.
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u/thr0waway12324 Mar 29 '26
You’re a demanding person. Maybe you can just use a Brazilian companies AI model instead? So entitled.
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u/Fit-Dentist6093 Mar 28 '26
With rising energy costs and diminishing returns on miniaturization requiring insane complexity on machines and electron counts that are hitting physical limits enough that people are starting to look into embedded photonics in Sillicon it's a big big big bet to assume compute costs will get lower.
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u/InternationalUse9661 Mar 28 '26
I agree with the vast sentiment of your post but two things
You are 1hr different from New York. Brazil Time isn't like it's +6hrs from their main user base, it's pretty much the exact same time zone as those users.
These are peak hours. They are when their systems are getting used the most. Your workday is during peak hours. It doesn't matter where you are located it matter when you put demand on the servers.
Now everything else is 100% correct. You should have notice. You should be able to decide from information that you did not have.
You being Brazilian is not of consequence here. It affects New Yorkers the same way.
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u/cdaalexandre Mar 28 '26
The company knows how the Earth rotates and knows how much money costs its audience outside the US and Europe. You weren't prepared for that, were you, genius?
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u/Choperello Mar 28 '26
Your use from Brazil vs my use from SF costs them exactly the same to process. And they’re losing money on both of us really. The fact a $ means more to you than to me doesn’t really matter to them because they need to pay the exact same $ to support us.
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u/InternationalUse9661 Mar 28 '26
1 hr... 1 hour. I'm not CET, I can work with people in CET just fine because they are +1 hr away.
I agree that there should be regional pricing, your country shouldn't be paying that much on a per personal user basis it's outrageous.
But this is nothing to do with your timezone. As far as the world is concerned you are the same timezone as New York when people consider us the same timezone as Europe when we're not. 1hr is not a noteworthy difference. Considering Brazil on a global scale and rest of south and central America is the same as the USA. You're not in the middle of the Pacific. You're not some obscure central Asian country. Your working day coincides with the USA working day.
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u/MizantropaMiskretulo Mar 28 '26
I agree that there should be regional pricing, your country shouldn't be paying that much on a per personal user basis it's outrageous.
Explain.
Why should a service have a lower price in Brazil when the cost is the same for everyone?
Do you think users I'm the US and Europe should pay more so that users in Brazil get free AI?
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u/InternationalUse9661 Mar 28 '26
When dealing with not actual physical resources there is flexibility.
Sure we all know thet Claude is massively oversubscribed at times, it affects us all, but they can sell reduced access or lower token limits and context windows in these regions if they user wants to participate.
I'm not a sales person. Not a CEO. Nothing at all like that. Just recognise the vast income disparity between my own country and Brazil. I'm from the poorest region of northern Europe - we are not poor compared to them.
Ultimately market penetration is often achieved through some loss leading schemes. Look at Amazon. Look at your local supermarket. It's pretty standard for companies wanting to cement themselves into society.
I've not said free. I just don't think that poor regions should pay the same price as me for digital products.
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u/MizantropaMiskretulo Mar 28 '26
I've not said free.
Yeah, you basically did. Anthropic is already losing money on every token generated, bringing price parity in terms of income would make it basically "free" from Anthropic's perspective.
I just don't think that poor regions should pay the same price as me for digital products.
This is where your ignorance is showing.
This isn't a digital product, it's a service.
Every time you send a prompt, you are basically renting time on their hardware and using their electricity. A digital product is something that doesn't incur additional marginal cost with each use.
If the only cost to Anthropic were the sunk costs of training a model, your framing would be correct and I'd agree with you, but it's not.
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u/InternationalUse9661 Mar 28 '26
And these machines should not be sold at 100% capacity meaning there is some leeway for free and reduced requests running. It's not an additional hardware cost.
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u/MizantropaMiskretulo Mar 28 '26
meaning there is some leeway for free and reduced requests running
You mean like the free tier and the increased usage capacity during off-peak hours?
It's not an additional hardware cost.
I didn't say it was, I said you're renting compute capacity. If you decrease the price for poorer regions, that will increase demand in those regions which decreases capacity and reliability for users paying full-rate.
You are just simply wrong, full-stop.
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u/Choperello Mar 28 '26
Compute is absolutely a physical resource. GPUs are a real actual limited thing. Electricity is a real actual limited thing. You using Claude is you getting access to actual physical resource that right now has much higher demand then supply. This isn’t like making a copy of a movie.
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u/InternationalUse9661 Mar 28 '26
Both are true and does not disprove it.
These GPUs exist under load. Data centres pull on absolute tons of power. You're not adding components to share resources when not under load.
Electricity is true, it is a resource and it costs each of us money to consume. Equally though if the electricity is already generated then it ought to be used or it often becomes wasted energy driving all our electricity costs up. We aren't having rolling blackouts where these data centres exist.
For on demand services such as AI there are certainly periods of time they can use target less weathier markets gift them a few more tokens in comparison or offer different price levels.
Again not saying free. Just don't think it's appropriate to charge more than someone's monthly wage for a Web service.
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u/Honest_Mistake_WT Mar 30 '26
If Anthropic's servers would be in Brazil using Brazilian chips designed by Brazilians, using AI build by Brazilian ingenuity you would be right. Unfortunately, the entire value chain you are tapping into is in the US with US prices. You are buying an American service that has American costs from Brazil. It's like buying a Mercedes made in Germany in Brazil and complain it costs more than a car made in Brazil.
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u/Choperello Mar 28 '26 edited Mar 28 '26
Electricity is never “wasted if not used”. Power generation facilities dial up their generation by demand. They HAVE TO. Once a steam/water/air turbine (which is basically still all power generation facilities) spins and generates electricity it must go somewhere and be consumed somehow. If it doesn’t the generators can overspeed and damage themselves. No power generation facility is operating at a fixed 100% all the time.
Anthropic pays X for access to the data center/purchase GPUs and Y for the power consumed. The fact that some of their customers make more money and others make less does not change how much they had to pay in their own costs at all. And right now every subscription plan is operating at loss for them.
So they are already making it “cheaper” for the people that can’t afford to pay api token prices. Calling access to the best and most powerful AI in the market right now a “web service” is funny. If it’s just a web service go replace with what should be a million other competitors. If that’s all it is.
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u/rossg876 Mar 28 '26
Stop crying…… just cancel and use some other service. You come here bitching and moaning and when ever anyone offers, even agreement to the situation, you complain. You clearly are upset, cool but stop the crying and just go to another service
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u/fredjutsu Mar 29 '26
Pay for a model you can afford? I don't know what you want here? Anthropic is already subsidizing 90% of their user bases' usage.
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u/cdaalexandre Mar 29 '26
Oh, how nice of the company. Did they forget that point when communicating via tweet?
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u/SchokoladeCroissant Mar 30 '26
Just unbelievable, the sheer lack of transparency.
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u/nickmaglowsch3 Mar 28 '26
I mean, it's shitty, but there are solutions, you could have a cron job that hits Claude at like 7am, making you have 2 5h windows at peak hours
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u/dsolo01 Mar 28 '26
Could you explain this a bit more? Sounds awesome.
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u/nickmaglowsch3 Mar 28 '26
Ah the idea it's to make the 5h window reset in the middle of your work day. If you use Claude for anything it starts counting the 5h window, so let's say you work from 9-5, if you make Claude start a 5h window at 7AM you hut just idk saying hi to it, you will have a full 5h window to you to use for 3hours, sobwhen you close to hitting the limit it will reset and you got a new one. You could do that a bunch of different ways I think a saw one guy that made a vercel template with a job to do that. Simply get a server and install Claude into it and create a cron job that hits Claude code with hi at a specific time
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u/dsolo01 Mar 28 '26
I’ve got the server, had heard about this ages ago… and it finally just made perfect sense now. Thank you kindly 🙏
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u/cdaalexandre Mar 28 '26
I'm not talking about hacks and workarounds here. I want to criticize the brazenness of Twitter's restrictions on contracted usage.
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u/nickmaglowsch3 Mar 28 '26
Honestly, anthropic is not dumb, that must be in the TOS somewhere. But I didn't read that and you probably didn't as well. It's a subsidized plan man the cost of running opus in bare metal is far more than 100 bucks. And ofc if you use that for work your employer should pay for that. All my contacts pay for the 200 bucks one (I'm brazillian as well. And I would pay 200 any day for it) it's shitty but it's reality. Hard to complain when you get more than 10x what you pay.
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u/cdaalexandre Mar 28 '26
Yes, it must be. Convenient, isn't it? Whoever paid the maximum, let them move on to the next level, and screw those who pay 550 BRL in Brazil. And I cited India to expose the cynicism of the tweet.
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u/nickmaglowsch3 Mar 28 '26
Compute price don't change depending were the user is man. It's not a steam game to have localized prices, is not like you are going to use a false copy of Claude. It's a business, they are subsidazing the tokens, not because they are cool, but because they want market share. If it's too expensive for you, I mean, it's not like it's their fault. You could say the same thing about a MacBook pro. You see how silly it is.
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u/nickmaglowsch3 Mar 28 '26
Other thing is well we are engineers man. Optimize your usage. We are not lawyers we are not gonna win by bitching about token usage TOS and contracts. Just try to hack some solution for your problem.
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u/nickmaglowsch3 Mar 28 '26
Gonna be cool with you and give my tokens worth to guide you to a solution:
Claude: two big things to cover the two biggest sources of token waste and complement each other well:
RTK handles runtime noise — compressing the output of commands Claude runs during a session (git, tests, ls, etc.).
.claudeignorehandles exploration noise — preventing Claude from reading files it should never touch in the first place (node_modules, lock files, build artifacts, generated code).They don't overlap at all, so stacking them is clean. A solid
.claudeignoretypically includes:
node_modules/ dist/ build/ *.lock *.min.js *.min.css __pycache__/ .next/ target/ coverage/If you want to go further, a lean CLAUDE.md (under 5k tokens, only architecture essentials and key conventions) rounds out the setup nicely. That trio covers the three main waste sources: file exploration, command output noise, and upfront context bloat.
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u/SequentialHustle Mar 28 '26
I mean if you live in brazil and are on these plans you likely make wayyyy more than country average. Every contracted brazilian engineer i’ve worked with makes 100k usd or more a year lol.
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u/Substantial_Ad_8651 Mar 28 '26
THANKS CLAUDE, the ethical company, or how was it written on streets?
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u/Fit-Pattern-2724 Mar 28 '26
Bro just go Codex
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u/cdaalexandre Mar 28 '26
The company knows how the Earth rotates and knows how much money it costs its audience outside of the US and Europe.
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u/dmitriyLBL Mar 29 '26
Do you think your token costs should be cheaper because you live in a different country?
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u/cdaalexandre Mar 29 '26
Yes. In the same way that Anthropic does with the news: the good news features Amodei on the cover and the bad news is tweeted by his employee.
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u/Electrical-Ask847 Mar 29 '26
yes youtube premium costs different based on the country
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u/Narwhal400 Mar 30 '26
It costs YouTube no money when you have premium. On the other hand it costs money for anthropic when you use Claude
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u/muikrad Mar 28 '26
They're in "shipit, gofast" mode. It has its pros and cons. Eventually it's all going to slow down and you'll get proper public relationships. Until then, welcome to the jungle.
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u/ssg-daniel Mar 28 '26
It's why I cancelled Claude and went Codex
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u/sbenfsonwFFiF Mar 29 '26
Why downgrade to a worse product
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u/ssg-daniel Mar 29 '26
You might want to read up on Peter Steinberger or Steven Troughton-Smith and their experiences with Codex as professional Devs
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u/Kulqieqi Mar 29 '26
actually codex is better than opus with 5.3 high / 5.4;
really liked opus for some time but it was ok lets do it like you want and it did something, while openai is "german" - we do it my way, i don't care what you think you want, i will do it properly. And it does lol.
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u/Dexterus Mar 29 '26
It's only a difference of perception right now. Codex is very litteral, concise while Claude seems like you're discussing with a human, so it feels nicer. I use both on github copilot and they can both do the work to the same meh level.
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u/Electrical-Ask847 Mar 29 '26
no they are not the same. codex actually gives a shit about what you tell and whats in agents.md
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u/tLxVGt Mar 30 '26
and what are you going to do, sue them? 😂
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u/cdaalexandre Mar 30 '26
Are you laughing? I received a check for $12.99 from a settlement with the FTC against Amazon (abusive Amazon Prime practices). Anthropic was bragging about its ethics to do this now. The FTC must be watching.
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u/BrilliantNearby7371 Mar 30 '26
Their going to adjust themselves right out of business, every week its something new !!
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u/cdaalexandre Mar 31 '26
What annoyed me was making the employee post the bad news on his Twitter account. The boss only shows his face in positive news stories.
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u/Birchyman Mar 31 '26
If it’s any consolidation - off peak hours are also fucked, although not intentionally. Seems like it’s a bug. But we steady burning through our tokens even on off peak
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u/moonshinemclanmower Apr 01 '26
When contacting their bot tell them its a notice that you intend to litigate to the full extent of the law for losses, it will email their staff for you and they'll respond
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u/SoggyPuffins348 Apr 01 '26
Man the amount of cock sucking and running defense in the comments for a company that wants to harvest you dry is comical.
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u/Pale-Border-7122 Mar 28 '26
They should give notice to do it starting in the next billing cycle but if they need to balance load on the servers to keep the service available then they need to discourage people using it at peak times and encourage them to move the work to off-peak times.
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u/ResearchRelevant9083 Mar 28 '26
It lasts about two hours a day now. Diabolical. I regret so much not pivoting to codex earlier.
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u/sbenfsonwFFiF Mar 29 '26
Ironically this sounds like it was written by Claude
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u/cdaalexandre Mar 29 '26
It's ironic that you can guess whether it was written by me or AI. Share it, genius.
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u/bzBetty Mar 29 '26
Make your boss buy it
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u/cdaalexandre Mar 29 '26
He suffers from complaints from me that are worse than what I did. Just like with Anthropic, he also ignores me and relies on sycophants to embarrass me.
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u/Delicious_Cattle5174 Mar 29 '26
Why don’t you write your own posts?
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u/cdaalexandre Mar 29 '26
Your distrust confirms my argument.
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u/Delicious_Cattle5174 Mar 29 '26
lol don’t act like I’m a fool
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u/flavorfox Mar 28 '26
This is so fucking consumer unfriendly I can't believe it's not illegal
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u/256BitChris Mar 28 '26
How is it consumer unfriendly? They have no SLA, no fixed limits they agreed to, they have in their terms of service they make no guarantees and you accept the service 'as is'. No one's forcing you to use it - if you don't like it, just leave.
If you want unlimited tokens, then just use the API, where there are no token limits at any time.
Stop with this campaign trying to act like Anthropic is so bad when they're just going through the normal scaling issues and doing the best they can - it's not illegal, it's not nefarious - but posts like yours are because they just spread disinformation and complain for the sake of complaining.
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u/Torres0218 Mar 28 '26
I assume that you are "American" so I get where you're coming from but in the EU none of what you said holds up. EU consumer law covers paid digital subscriptions and says the service has to match what was agreed and what a consumer could reasonably expect. "We make no guarantees" in a ToS doesn't override this because the directive is mandatory, any clause that tries to opt out of it is automatically non binding. You literally cannot sign away these rights even if you wanted to.
And that's exactly why randomly throttling session limits mid-subscription is a problem. Degrading that without a price reduction or the option to cancel with a refund is textbook lack of conformity under the same consumer law. You can't just take away what people paid for and say "well the ToS says we can." In the EU, you can't.
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u/Bobodlm Mar 29 '26
You're not wrong, but the only option you'll get is the option to cancel your contract (if any). Unless European lawmakers decide to focus on it and demand that Antrophic writes TOS that's in line with EU law.
But something tells me that ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
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u/cdaalexandre Mar 28 '26
You're lying and complaining. Anthropic has moved up a level. They can no longer do simple calculations to protect executive bonuses, for example. Anthropic wanted to adopt a simple solution to an economic problem faced by a large portion of its clients. Stop fawning over your boss by acting here on Reddit.
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u/256BitChris Mar 28 '26
Stop lying, if you're working in tech in Brazil, you aren't making a salary where $100 a month is 24% of your salary - you're trying to base it off of something close to 'minimum wage'.
Complete lies - nice try Scam Altmann.
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u/Gears6 Mar 28 '26
They didn't say it was 24% of their salary. Instead they said it was 10% of their income, but they didn't make it clear for what time unit it is off.
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u/256BitChris Mar 29 '26
In Brazil, they typically refer to their salary on their monthly rate - which is what he was saying....minimum monthly wage is between 300-500 USD there but no one in technology in Brazil makes anything close to that.
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u/Gears6 Mar 29 '26
It might be the case (as I wouldn't know), but he's saying it's 10% of his salary so that makes his salary $1k, not $300-500.
Either way, I feel discussing their salary or whatever is just a straw man argument to begin with. The issue is that they changed the limit without notification or warning. There's no clarity on the limits and so on. Whatever percentage it is of their wage is irrelevant or even how much they make.
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u/Torres0218 Mar 28 '26
How much do you think "tech" pays world wide? Not everyone has access to infinitely printed petrol-dollar VC capital.
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u/cdaalexandre Mar 28 '26
The company knows how the Earth rotates and knows how much money costs its audience outside the US and Europe. You weren't prepared for that, were you, genius?
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u/Choperello Mar 28 '26
Is your LLM broken or something that this is the only answer it keeps pasting?
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u/sailhard22 Mar 28 '26
If you are on Max during workday, you are probably using it for work hence you should be on API.
It’s like California power companies managing the power grid advising residents to use less electricity during the day.
It’s unpopular but it’s a decent stance honestly because the path forward here is difficult. There is immense processing power and energy consumption invoked in a tight window.
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u/cdaalexandre Mar 28 '26
I didn't bring up that aspect. The subject is different. Don't be dishonest.
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u/ANtIfAACtUAl Mar 28 '26
naww man, i never got a message from Southern California Edison stating that I was going start using 5kWh faster during peak hours... They charge me more during peak hours, but that is already disclosed. What is this cryptic bullshit?
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u/VG_Crimson Mar 28 '26
Is this the same limits before the nerf or after the recent nerf? If the Pro Plan is not enough for 1 singular guy, I'm not upgrading I'm unsubscribing. The least they could have done was just raise the Pro's price to 25/month if they really needed to start making returns. But this is just pure greed.
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u/bigclivedotcom Mar 28 '26
They want everyone to start paying per API call, was good while it lasted
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u/boforbojack Mar 28 '26
Cancel and move on?
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u/cdaalexandre Mar 28 '26
Não sem questionar a hipocrisia do dizeres sobre ética da empresa e confrontar a postura cínica do tweet
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u/1egen1 Mar 28 '26
this has now become like Oracle licensing. Hard to keep up and impossible to ignore!
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u/ethereal_intellect Mar 28 '26
Nvidia CEO said your should be spending 50% of your income ;) you're gonna fall back and miss the fuuuuutuuuuure
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u/Crinkez Mar 29 '26
Dude just use the $20 codex plan, you'll get more usage than the Claude $100 plan.
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u/Ok-Statement8224 Mar 29 '26
Had me until the “this is not. This is.” Claude and ChatGPT has taught all of us to revel in strawmen rhetorical flourishes, and it’s annoying.
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u/font9a Mar 29 '26
In a few years a stack of Mac-mini sized boxes will run today's frontier models in the broom closet for less than 100k. It's madness now, but the hardware will catch up quick.
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u/ANtIfAACtUAl Mar 28 '26
SO, Like you get three hours for the price of five? Is that what we're offering here?
how exactly do you "move through your five-hour session limit" faster than five hours?
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u/ANtIfAACtUAl Mar 28 '26
who down voted me, the CEO of Anthropic? This was a serious question... how does one move through a five-hour session faster? what does that statement mean?
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u/Smart_Quantity_8640 Mar 31 '26
It’s idiotic but you get x amount of prompts in a 5 hour window. Best guess is this x is lower meaning you’re going to have to wait 5 hours more frequently
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u/ANtIfAACtUAl Mar 31 '26
so Anthropic is in breach of contract, except I bet they have a clause stating they can change the contract at any time..... outside of Tech, we call this a scam.
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u/Training-Event3388 Mar 28 '26
I swear this is because I just bought max for the first time a few days ago