Couple of months ago they made claude code use up so many tokens the 20 dollar plan doesn't really cut it for many. Especially with the 5 hour limits.

Plenty of people on reddit complaining they ran out of the 5 hour limit in half an hour on the 200 a month plan.

Anthropic doesn't tell you when the busy time pricing takes place or how much more it costs AFAIK. You just suddenly use up more of your token quota than the actual tokens the LLM put out.

So either they've reduced their load by a lot, or their income by a lot.

Oh and the bonus: Claude Code now defaults to Opus, which now has 1M context. Not difficult to rack up bills if you've allowed additional usage after running into the limits.

Opus is still the best model, but Anthropic is becoming the worst company to deal with, even OpenAI seems to be better now.

Anyway, Qwen and GLM are like 5-10x cheaper than Opus or GPT, so I suspect that the Americans are now also running a profit from inference. But as they enshittify, using the Chinese LLMs is starting to be a much better deal.