Anthropic Manager: Pro and Max Plans Outgrown by Claude Use
Anthropic pulled the coding tool Claude Code from its $20 Pro subscription temporarily for certain new customers. The company quickly undid the action following complaints from users. Head of Growth Amol Avasare indicated that the existing Pro and Max plans do not align with current ways people use Claude.
Ed Zitron detailed the situation on his site Where's Your Ed At. He noted that Claude Code vanished from the pricing pages on Anthropic's website. Visitors on mobile and desktop saw an X marking Claude Code as unavailable for the Pro tier. Meanwhile, the Max 5x and Max 20x plans kept access to it. Support documents changed too. An April 10 archived version mentioned using Claude Code with Pro or Max plans. The new version only referenced Max plans. Current Pro subscribers could still reach Claude Code through the command-line interface and web app.
Temporary Change Sparks Backlash
Users on X highlighted the shift. Amol Avasare responded that it was a small test affecting about 2% of new prosumer signups. He stressed that existing Pro and Max subscribers faced no impact. Zitron observed that the public pricing page and support docs showed the removal to everyone, not just a small group. Anthropic restored the original setup soon after. Avasare expressed regret for the mix-up.
Avasare's remarks went further. He pointed out prior tweaks like weekly caps and stricter peak-time limits. Still, usage patterns evolved beyond expectations. The plans were not designed for these demands. He explained that the Max plan came before Claude Code and Claude Cowork. It focused solely on heavy chat interactions.
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Plans Designed for Earlier Use Cases
Anthropic moved enterprise clients to per-million-token billing from rate limits, which often cost less than real usage. Dropping Claude Code from Pro permanently would push new users toward API token payments or pricier plans for the coding feature. A new tokenizer for Opus 4.7 added to expenses.
This event points to larger challenges. The Wall Street Journal reported Anthropic's API uptime at 98.95% over the 90 days before April 8. That falls short of the 99.99% norm in cloud services. Retool founder David Hsu, an enterprise customer, switched to OpenAI. He told the WSJ he favors Anthropic's Opus 4.6 model but left because of frequent outages.
Industry Faces Compute Crunch
Others struggle too. OpenAI closed its Sora app partly to redirect compute to coding and enterprise offerings. GitHub Copilot updated its billing and halted new signups for Pro, Pro+, and Student plans temporarily. Spot-market GPU hourly rates rose 48%, per the Ornn Compute Price Index.
These Pro plan adjustments appear as early signs of broader limits on agentic tools in consumer subscriptions. Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI staff, builds the Claude family of AI models. Its Pro plan costs $20 monthly for advanced access, while Max tiers offer more capacity at higher prices. Claude Code enables coding tasks via command line or web. Such tools demand significant compute, straining resources amid rapid AI growth.