It would be showing greater higher quality appreciation to offer an ongoing benefit.
But there is some benefit to giving maintainers a generous trial length with your offering. 6 months is certainly long enough to see how well it does or does not incorporate into your project.
It just so happens we almost all universally love the offering.
> But there is some benefit to giving maintainers a generous trial length with your offering. 6 months is certainly long enough to see how well it does or does not incorporate into your project.
This would be fine in the context of a general sales pitch/marketing deal.
But OSS development and maintenance is special here. It has a budget of $0. As a sales strategy, Anthropic would be better off trying to sell luxury gold plated bindles to hobos.
And there's another question: How exactly does Anthropic see the future of OSS, with this pitch? What are they thinking? Is this the new norm for OSS a $200/month entry fee?
Because adding such a cost to OSS would not only go against everything OSS stands for, and would push the vast majority of maintainers into quitting their projects.
(Now, Anthropic can't mandate maintainers use Claude, though a much-discussed side effect of tools like Claude has been the increased burden on OSS maintainers. And while Anthropic does not raise suggestion that they deal with this by employing AI tools, bystanders most certainly have.)
The 20x plan is much more useful if you use it full time. Trying to put a full 8 hour workday in on the $20 plan is painful since you have to stop when you reach your usage limit and that comes up quickly at that tier. The 20x plan is enough to have multiple independent Claude Code sessions running in parallel working on different features or bugs without hitting limits (unless you've got a lot of sessions going).
That's the problem, it's a "get hooked on the useful plan for six months and then pay us" vs "here's a little something so you can get a little help every day, but forever".
Yup. I have the $20 plan, and I've been focusing full time (and then some) on my open source projects. I usually hit the limit 2-3 hours into the 5-hour limit window, and have to wait for it to reset.
In a way it's kinda nice, because it forces me not to rely on it too much, and I mostly use it for more mechanical changes, nothing that I'd consider "creative" (because I enjoy that part of programming!). But it's also frustrating if I'm, say, building a planning document or getting suggestions or help with debugging, and suddenly I hit the limit and have to context switch.
So if I get into this program, I will probably enjoy Max 20x a lot, and then be really bummed when the 6-month period is over. Not sure if I'll be bummed enough to fork over the cash for it to continue, but I'm sure I will be very tempted to do so.
It's a marketing/sales tactic. I already have a Claude Pro subscription. I use it quite a bit, and do hit the limits often enough (sometimes needing to wait 2-3 hours before it resets), but I'm not convinced I want to spend more on the Max subscription, even though I do get a ton of value out of it.
Giving me Max 20x for 6 months would just get me hooked more on it to the point that I'd likely upgrade my subscription after the free period is over. Or I'd just go back to Pro and feel shittier about it.
If they were giving it away for free indefinitely, then that would actually be generous and altruistic. I don't think it's a spectrum; I think nothing free is one thing, some defined period of free is a sales tactic, and free indefinitely/forever is actual generosity.
Kindly -- I think this is a symptom of the larger issue, right?
You shouldn't need a document to help persuade the consumer (or the more technically inclined ones anyway). That magic should just be self evident. We don't need a document to understand why the iPhone was a hit, right?
Doesn't matter if you have the greatest app in the world. If it overwhelms the user on first use, it's simply not going to be used.
I agree at first glance it is overwhelming unfortunately.
> You shouldn't need a document to help persuade the consumer
For the most part we don't. They get it, they have the frustration with duplication, and they see the value of our pricing being the same or cheaper than one or two of the apps their paying for.
The harder part as I said in the original comment is no one is searching for a household data solution. It's not a thing that exists to people, and we don't advertise (mostly) as "a budgeting app" or "a to-do app", so the persuading if you want to call it that comes from catching these buyers and showing them that yea, we do that, and so much more.
It's well meaning but I think this goes against something like the curb effect. Not a perfect analogy but, verbosity is something you have to opt into here: Everyone benefits from being able to glance at what the agent is up to by default. Nobody greatly benefits from the agent being quiet by default.
If people find it too noisy, they can use the flag or toggle that makes everything quieter.
p.s. Serendipitously I just finished my on-site at anthropic today, hi :)
There may be a risk of running into thermal throttling in such a use-case, as laptops are really not designed for sustained loads of any variety. Some deal with it better than others, but few deal with it well.
Part of why this is a problem is that consumer grade NICs often tend to overload quite a lot of work to the CPU that higher end server specced NICs do themselves, as a laptop isn't really expected to have to keep up with 10K concurrent TCP connections.
I don't think I would need VC to get off the ground.
I keep coming back to the gigantic headache of content moderation, and it gives me pause not to do it. There are some truly terrible people who will try to tear the platform apart.
I think automatic moderation is one of those golden use cases for LLMs. You can use cheaper inference models, and maybe some clever sampling techniques to limit the token expense.
Thinking out loud, I'd be surprised if this isn't a startup already.
It would be showing greater higher quality appreciation to offer an ongoing benefit.
But there is some benefit to giving maintainers a generous trial length with your offering. 6 months is certainly long enough to see how well it does or does not incorporate into your project.
It just so happens we almost all universally love the offering.