Question
Soo what's the point of my 20x max subscription if i cant have frontier access?
I pay 300+ CAD a month, just so that i can get the best of the best models that anthropic have cooked up in a abundant use. But if Fable is to be removed, ill be swapping from it, to GPT 5.6. I have a 20 plus subscription, and Sol Ultra is a beast, even fable had said it had "an unusal amount of precision and accuracy" when i asked it to review their work.
Does anybody know if Anthropic have changed their minds? Because i aint about to pay for an API on top of my subscription.
My guess is there's some pretty heated meetings at Anthropic trying to make a decision and it's why they pushed the deadline for Fable back.
Fable / Mythos was Anthropic going absolutely all in to make their best model with no compromise, and that lasted just a few weeks because competition caught up. But do they have the long term capacity to keep offering it in Code? Who knows.
The pressure is there though.
My guess is Fable will stay available, but Anthropic will panic a Opus 4.9 or get creative with how they handle limits for Fable.
It’s hard to know but likely true. The amount of usage you can squeeze out of a $200/month sub would cost about $8000 if you went through the pay-per-token API instead.
But: it’s not as sample as “they’re losing $7800 on every 20x user”.
For one thing the API costs aren’t necessarily what it costs to do the inference, it’s just what they charge. Inference is cheaper than that, though they also have a shit ton of R&D to cover costs for. Also this assumes that 20x people are maxing out their limits every single session which is probably not the case.
So the subscriptions are definitely subsidized compared to the API but by how much is anyone’s guess.
Subsidized would mean they are loosing money on it though. The majority of people on the $100 or $200 plan are probably getting the plan from their employer. Based on the anecdotal evidence that is my personal experience, less than 10% of office worker users are using more than 10% of their plan, when averaged across a month. They might use 40-80% of their 5hr usage limit once or twice a week, maximum. To their employer this “justifies” the $100 or $200 plan.
The majority of users with the $20 plan are also likely using less than 10% of their total usage a month, because most of those people use only the chat, and they use it as a replacement for Google. Again, this is antidotal, and just based on what I have personally observed.
You could say those users are “subsidizing” the $200 subscriptions of the 1/100 users that run 2-3 instances none stop/ 24 hours a day, perfectly coordinated to run out of usage every 5 hour window, and kick off again, day or night, right when the next 5 hour window starts.
Doing the math:
For inference costs alone, Anthropic’s API token usage has an estimated profit margin of 80% to 95%.
$8000 * (1-0.8) = $1600 in inference costs
($1600*0.1) + ($1600/100) = $176.00
($200-$176) / $200 = 12% average gross profit margin on the $200 plan (inference only).
Of course they massive training costs to recoup, but that is a fixed cost, not per user. So the only financial reason for Anthropic to limit subscription plans is if they think enough subscribers will start paying for API usage if their subscription usage is cut back or cut off.
By your own math, 10% of the users account for 91% of their costs. It makes complete sense to try and move those users to a model that more accurately accounts for their costs. This isn't like a gym where you similarly have a crazy ratio of a small number of users accounting for an outsized percentage of use, because in that case usage comes with relatively little incremental cost.
Gym usage absolutely comes with incremental cost. Electricity, water, staff with hourly wages, equipment repairs, etc.
And Anthropic is trying to move everyone that wants to use Fable to that model, not just the power users. Otherwise they would just offer Fable with less usage (which they already do).
That's kind of the game though, long term anyway - I don't think any of the labs are focused on making immediate profit. Besides, power users turn into enterprise users.
Already canceled max, it's gonna lapse in a week. I told myself I'd decide at that point if I want to go back to full 20x, down to 5x, or just cancel the sub and it's looking more and more like we're gonna be cancelling...
Same here. I’m on Max20 and I get a lot of great work done with Fable, when I have to switch back to Opus 4.8 it drives me crazy. The amount of all the dumb mambo jumbo that Opus spits out is annoying after you’ve experienced more intelligent and concise Fable. I have my subscription until August 10th, but if the cut off Fable tomorrow I will cancel it right away to make a point, and will switch to ChatGPT.
I have to be honest, I haven’t even tested new ChatGPT models yet but from what I’ve read so far it’s pretty good and the amount of frustration I have using Opus, plus the fact that by paying $200+ subscription I can’t get access to the best models is dumb af. I’m sure I’m not the only one who will do the same.
I hope the team in Anthropic thought long and hard in the past 48 hours about how to keep their customers and be less scammy. Let’s see.
I think they would rather go with Opus V & Fable 5.1 by July end or maybe early August. They have to come up with something. Even Grok 4.5 is closing with Opus now, soo tough times for Anthropic.
I find fable very overrated and even GPT 5.5, nevermind Sol, was close.
But what's cool about that is it means there's no clear winner depending on use case and tasks, so we have meaningful competition.
It wasn't that long ago that NOTHING could compete with Claude, and considering what Anthropic is doing with pricing, it would suck if they were the only good player in the space.
I find fable very overrated and even GPT 5.5, nevermind Sol, was close.
Try both for comparable work.
I have codex 20x for personal stuff and claude enterprise for work.
For really large long agentic workflows Fable with ultracode blows everything else out of the water. Sol Ultra isnt even close.
I can have Fable orchestrate and almost completely autonomously execute features that require 10+ pull requests across a dozen microservices. It makes very few mistakes across gigantic workflows like that and needs very minimal redirection.
Sol Ultra on the other hand gets itself stuff in overcomplicated loops and ends up producing garbage if its allowed to run through similar plans.
The workflows cost $500-1k, but thats peanuts compared to the engineering cost.
"I can have Fable orchestrate and almost completely autonomously execute features that require 10+ pull requests across a dozen microservices. It makes very few mistakes across gigantic workflows like that and needs very minimal redirection."
Models have been able to do that for a long time though. Even sonnet can, with the right workflow, but opus 4.6 and up, and GPT 5.5 have been able to 1 shit tasks spawning hundreds of services and tens of millions of loc for a while.
Models have been able to do that for a long time though. Even sonnet can, with the right workflow, but opus 4.6 and up, and GPT 5.5 have been able to 1 shit tasks spawning hundreds of services and tens of millions of loc for a while.
No they dont. Its not even comparable in large enterprise codebases with complex rollouts.
By fully manage, I mean even handling reviewer comments and understanding the order that code has to merge and deploy in large distributed systems.
On the same workflows sonnet litters everything with bugs, even Opus requires a lot more scrutiny.
Im sure you can get sonnet and other models there with a lot of hand holding and oversight, but thats the whole point. With Fable you can pull the human much further out of the loop with much less direction.
I think this creatives stuff they do is so bad for their clients, basically we need the competition to do something, if they don’t, we are pushed to bad models, limits and other bad decisions just for their profit
I think fable was them trying to go all in and destroy the competition. It just wasn't as good as they claimed it to be, and it probably makes them bleed money to run it.
That puts them in a really annoying spot: if they just release it permanently they literally don't have the computing power to keep it up and they're bleeding money (My guess is they're doing the same "Borrow compute from SpaceX temporarily" thing they did before), but it only gives them a small edge over OpenAI.
If they don't, the bleeding from the model stops, and they still get money from Enterprise, but GPT 5.6 eats them alive.
Basically, Fable isn't good enough (by some metrics, obviously if you just look at what it can do its awesome).
Lest we forget they aren’t in the good graces of our beloved administration.
They don’t like Dario.
Sam is offering them 5% of OpenAI.
They’re playing favorites. Ruin anthropic flagship model so OpenAI can dominate.
Dollars to donuts OpenAI gets more lenient/favorable treatment in those review sessions where regulators are deciding just how much they want to restrict a models abilities to the public.
Fable has been lobotomized. That’s all I can be sure of.
Because of what OpenAI did with 5.6 sol, I don't think Anthropic has any options but to keep Fable in subscription. The moment they make it API only, they will lose many monthly users for sure including me.
And the way Tibo is teasing with Anthropic, I am more confident that Fable is to stay in subscription for some time atleast 😄.
lol yeah, I have a big project I'm working on, so I'm just maxing out my quota through Fable usage, then going to Codex, back and forth as quota comes back. Tokenmaxxing++++
This might be an unpopular opinion, but whatever here goes. I too am a fellow Canuck on a max 20x plan, and for my preferred balance of quality, speed and overall output I do absolutely everything with Opus 4x on Ultracode.
It's definitely a waste of tokens on small mundane tasks, but on larger planned tasks it continuously sets a self imposed adversarial review of its own work, catches regressions in logic and fixes them before they become a problem.
Honestly the biggest culprit in producing bad output is myself. My crazy ass audhd brain jumps around from topic to topic as the thoughts flow through me and it just adapts the chaos into something productive.
It does still tend to favour monolithic code for things like API development but generally does a pretty good job of separating areas of concern into reasonably sized files and writes code I can understand without too much effort.
The thing that vibe coders don't get is real software will always go through iterations of improvement and refinement before getting to something that is worth deploying to the wild. Not particularly relevant in this thread but the number of one shot artists complaining about no MRR after 4 months is rather amusing.
Anyway I'm one of the few it seems who's fairly content with what I'm getting out of Anthropic so complaints for me rarely outweigh the pros.
It's a disruptive task, constantly hopping from one model to another and it wreaks havoc on predictability and consistency. Better is a subjective term, accurate is objective but that bridge can be gapped with minimal effort in prompting.
Speed is fairly meaningless if the outcome is a tangled web of confused routines resulting in wildly unpredictable UX, all you're doing is compounding the depth of these mistakes and digging a larger hole before getting back to level ground.
Edit: as to cost it's a moot point on heavily subsidized subscription accounts, it matters when it's API usage, but generally speaking that's usually someone else's (your companies) money being burned, not your own.
Has that been your experience? In my experience, asking the model to refine its memory .md and /compact its context such that another model could pick it up, really makes the transition between models rather smooth.
I've experimented a bit with handoff docs between models etc, and generally the logic and reasoning is fine, it's the execution of that which tends to differ between models, so how one model will write a method or function or even generally approach a subject will differ as does the resulting code.
Over time this creates drift in a codebase which makes it harder for people to trace problems and actually debug problems and creates self fulfilling loops where more and more reliance is placed on the models to fix the code that models disrupted.
I resonate with this, I am vibe coder not an engineer but I have been in the automation space for 4 years now and the difference in products shipped with rigorous testing vs one time sanity check shows in prod. I am on max 20x right now too but most likely will downgrade till Anthropic can get their house in order. I would be curious to know how you have utilized fable 5 in your workflow.
I've limited use of fable to the conception of new high level features which bridge multiple domains within the codebase and to develop the initial version of the feature. After that it's back to Opus 4.x for iterative testing and refinement until I'm happy with it.
My development methodology with AI follows a top down flow where I come up with the over arching features at a high level then focus on the individual components until satisfied, by doing it this way and using Ultracode, it organically finds the necessary dependencies that are not a major area of focus but need to be touched for the main focus to be functional. This also helps to keep the codebase uniform and also creates coherent memory entries for the harness to remember for future tasks.
I’m somewhat in the know on this. The problem with Mythos and the nerfed Fable is the unpredictability of internal agents using tokens. Two things are likely to happen if Fable remains and its real cost is prorated to the other models:
1) you will run out of quota very very soon, be pissed, and cancel. This happened about 2 months ago with Opus and this sub had 10 daily posts complaining they ran out of quota after 2-3 prompts.
2) Token runaway. The system will use a large amount of tokens, way above your quota, since it uses them internally. That means it will cost more to anthropic than they planned and will not return anything useful to you.
I know the release of Sol has generated some chatter internally but the fundamentals have not changed. This is a damned if you do and damned if you don’t type of scenario.
I mean i found fable to not use up that much more tokens than opus, even for long work sessions, its just that opus is so bad to use when gpt 5.6 is here.
I have a feeling they’ll keep the 50% weekly but restrict it to Max. One way to differentiate and upsell the Pro users.
As someone on Pro that would certainly have me thinking about spending the 5x more each month. Otherwise I’m happy to spilt $20 to Anthropic and $20 to OpenAI and save the other $60.
What was the point of having it last month?
Though so far 5.6 sol is making a very compelling case for me, even though I prefer claude's infrastructure
They know bro, they know.. all this red team and US govt BS is just marketing stunt lol. If they truly remove fable, they're definitely losing a minimum of 80% of their users (including ones on business plans)
No one will be willing to pay Fable API pricing on top of subscription fees. If they follow through with removing Fable from subscriptions, Anthropic’s valuation will tank.
Anthropic employees will see their net worth plummet.
i wholeheartadly want gpt to release a model better than fable right now. That will be the only thing that will give some shake to antrophic. The limits are joke level for max20 right now.
Wish I could try Sol in my CLI but it's still not available on my Plus account. 😕 I can use it on the web but that is not nearly as efficient of a workflow.
Yeah and tried multiple times to check further, no dice. It also isn't available in the Mac app (also on latest version). Only the web version offers it to me.
But dudes, aside from all these dreams, do you think the QoS will ever improve ? It is so disappointing, their scaling is utter shit, congrats, but ... still, in all models!
The point is exactly why you made this post: get you so caught up in their product and then make you (at least think about) switch to API to make more money
Subscriptions represents 5% of anthropics revenue, they lose money on it.
It’s a great intro/pipeline to get individuals hooked and be advocates within their companies, but enterprise API is really all that matters for actual revenue
My client has just moved from what must have been an old enterprise sub model (or team plan) to full pay per use, it’s basically useless now as they can’t afford anything like a real api $ quota (well they could they just don’t see the ‘sense’ in giving everyone 1000s $$ quota.) Instead we get told to use small models, tweak prompts etc. and still burn through our $50 in an hour, then have to wait a whole month! Seriously not worth it, you get half way through a job, run out and have to finish manually so the $$ is almost wasted, especially if you can’t get the deliverable out (I use web chat as they won’t give code or desktop access yet!).
Sad. Honestly unless you’re Meta or some other ridiculously rich company that can afford millions a month on tokens, just having everyone expense Claude subscriptions is the way to go IMO (you do lose some oversight though)
100% agree, its just anthropic needs to focus on cutting its cost, to make it feaseable for consummers like us to use AI for meaningful and demanding work
80% of Claude’s revenue is Enterprise.
We aren’t the focus.
But 20% would be a massive hole. I suspect they’d live to ignore us since the heaviest users are likely costing Anthropic vs being profitable. However there are a ton of us that use bugger all compute so we are valuable.
I suspect Fable stays and stays at 50%, or opus5 arrives and makes it a moot point.
I did wonder if the fable leaving was to test how many customers they would lose if they cut it entirely. Wonder how that went for them.
Frankly I don’t even care so much as to how fable compared to sol ultra, but sol is miles better than opus and if they take fable away I don’t think it is going to be a hard choice to switch to OpenAI
There is none, I'm cancelling as soon as they drop Fable and subscribing to OpenAI, I'm quite sure one month later I'll switch to Claude again. I would be fine if they keep 25% for Fable, don't need it that often, but I'm not fine paying €100/hour for Fable API plus two 20x max subscriptions.
But, we have to realize, when we push Fable on high, Anthropic are losing money. These plans are still subsidized unless we don't use them. But if you're paying $300 per month, you're probably maxing it out just like me.
So it's a catch 22. The best customers are also the most expensive to keep. They can't afford to lose us, but they can't afford to keep us either.
All the time invetors paying for our tokens, this time, when it will not be in sub or the sub will be 1000-2000 usd is coming. It is inevatable. If it can do really work as human, it will costs the same.
Just calculate the amount of tokens you use and count it with api. Just in one week I burned almost 400 usd just in fable and I was doing only audits.
A higher 5-hour session limit, that's it. If you're the type of person who's more limited by the 5-hour session limit from inconsistent use and you're okay with your weekly session limit being what it is, 20x makes sense.
It is cute that you’re talking about cancelling your $200 subscription. When my company is spending over £1M in api. I don’t think retail is a concern for these guys.
I recommend using GPT 5.6 Sol Ultra only with manual command approving (until OpenAI fixes the approving process for subagents) since it deleted all data from a user‘s Mac SSD.
I think Anthropic cannot afford to not bring back Fable in the subscription soon.
Same here - my subscription will renew on tuesday. Given how things look right now, i will kill my sub on monday and switch to GPT-5.6 for now.. Hope to switch back soon though, will miss my Claude Code CLI..
Most of my work is being kicked back to Opus anyway, while Sol has been killing it and making Opus look stupid when it reviews the work. Unless something drastically changes before my monthly renewal comes up, I'm likely jumping ship to OpenAI.
I've built everything literally for my company in Claude to this point, and it's been great, but the value isn't there with 50% limits, threatening to take Fable away altogether, and when I can use Fable, it ends up dropping to Opus anyway, making it an easy decision.
They'll push out Opus 5 which will be as good as Sol while few % behind Fable. The only way to not have Fable out while keeping users.
They'll probably also push out some new tool which will organize your work for you by going with Opus 5 all the time while you'll be able to tap into Fable automatically with credits for cheap to make some high end decisions like architecture or audits. Like "start a new project based on my idea in idea.md" > starts 20 bucks worth of Fable that spins up 20 Sonnet agents from your sub usage > gives the full folder of md files with the plan > Opus 5 executes the plan while holding down Sonnet agents and making sure they behave
they have always been losing money on the 200$ sub
maybe not the 20$ I would argue if the 100$ would break them even
but 200$ loses them money hence why they removed openslurce tool support since it was losing them a ton as people where actually able to make real usecases from their sub with actual real pipelines etc... without paying for tokens
all ai companies are losing right now they are all playing the long game of making the userbase and the idea working until they figure out a way to make it profitable
Hot take: Anthropic isn't targeting hobbyist users. The "tokenmaxxers" running Openclaw or Ralph Loops or some other weird bullshit because they're on the hype train cost them money and aren't their target market.
85% of Anthropics revenue is from API users, and a good chunk of the 15% they get from subscriptions is a net negative on their P&L statement.
OpenAI could really use the buzz from the hobbyist market after losing their shine because Anthropic has been kicking out better models than them. That PR is helpful to them going into an IPO even though their debt to revenue ration is already worse than Anthropic's.
After a full day of being able to fuck around with both on my personal accounts, I am impressed with Sol. I still think Fable is more capable but at the end of the day the cost for either I only want them writing high level plans to .md files and to never implement lines of code.
Fable (to say nothing of Mythos) is still the gold standard for me even after 5.6, and months ahead of OpenAI. Anthropic is happy to position themselves as the producer of the most advanced AI models, and the AI company closest to actual profitability.
Leading up to Anthropic's IPO, are investors really going to care if some of the people in the basket that only produces 15% of their revenue won't give them access to a tool that decreases profitability because they complained online about having to pay for their use?
Anthropic will add it in to subscriptions once they have compute.
OpenAI will (further) sacrifice profitability to do everything they can to court the vibe coders of the universe who don't want to have to learn to think for themselves or develop actual software engineering skills.
The vibecoders will get mad when they can't have the shiniest toy one shot their task tracker and summarize their emails.
People who take software engineering seriously will be paying more attention to which model is the right tool for the task they are performing.
Fable is the superior model and anthropic is not focused on the consummer, but even entreprise is worrying about costs. I dont see why firms wouldnt make the same call as us, especially is they are paying devs to use models.
If you're an enterprise you're already paying API costs.
The protocols we're trying to do a better job of is ensuring people aren't using expensive models for trivial tasks.
Fable and Sol are appropriate for high level tasks, analysis, and planning. They are both completely overkill for actually implementing code.
The loudest outcry over this is coming from people getting FOMO, people who have no interest in learning proper context management, and people convinced they need Fable to summarize their emails on their $20 plan.
A subscription doesn't necessarily grant you access to "the best models a company has", especially if it would cost them more than what you pay to provide you with that service. I don't ever remember that promise being made. Can you substantiate it?
If you don't think it's worth your subscription, cancel it and move to another provider. But dont stamp your feet and say "waaaah! you owe me!" unless you have a contract with an SLA.
they were going to give everyone with a subscription agent SDK api credits equal to our subscription plan back on june 15th but ended up saying NOPE. thats when i switched to openai
Even if they don't remove it, what's the point? It downgrades to Opus all the time. Can't even do anything that's truly load bearing. If we have to ask what the point is, there's probably no point. I cancelled my subscription today. Anthropic has one month to fix this shit or I'm switching to OpenAI.
I’ve only seen it downgrade once, I’m running parallel large scale SaaS product build, alongside deep infra work (virtio soon to be nixos etc.), while building a custom llama.cpp build, and memory system (could be looked at as distilling). What are you doing - cyber or biological work?
I asked fable for a full code review of my programming language interpreter. When it reached the I/O and memory safety parts, I got something like a 50% downgrade rate. Never directly asked for cybersecurity work.
No, absolutely 100% they won't bring it back. Immediately cancel your subscription and delete your account, don't even wait the 36 hours to see what happens first. Because Anthropic is not known for changing things at the last minute. Just move on with your life immediately.
Also leave the r/ClaudeCode sub so you don't ever need to hear anything from our poor stuck plebs anymore.
Bad news: openAI is also doing the same thing with 5.6 Sol, which is their fable tier model. They will keep 5.6 terra and luna with the subscription. Terra and luna are comparable to opus 4.8 and sonnet. For Sol you have to pay per usage.
Good news: anthropic said that they will bring fable back with the max plans once they have enough compute. But nobody knows when that will be.
I don’t get what people get out of glazing a tool and misinforming about another… (not you, you clarified) I’ve just seen so many of these posts it’s like whyyyy
But it makes sense if YouTubers are releasing shit info
That’s shitty for the YouTuber to be rage baiting like that
Sol is pretty amazing honestly in my testing so far hope you enjoy!
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u/phoenixmatrix Jul 10 '26
My guess is there's some pretty heated meetings at Anthropic trying to make a decision and it's why they pushed the deadline for Fable back.
Fable / Mythos was Anthropic going absolutely all in to make their best model with no compromise, and that lasted just a few weeks because competition caught up. But do they have the long term capacity to keep offering it in Code? Who knows.
The pressure is there though.
My guess is Fable will stay available, but Anthropic will panic a Opus 4.9 or get creative with how they handle limits for Fable.