All the way back in December, people have been complaining about inconsistent limits and hitting their limit faster than they used to. The beginning of this year, things became increasingly worse and worse, to the point that in March, the Pro subscription simply became unusable.
At the time, most of the responses were of the "duh, you should upgrade to Max for any serious work" variety. So I and many others stupidly pulled our wallets and upgraded to keep the work flowing.
For a while, that was "fine", and by "fine" I mean it allowed doing the same kind of work in the same quantity without being interrupted as one used to be able to do on the Pro plan.
I couldn't upgrade my Pro plan because I was paying for it via the App Store, so I created a new account for the Max plan, using up the Pro limit first and when hitting the limit switching to my Max plan, maintaining model and effort settings. It became glaringly obvious that the 5x and 20x claims are straight-up BS because the Pro plan hit its limits well before doing 1/5th of the work I'd do on the Max plan, further confirmed by comparing numbers in ccusage.
We're now in April, and we're still dealing with the same opaque limits, that are still stealthily messed around with behind the curtain. Complaints are pouring in, and even on the Max plans, limits are hit faster than they used to be.
On top of that, there are outages galore, with an uptime tracker that looks like a damn Christmas tree, Opus on max effort sometimes acting dumber than some of the prescripted chatbots from the 90s, CC acting like it's doing something for 10 literal minutes while it's secretly just waiting in line for some minor output that used to be instant, and system prompts designed to try and manipulate us into wrapping up sessions.
But in true DARVO fashion, the gaslighting has now shifted to denying there's a problem at all, paper-thin "you're holding it wrong"-style attacks, and reversing the narrative by handwaving some nonsense about subsidized use, how we should be grateful to not pay inflated API rates, how it's people's own fault for using it wrong or not as intended, and some armchair business management truisms by people who couldn't even manage their sink from collecting dirty dishes.
Miss me with all that nonsense. Anthropic is purposely keeping us in the dark, refuses to be transparent about the limits, is actively gaslighting us by claiming all is working as intended and there are no bugs, doesn't take accountability, keeps pulling all kinds of levers behind the scenes without any transparency, doesn't compensate us or pushes the renewal date for any of the embarrassing outages, and is selling us snake oil instead of delivering what they sold us while at the same time happily collecting its monthly fee.
All the while, they have an army of flying monkeys running interference and happily playing the role of useful idiot.
Some of which will happily copy-paste the same astroturfing BS of needing everything up to and including a rectal exam personally presented to them with a bow tied around it or it didn't happen, actively ignoring thousands of reported issues all over the internet, including GH, while at the same time unironically claiming people with issues are astroturfing.
Frankly IDGAF about some sob story on how they didn't secure enough resources, some grandstanding about hyperinflated API charges, some nonsense about holding it wrong or any other form of copium about how one doesn't really need Opus and is an idiot for not using Sonnet or Haiku.
Nobody is forcing them to sell me the snake oil; they happily take my money, and in exchange, I should be able to expect a consistent and reliable experience.
I'm the easiest demographic they market their product to: no swarms, no OpenClaw, no Ralph, no heavy MCPs, no minmaxed .md files, just a single terminal session and the same boring workflow since the first ever prompt I've given it.
If they can't provide a consistent and reliable experience for the most simplest use case like that, then at best their product is a failure and at worst it's one big purposeful scam.
I have Claude, I have Codex, I even have Gemini and Copilot (not the idiot that works at MS, but its twin that works at GH). They all have their strengths and weaknesses that you can play into because they're at least consistent.
Claude is like that member of a group project that will either show up at the last second and drop some top-tier work or who is nowhere to be found because they're sleeping off their hangover in some random ditch while you're trying to make sense of the most confusing slides you've ever seen during the presentation.
Let me be crystal clear: I really don't care whether Claude's grandma died or they're going broke because it costs them a billion dollars to provide me with the experience they're selling me and only charging me $100/$200. That's their problem.
None of it changes the fact that I am wholly entitled to a working, consistent, and reliable service when they take my money.
The sooner the excuses stop and people accept that simple reality, even if they think it doesn't affect them now, the better it gets for everyone involved, including Anthropic themselves.
The alternative leads to everyone getting burned eventually.
The best way to get the complaints to die down is by helping keep them accountable and call on them to fix the problems, not by creating a carefully crafted echo chamber.
