Bottom line: Anthropic just added weekly limits to Claude Pro ($20/month) and Claude Max ($200/month), affecting their heaviest users of Claude Code…mid-workflow.
Why it matters: This is the same playbook we’ve seen AI companies use before—hook users with "unlimited" access, then cap the power users who matter most.
Theo from t3.chat summed it up perfectly: "No free lunch lasts forever."
The Same Playbook, Different Day
Here's how the AI pricing bait-and-switch works:
Launch with generous/unlimited limits Build user dependency Add caps targeting "less than 5%" of users Frame as "sustainability" or "fairness"
Sound familiar? That's because we've seen this movie before. Cursor did it. Windsurf followed. GitHub Copilot tightened screws. Now Claude Code.
The thing is, Anthropic isn't wrong about the economics. Running Claude Sonnet or Opus models costs real money—we're talking about serious compute infrastructure here. But that's precisely why the bait-and-switch approach is so damaging to the developer community.
That "5%" Drives Everything
Who actually gets hit by these limits:
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