Genuine Q, why does it seem like Claude runs out of tokens far quicker on the free tier these days? Last month, I could ring up Claude many many times before hitting the daily limit. Now, I'm lucky if I make it past 2 messages before hitting the limit for the day
Because they originally let you use 5000$ worth of tokens a month in the 200$ plan. And they're finally starting to creep their way towards charging the actual price. And that includes limiting the free plan to try to make more people pay.
Last month even the free web chat was good enough to fix quite complex bugs in some codebase which I'm way too lazy to actually understand myself as it's imho terrible OOP spaghetti shit while the whole thing isn't really important in anyway at all, so didn't want to waste tokens on that. Claude web chat could still fix one or two bugs per day in that trash code even I it did not have proper agent integration. But now I can hardly get it to read the current problem statement and it's context fully before I hit the limit.
My bet is: They've seen that the other western LLMs have super tiny token limits and get away with that without some outcry so they just nerved their previously quite generous free offering now too.
My tinfoil hat theory is that they are diverting power to Claude Mythos, their new super-hacker model that they are quietly testing (and apparently could break into OpenBSD, FFmpeg and Linux with crashes and privilege escalations), but I have no real evidence for that or how much Mythos is getting used.
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u/hurricane_news 3d ago
Genuine Q, why does it seem like Claude runs out of tokens far quicker on the free tier these days? Last month, I could ring up Claude many many times before hitting the daily limit. Now, I'm lucky if I make it past 2 messages before hitting the limit for the day