The democratization of AI is over. Get your wallets ready 💸

Remember my recent posts about the end of the cheap AI agent era and how Anthropic quietly throttles limits on premium tier users to free up hardware?

A note came out saying: Anthropic is now aggressively flexing its pricing power. And the most interesting part is that the large B2B segment simply silently opens their wallets and pays those bills, no matter how high they are.

🤑 That's how real IT business works: your tears about the Max plan at $200/month not handling a session of a couple prompts are completely irrelevant to Anthropic's management. The unit economics of heavy agentic workflows would never have worked out for individual developers. Individuals were only needed for cheap beta testing, collecting edge cases, and creating initial hype.
And this whole fairy tale about "artificial intelligence for everyone" was just a promo campaign generously funded by venture capital. The warm-up is over, enterprise has been successfully sold the idea that AI is not a cost but a critical investment. And while top management is mindlessly pouring budgets into it to keep up with competitors, prices will skyrocket.

Inference of top models is insanely expensive. GPUs are still in short supply. It's logical that computing power will be aggressively taken away from physics with a $100 subscription and given to corporations that bring in millions through B2B contracts.

And perhaps everyone else will have to remember how to read documentation and type on the keyboard with their own fingers.

I myself am suffering terribly; just today I used up 20% of the weekly limits of my GLM Coding Plan Lite subscription in 1 hour! It costs $18, and before, the $3 plan was easily enough for a month.

Looking for alternatives, trying Minimax Token Plan (cheap and cheerful) and ModelArk Coding Plan (has GLM5.1, but not sure yet how it will behave with limits).

Sad 😩