Anthropic caused a stir among developers with what appeared to be a surprise change to its pricing plan: The company signaled that Claude Code, the popular agentic development tool, would no longer be available to subscribers on the $20-per-month Pro plan.
Users took to Reddit and X to point out that Anthropic’s pricing page for Claude explicitly showed Claude Code as not supported in the Pro plan. (It remained in the $100/month+ Max plan.) New users signing up for Pro subscriptions were unable to access Claude Code. Meanwhile, existing subscribers saw no interruption.
After speculation and frustration spread, Anthropic’s head of growth, Amol Avasare, took to social media to clarify that this was a “small test on ~2% of new prosumer signups.” As for the reasoning, he explained:
When we launched Max a year ago, it didn’t include Claude Code, Cowork didn’t exist, and agents that run for hours weren’t a thing. Max was designed for heavy chat usage, that’s it. Since then, we bundled Claude Code into Max and it took off after Opus 4. Cowork landed. Long-running async agents are now everyday workflows. The way people actually use a Claude subscription has changed fundamentally. Engagement per subscriber is way up.
We’ve made small adjustments along the way (weekly caps, tighter limits at peak), but usage has changed a lot and our current plans weren’t built for this. So we’re looking at different options to keep delivering a great experience for users.
Some users remained upset, noting that it was strange and confusing that Anthropic ran a trial on just 2 percent of new sign-ups yet updated its public-facing documentation to reflect that the change was universal. Before long, the pricing page was updated to again show that Claude Code is offered as part of the Pro plan.
Claude has seen an explosive growth in usage over the past few months. User numbers increased dramatically as many people flocked away from ChatGPT; tools like OpenClaw began consuming large amounts of tokens; and, in general, as Avasare said, usage for some users shifted away from brief, sporadic chat sessions to nearly always-on, multi-agent workflows. The reality is that there is only so much compute to go around—and that’s shown in occasional outages and other problems for the service.
The company has attracted heat over other recent attempts to deal with the high demand, like introducing new limits during peak hours. It’s not surprising that it would test removing the tool that drives a lot of that heavy usage from the plan with a relatively modest consumer price point, but of course, people have started to build their daily workflows on top of this tool, so users are understandably frustrated that a change that dramatic that could occur at all, much less that it could happen without much public communication.
“When we do land on something, if it affects existing subscribers you’ll get plenty of notice before anything changes. Will hear it from us, not a screenshot on X or Reddit,” Avasare said.
