An open letter to Anthropic: Want to free up compute during peak hours? How about restricting free accounts to off peak hours instead of punishing your paid users

A few weeks ago, millions of people left ChatGPT on principle and chose Claude. You hit #1 on the App Store. Your revenue surged. You 'thanked' us with a 2x usage promotion. Now that promotion ends tomorrow, and here's what paying Pro subscribers actually get: * Two standard prompts during peak hours can burn your entire 5-hour session * Free tier Sonnet is more usable during peak hours than paid Pro * There's no indicator in the app that peak hours are even active to know that you're burning usage faster * There's no real-time token counter. No published token budgets. No way to plan. People who had created routines around the system get constantly changing usage limits that they have to budget mentally at a significant psychological burden. * Max 20x users ($200/mo) are reporting usage jumping from 21% to 100% on a single prompt, and it seems inconsistent among users. * Usage meters climb even after closing all sessions You say this is about managing GPU capacity during peak hours? But if that's true, why is the free tier running unthrottled during peak hours while paying customers get locked out in minutes? Every other capacity-constrained service on earth protects paying customers first. You're doing the opposite, and you're burning good will to spit in the face of those who pay for the service. The very least you could do is make it so that the free tier has to wait for non-peak hours to chat with sonnet. If they want to use it during peak hours they would have to move up to a paid tier. That would actually prove Pro is worth the upgrade! You already have a banner system that warns users at 75% weekly usage. Adding "peak hours active — usage consumed faster" would take a single engineer a single day. You chose not to, because if people could see what was happening, they'd use less during peaks. BUT THAT IS EXACTLY YOUR STATED OBJECTIVE! The current implementation makes it feel like we are being punished for paying you money. The "\~7% of users affected" framing is insulting. Reddit, GitHub, and Discord are on fire right now with cancellation threads from Pro AND Max subscribers. **What we're asking for is not unreasonable:** * Show us when peak hours are active, in the app * Throttle free users before paid users during peaks * Publish actual token budgets so we can plan * Tell us about changes BEFORE they take effect, not on Reddit days later after the backlash forces your hand You built this user base on trust. The people canceling right now aren't people who found a better model. They're the people who believed in you the most and promote Claude to their friends. Don't burn the good will that you've built up by making paid subscribers feel like they're in an abusive relationship.