Anthropic squeezed three ways

Anthropic’s Claude Code pricing fiasco is what it looks like when a company is squeezed at three ends. Anthropic quietly removed Claude Code from the $20 Pro plan, making it exclusive to the $100 and $200 Max tiers. Their Head of Growth framed it as a small test on 2% of new signups (which didn’t match what users were seeing). Within hours they reversed it.What interests me is what the test reveals about the bind Anthropic is in. It was an attempt to fix unit economics: heavy users on flat-fee plans consume vastly more than the plans recover, and the Head of Growth, Amol Avasare, said as much on X – plans weren’t built for current usage patterns.That’s one real pressure. But it’s not the only one. They’re squeezed three ways at once.The first squeeze is unit economics. Someone running Claude Code all day on a $20 subscription costs far more to serve than they pay. Either prices go up or costs come down. However raising prices risks making them uncompetitive against OpenAI and Google,…