£200 plans

Right, so Claude's dropped a £200 (yeah yeah, conversion, but this is easier) plan, have they? My first thought? Desperate. Remember back in late Feb, around the 3.7 update? They were sending out those sneaky 25% off deals for the annual Pro plan, trying to lock people in, eh? And then barely over a month later, this £200 monster lands. Smells like they needed to show those investors some quick cash after that big funding round, doesn't it?

And what do you get for your two hundred quid? More Claude. That's it. Don't get me wrong, Claude's nice for creative writing, and I've even used it for coding now and then. And yeah, sure, they've got some nice features on the webui like Artifacts. But is that really worth £200 a month when it's stuck in the browser and there's zero ecosystem around it? It's hardly the king of the hill. And £200 for the "Max" plan? Seriously?

Who is this for? It's gotta be people who are glued to the web UI, right? Because if you're using the API, there's no way you're burning through £200 worth of tokens a month, unless you're going full-on, 24/7 AI-mashing. And get this, it's not even unlimited like GPT Pro! You just get more usage. That's the big sell.

It really highlights how... lacking the Anthropic ecosystem is. Compare it to something like, well, anything. Even GPT Pro gives you image generation, video generation, that advanced voice mode, all that jazz. And then you've got Google One Premium. For what, £19? You get Gemini 2.5 Pro, which is pretty decent, Image Gen 3, which is... there, some voice stuff, and a mountain of other Google goodies: 2TB of cloud storage, cashback, Fitbit perks...

Suddenly, Claude Max looks like a bad joke. A desperate, grasping-at-straws, "please give us money" kind of joke. And don't even get me started on their $100 tier! For that money (£80ish?), you could literally subscribe to Claude Pro itself, ChatGPT Plus, and Google One AI Premium, get all their features, and still have like £25-£30 left over for other actually useful tools! It's madness. They're clearly banking on the hardcore Claude stans (and we all know they're out there, convinced Claude's the second coming, but that's a whole other rant). Or, you know, the people who are utterly terrified of anything that isn't the Claude web interface. Maybe small businesses that, for some godforsaken reason, have decided to put all their AI eggs in the Anthropic basket? Which is just asking for trouble, isn't it?

It's just... they're offering so little compared to the competition. Can you imagine a Google £200 plan? It would have everything, and it would be actually useful too because you're likely already using many of their services.