AI flat rates for programming are mathematically unsustainable

A Claude Max user, who pays $100 a month, generated $5,600 in actual API costs in a single billing cycle. It is just an (extreme) example of the enormous gap between the price of such a plan and its spending potential. Other analyzes place it on the range of between 1,000 and 5,000 dollars. Anthropic has just cut off access to third-party tools (such as OpenClaw) to your subscription plans. In addition to for protecting your fenced gardenis also the inevitable arithmetic consequence of selling tokens at open buffet prices when real consumption has skyrocketed between 10 and 100 times. Why is it important. The business model that has financed the explosion of AI for programmers (flat rates, unlimited access, subscription model) has been built on a statistical fiction that development agents have destroyed. What is assumed when a flat rate is sold in any area is that light users subsidize the most intensive ones and the averages are sustained. That works in the data rates of a telecom, in the gyms, in Netflix and in an all-you-can-eat buffet. But it doesn’t work when any user can become, from one day to the next, a beastly consumer of computing. And that’s exactly what happens when an agent comes into play. And since December we are in the era of the agents. Between the lines. The person who has best explained this problem is Luo Fuliresponsible for the team MiMo model on Xiaomi and ex-DeepSeek, who has published a long tweet which has moved especially in Chinese technological circles. Your diagnosis is that third party tools like OpenClaw are not optimized to reuse Claude’s context cache, so each query regenerates context windows of over 100,000 tokens from scratch. The actual number of requests per query is several times higher than what Claude Code himself would generate. “That’s not a gap. It’s a crater,” Luo said. The backdrop. In China, AI programming plans have become one of the most sought-after technology products on the market. Alibaba Cloud quotas They usually sell out in the first hours of the work dayand Tencent’s appear as “unavailable” permanently. Developers go so far as to set morning alarms and write scripts self-purchase to get monthly access. The demand is real, but the underlying economics point in the opposite direction: subscription plans, designed for a world where each interaction consumed a few hundred tokensnow absorb agent workloads that consume 10 to 100 times more per task. Yes, but. Anthropic has not closed access to third-party agents. You have moved them to another invoice: from flat rate to pay-as-you-go API. The measure includes a one-time credit equivalent to the monthly price of the plan and discounts of up to 30% for those who pre-purchase “extra use” packages. The problem is that for many independent developers, the jump in costs, potentially tenfold, makes the use of agents no longer economically viable. Some have already announced that they will migrate to other models. Someone has to pay for that party, and until a new, more efficient solution arrives, no one knows who it will be. The big question. If flat rate can’t survive actual agent usage, what pricing model can? Luo Fuli believes that economic pressure will eventually force third-party tool developers to optimize their context management and maximize cache reuse. He may be right and his approach is logical. But in the meantime, the entire industry is operating with a business model whose math doesn’t add up, and the question of who will absorb the difference (suppliers, developers or end users) remains unanswered. In Xataka | Companies have been investing in AI for years. The problem is that many projects are not producing results. Featured image | Fotis Fotopoulos

Some researchers have calculated mathematically which are the most tourist cities in the world. Bad news, Barcelona

Each summer Barcelona usually Be news in the foreign press for its attractiveness as a tourist destination. After all, its mixture of Mediterranean climate, beach, culture, architecture and gastronomy attract every year to hundreds of thousands of travelers from other parts of the world. However in July 2024 The Ciudad Condal monopolized holders in the media of the entire planet for a rather different reason: fed up with saturation, a group of neighbors dedicated himself to shooting visitors with water guns next to posters in which messages such as “Tourists Go Home” were read. That was a sample (The nth) The impact of the sector in the Catalan capital, a phenomenon that has now been black on white in A study which identifies Barcelona as the city most pressured by tourism. Tourist density. That is the parameter that has analyzed Nomad Esim in A report published a few days ago, a study in which he is dedicated to examining how Overurism It is affecting some of the most popular destinations in the world. To do this, it has basically valued two parameters: the size of the cities and the number of foreign visitors who receive each year, which allows it to calculate their “density” of travelers. With the results it has elaborated A 40 -cities ranking Headed by Porto, Cancun and Barcelona, ​​which leads the list. Why’s that? Nomad technicians have estimated that Barcelona receives about 20.37 million tourists who are forced to be distributed by an urban area of 101 square kilometerswith what the concentration of visitors per km2 amounts to 201.722. There is no other city on the list that approaches him. The second in the ranking, Cancun, has 147,887 tourists per km2 and in Porto do not even reach 144,000. The fourth place is occupied by New York, with 137,712, which Dubrovnik (112,500), Florence (107,843), Kyoto (98,651) and Lisbon (88,000). Mallorca occupies the 37th position, with 5,137, and Paris the 29th (16,820). Issue of density and size. That data does not mean that Barcelona is the one that receives the most tourists. Not much less. New York, Kyoto, Los Angeles, Paris, Las Vegas or London (to quote only some examples) receive more visitors than the city, according to the information that Nomad Esim manages, but its largest urban extension explains that the tourist massification is not so high. The data of the report They must also be taken as what they are: a report, with their biases and limitations. His estimate of tourists does not coincide for example with the global data that the city handled in the late 2024 (15.5 million). In 2023 the observatori of tourism spoke of 15.6 million of visitors, balance that rose to 25.9 million if the region was taken into account, not just the city. The report It is interesting in any case because it provides clues about other destinations and connects with a feeling that has been breathed for years in Barcelona: The discomfort from the neighbors for the tourist. The pressure on residents. In his report, Nomad has done something else: calculating the “pressure” that tourism exerts on the local population of each of the destinations. To do this he crossed the flow of tourists from each city and its census. The most bulky data is taken in that case Orlando, with 241 tourists for each resident. They are followed by Santorini (220), Queenstow (116), Mykonos (105) and Cozumel (94). Barcelona occupies the 24th place of the international list, with an average of 13 visitors per local, a result slightly lower than that of Mallorca (20). If both metrics are mixed, the surface, total register of neighbors and influx of tourists, the first in the list is Cancun, followed by Orlando, Dubrovnik, Kyoto, Florence and witches. Barcelona is in tenth place and Mallorca in the 32nd. Of the imforms to the streets. The study is interesting because it gives a measure of the pressure that great destinations support, including Barcelona or Mallorca, a phenomenon that has caused resident mobilizations that claim a more sustainable tourist model. The Protest with guns Water was surely the most media, but not the only one: in Barcelona (as in other locations) the neighbors have taken to the streets to show their rejection of massification or demand a greater access to housing, a market conditioned for tourist pressure. The risk: die of success. Saturation supposes something else: a threat to the quality and future of its own destination. The “No List 2025” of Fodor´s, one of the most solera guides among the Anglo -Saxon travelers already has proposed To their readers who “reconside” spend their vacation in three emblematic destinations in Spain that face the risk of dying of success or are directly saturated. Which is it? Canary Islands, Mallorca … and Barcelona, ​​who share a list with international destinations such as Bali, Venice, Lisbon, Koh Samui (Thailand) or Agrigento (Sicily). It is not that they have asked for charm, but about the consequences that tourist success is having in the functioning of cities. Image | Sung Shin In Xataka | The tourism paradox in Spain: if you have not reserved your vacation in the Canary Islands, it is possible that the same thing costs to go to the Caribbean

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