Feeding the Meter

On a kerb, feeding the meter means paying more to keep the spot. That is one face of the machine. The other is quieter, and it takes money from people who never run hot. It is the allowance you already paid for, gone on a clock whether you spent it or not. You have looked at the bar, seen an hour left, and decided to start tomorrow instead. Your plan resets tonight either way. On 1 June 2026 GitHub Copilot moved every plan onto usage-based credits, the free tier included. GitHub Blog Each plan now carries a monthly allotment pegged to its own price. Ten dollars of credits on the ten dollar plan. Thirty-nine on the thirty-nine. Cursor includes a set amount of model usage in every plan and bills anything past it in arrears. Cursor Pricing Anthropic's included usage resets on a rolling five-hour clock, with weekly caps above it. Claude Help Center Inside one quarter the AI subscription stopped being a flat fee and became a meter. The sensible response was to learn to read the meter. That is what I did. It is the smaller half of the story.

There is a second clock, and it is not on the meter. Anthropic's Supplemental Credit Terms took effect on 4 March 2024. They live on a different domain from the app. They say usage credits are non-refundable, and that they expire one calendar year from the day they are issued. OpenAI's help centre says the same thing in friendlier language: credits are valid for twelve months, and unused credits expire and do not roll over. OpenAI Help Center So here is the honest answer to the question you actually have. You are paying for the contract everybody now sells. A fixed monthly fee. An allowance that costs nothing extra until it runs out. A steep price after that. Feeding the meter is all three, and the part that catches most of us is the middle one. Your mobile phone bill was built this way in 2009.

The Contract Was Written for Mobile Phones

Guess how much of your plan you used last month, then go and look. The gap between those two numbers is the whole business. In 2009 Michael Grubb showed what to do with it. When customers overestimate how well they can forecast their own demand, the profit-maximising contract takes exactly this shape: a fixed fee, an allowance that feels free while it lasts, and a punishing rate past the line. Grubb, AER 2009 He was not describing artificial intelligence. He was describing American mobile phone plans, and he called the paper Selling to Overconfident Consumers. Three years earlier, Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier had measured the gap directly. Across 7,752 gym members, people forecast 9.50 visits a month and made 4.17. DellaVigna and Malmendier, AER 2006 Those on flat contracts above $70 paid more than $17 for every visit they took. A ten-visit pass sat on the counter at $10. Nobody was defrauded. Everybody was confident.

What is striking about 2026 is the convergence. Four companies, with different investors, different hardware and different customers, arrived at the same instrument within months of each other. That is not copying. It is what happens when an industry finds the contract that fits its customer. And this customer cannot tell you, within a factor of two, how much they used last Tuesday. I have argued before that subscription fatigue is the wrong instrument for reading arrangements like these. This is the same mistake in a newer coat. We keep auditing the price and ignoring the schedule.

Two Documents, Written for Two Different Readers

The best usage guidance in the industry is published by Anthropic, and it works. Plan the conversation before you start it. Batch related questions into one message instead of five. Put stable documents in a project, where they are cached and do not count against your limits each time you reuse them. Prefer the smaller model unless the work needs the larger one. Start a fresh chat for a new topic, so you stop paying to carry the old one. Watch the progress bars in your settings. Manage usage credits Every item is true. Every item lowers your bill. I use most of them. Hold that at full strength, then notice what else each item does. It flattens peak load on a fleet of very expensive machines. The guidance is genuinely for you. It is also demand management, performed by the customer, unpaid, with a straight face on both sides.

Now set the two documents next to each other. The advice was updated on 2 June 2026. It sits in a searchable help centre and it is written in the second person. The expiry sits in those Supplemental Credit Terms dated 4 March 2024, on the corporate domain, in the third person, addressed to a Customer who is presumed to have read it. Between them the schedules line up like this. Included usage, gone every five hours. Prepaid balance, gone at twelve months. Copilot's allotment, renewed monthly and pegged to the price of the plan. And Anthropic's bundles, which cost 10 per cent less at $50 and 30 per cent less at $1,000, drawing down against that same twelve-month clock. Buy usage bundles Nobody rolls over. GitHub, announcing its change, even gave the leftover a name. It was introducing pooled usage across a business, it wrote, to help eliminate stranded capacity. Individual plans do not pool.

A Remedy You Can Only Spend by Spending More

On 28 July 2026 an EU subscriber posting as Pinkashtray0 filed a billing complaint on Anthropic's public issue tracker. claude-code #81869 The facts he reported are small and precise. On 17 July, for thirty-one minutes, a configuration error billed some usage against credits instead of counting it towards included weekly usage. Anthropic acknowledged it by email, which he quoted in full. It added €3.91 to his account, stated to be twice the amount billed in error. The credit does not expire until 21 July 2027. It also cannot be spent, because a correction credit is only consumed once you exceed your plan limits, and he does not. He mentioned, almost in passing, that he had held around $100 of purchased extra usage for about a year without spending a cent of it. Then he asked Anthropic to confirm the exact date that money would lapse.

His sentence is the one worth keeping. A remedy that only materialises if the customer spends more money is not a remedy. Nothing here was hidden and nothing here was illegal, which is exactly why it is worth looking at. The terms were published. The error was admitted. The compensation was doubled. And the man is still out of pocket, in the only currency he can actually use. Two pounds and change, and a clock.

You Paid Until Four. It Finished at Half Past Two.

You have done this. You stand at the machine at the kerb, guess how long the thing inside will take, add twenty minutes because you would rather not be thinking about it, and put the ticket face up on the dashboard. Then it finishes early. You walk back past a car circling for a space, and you drive away with ninety minutes still printed on a piece of paper nobody will ever look at again. The kerb behind you goes back to zero before you reach the junction.

Nobody stole anything, and the machine did exactly what it said. You bought ninety minutes, the ninety minutes existed, and they went back to the road the moment you left. That is the part a progress bar cannot show you. Not that you might run out, which you can see perfectly well. That the clock was never counting your time. It was counting the space's. Try the strip that shows remaining and reset together.

The Strongest Case for Calling It a Ceiling

Here is the objection, and it is a good one. Inference capacity is finite, expensive and violently peaky. A rolling window is the least-bad instrument anyone has found for stopping a handful of very heavy users from degrading a service for everybody else. Rollover would make that worse rather than better. Banked capacity would come back as a single Monday-morning wave and take the service down for the people who saved nothing. A five-hour clock is short on purpose, so that a bad hour is recoverable inside the working day instead of the working month. And a company farming unused capacity does not publish a guide teaching you to consume less of its product. It does not build a live meter into its own settings page. It certainly does not raise its own limits. On 6 May 2026 Anthropic doubled the five-hour limits for Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise plans, removed the peak-hour reduction, and cited new compute. Anthropic News Limits that move up when capacity arrives were limits about capacity.

All of that is true, and it explains one clock. It does not explain the other. Those same Supplemental Credit Terms, effective 4 March 2024, put a twelve-month expiry on money that has already been paid. Prepaid credit reserves nothing. No machine is held idle waiting for it. Expiring it releases no capacity to anybody. And if you want to know how much of this is physics and how much is preference, go back to the kerb. Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax and Victoria refund unused parking time or return it to your account. Global News HONK and ParkNYC state plainly that they do not. HONK ParkNYC Same technology, opposite policies, and nobody has ever argued the difference is something to do with the road. So one of the two schedules in front of you is a pricing decision wearing the costume of a physical constraint. It is the one filed in the document nobody opens.

The Meter

Every meter in front of you expires, at five hours, at a month or at a year, and only the fastest of those clocks is about the machines. Read the schedule before you read the price, and ask of each expiry what it is actually protecting. Pinkashtray0 is owed about £1.70, has been told he can have it as credit against a service he demonstrably does not use, and will most likely watch it expire on 21 July 2027, next to the hundred dollars he already handed over and never spent.