The 2% Experiment That 98% of Customers Saw | Edition 305

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On April 21, Anthropic changed one line on its public pricing page. Claude Code — the coding tool bundled into the $20-a-month Pro plan — stopped being listed as included. Read the page cold and it looked like the cost of getting Claude Code had just gone from $20 a month to $100.

It was not a price increase. It was an experiment running on roughly 2% of new signups. The other 98% found out anyway, because the page they read is the same page everybody reads.

Internet Archive captures bracket it tightly. At 14:10 UTC on 21 April, the Pro card on claude.com/pricing still read Includes Claude Code. By 19:25 UTC it was gone. A support article titled Using Claude Code with your Pro or Max plan had quietly become Using Claude Code with your Max plan, captured under the new title at 18:36 UTC. Nothing had been announced, so every account of the change was somebody's screenshot.

At 22:55 UTC that same day — 3:55pm Pacific on 21 April — Anthropic's head of growth, Amol Avasare, posted on X: "For clarity, we're running a small test on ~2% of new prosumer signups. Existing Pro and Max subscribers aren't affected." The Register's write-up came hours later, at 01:16 UTC on 22 April — the evening of 21 April in the US. Then at 02:51 UTC Avasare posted again: "Getting lots of questions on why the landing page / docs were updated if only 2% of new signups were affected. This was understandably confusing for the 98% of folks not part of the experiment, and we've reverted both the landing page and docs changes." Twenty minutes later he called it "a mistake that the logged-out landing page and docs were updated for this test."

The archive shows the pricing page restored by 05:10 UTC on 22 April — 10:10pm Pacific on the 21st. Read in Pacific time, the whole episode happened on a single day.

Today the pricing page lists Claude Code as included in Pro at $20 a month. The revert held.

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Testing a price on a slice of new signups is ordinary, and leaving existing subscribers alone is the considerate way to do it. The problem was the plumbing.

The test was implemented by editing two surfaces that have no idea who is looking at them: the logged-out landing page, and the public support docs — which are also what search engines index and what an AI assistant reads when someone asks what a plan includes. A logged-out page cannot know whether you are in the 2%, because it does not know who you are.

So the reach was never 2%. It was everyone who visited.

The rule worth stealing: the blast radius of a change is set by the widest surface you edit, not by the size of the group you meant to target. When those two numbers disagree, the surface wins.

Anthropic said clearly and early that existing customers were untouched — though that assurance came as a tweet from its head of growth, not a blog post or changelog, and nothing was published to verify it. Simon Willison disputed the 2% framing at the time. The revert, at least, was same-day, complete and unnegotiated. And the correction was in plain language — "we've reverted both the landing page and docs changes" is a sentence a human wrote.

What it cost is subtler. For several hours on 21 April, the most authoritative page describing what Anthropic sells disagreed with what Anthropic actually sells, in the direction of a fivefold increase. Every screenshot from that window still exists. A page you revert is not a page you un-publish.

You will see this described as a nine-hour or twelve-hour episode. No primary source supports either. The archive captures only bracket it: the line was there at 14:10 UTC on 21 April and gone by 19:25; still gone at 00:12 UTC on 22 April and restored by 05:10. Somewhere between roughly five and fifteen hours — wide enough that any precise figure is invented.

You will also see Anthropic called a $61.5 billion company. That was its valuation in March 2025. It closed a $30 billion Series G at $380 billion post-money in February 2026, and five weeks after this incident raised $65 billion more at $965 billion post-money.

Which makes the story better, not worse. A company operating at that scale still shipped a copy change to a public page without anyone asking who else reads it.

Write down every logged-out surface you own — pricing page, docs, help centre, plan comparison, app store listing. Those are the pages that cannot be tested quietly. Then add one line to your experiment checklist: which surfaces does this change edit, and who can see each one?

The site version has the interactive blast-radius calculator and the copy-paste pre-mortem prompt that runs this check on a change you are about to ship.

— Jerry