26 May 2026 · business · pricing

Let the price do the migration

Most companies run a migration campaign to clear users off a deprecated API. Anthropic just tripled the price of theirs and let market forces do the work.

A wide dark expanse of polished black slate at dusk. On the left, an old toll gate glows in deep amber - a gantry barrier with a small lit booth beside it - its empty road leading off towards a low sun half-sunk on the horizon beneath a band of burnt-orange light. Sweeping in from the foreground and curving away to the right is a luminous river of cyan-to-mint light, flowing smoothly into the night. A single small magenta point of light glows faintly in the upper-right deep distance.

When you deprecate an old version of an API, the conventional playbook is a migration campaign: the emails, the deprecation banners, the webinars, someone on the phone to your biggest accounts walking them across to the new version. It’s a real project, often weeks of coordinated work across engineering, support and account management, all to nudge people towards something that’s better for them anyway.

There’s another option too, one that Anthropic use, and it’s worth stealing. Rather than chasing everyone off the old version, you charge more for it - three times the price of the current one - and let market forces run the campaign for you. The customers who can move, move, because the maths decides for them. The ones who can’t keep paying a premium that more than covers the cost of keeping a deprecated path alive. Either way you come out ahead, and nobody had to draft a single “please upgrade” email.

⚠️ Warning: your customers may not wear it

This works for the frontier labs because demand for their models is close to inelastic and the cost of switching versions sits with the customer rather than them. For most businesses, tripling the price of something people are actively using is a quick way to make them angry and send them shopping around. Only reach for this once a product is genuinely legacy, where a sunset is already on the calendar and you’re confident your customers will tolerate the nudge rather than resent it.

Used at the right moment it’s the cheapest migration campaign you’ll ever run, but reach for it too early and it becomes an expensive way to teach loyal customers to leave.

Edit: Of course, this also works for PaaS. AWS charge for “extended support” on old versions of managed services like RDS and EKS, keeping an end-of-life release running for you well past its cutoff in exchange for a premium that climbs the longer you put off upgrading. The sunset is real, but there’s always a paid escape hatch for the customers who’d rather pay than migrate.