Alibaba Tencent Coding Plan Continues to Sell Out, $200 Package Also Unavailable

According to 1M AI News monitoring, the token demand surge driven by the OpenClaw "Lobster Raising" craze has not subsided. As of March 26, Alibaba Cloud's Centrifuge Coding Plan Pro package (200 RMB/month, 90,000 request limit) shows "Temporarily Sold Out," while Tencent's Metafusion Coding Plan (200 RMB/month, same specifications) shows "Low Stock, Emergency Restocking in Progress".

This out-of-stock situation began in mid-March. Various cloud providers rapidly released Coding Plan programming packages after OpenClaw entered the mainstream market, attracting users with prices as low as 7.9 RMB for the first month, supporting one-stop access to multiple models such as Qianwen, Zhipu, Kimi, MiniMax, and compatible with popular AI programming tools like Cline, OpenClaw, Claude Code. Users found that there was still balance left in the package after running an Agent project for 24 hours, making it much more cost-effective than directly purchasing APIs, leading to a sudden surge in demand.

Starting from March 17, various providers began to adjust: Tencent switched to limited-time daily sales at 10 a.m., with the 40 RMB Lite package selling out instantly; Alibaba's Centrifuge stopped selling the Lite version, only retaining the 200 RMB Pro version, which continues to be sold out, and the official website changed to limited restocking at 9:30 a.m. daily; Baidu Qianfan sold out at the same time; ByteDance's Volcano Engine Ark is still available for subscription, but users reported slow response times. On March 18, Alibaba Cloud announced across-the-board price increases for AI computing power and storage products, with the highest increase reaching 34%. Caixin First Financial cited insiders stating that a key reason for the price hike is the "surge in Token calls," with Centrifuge's MaaS business achieving its highest growth rate from January to March this year, as Alibaba Cloud is directing its scarce AI computing resources toward Token business.