Alibaba and Tencent's Coding Plan continues to sell out, and the 200 yuan package is also sold out.

According to 1M AI News monitoring, the surge in demand for tokens driven by the “Lobster Farming” craze on OpenClaw has not yet eased. As of March 26, Alibaba Cloud’s Bailing Coding Plan Pro package (200 yuan/month, 90,000 requests) shows “Sold Out for Now,” while Tencent’s Hun Yuan Coding Plan (200 yuan/month, same quota) indicates “Stock Running Low, Restocking Urgently.”

This shortage began in mid-March. After OpenClaw became popular in the mainstream market, cloud providers launched intensive Coding Plan subscription packages, attracting users with introductory prices as low as 7.9 yuan for the first month. These plans support one-stop calls for multiple models like Qianwen, Zhipu, Kimi, MiniMax, and are compatible with mainstream AI programming tools such as Cline, OpenClaw, and Claude Code. Users found that running Agent projects 24/7 with these packages still had remaining balance, making them much more cost-effective than directly purchasing APIs, leading to a demand surge.

Starting from March 17, each provider began adjustments: Tencent limited sales to daily 10 a.m. releases, with the 40-yuan Lite package selling out instantly; Alibaba Bailing stopped offering the Lite version, only keeping the 200-yuan Pro version which remained sold out, and switched to daily 9:30 a.m. limited restocks; Baidu Qianfan sold out simultaneously; ByteDance’s Volcano Engine Ark can still be subscribed to, but users reported slow response times. On March 18, Alibaba Cloud announced a price increase across all AI computing power and storage products, with the highest rise reaching 34%. First Financial quoted insiders saying the main reason for the price hike was the “explosive growth in token call volume.” The Bailing MaaS business achieved its highest ever growth rate from January to March this year, and Alibaba Cloud is shifting scarce AI computing resources toward token services.