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by jerrygenser 335 days ago
They can lock in by subsidizing the price of you use their tool, while making the default price larger for wrappers. This can draw people from the wrapper that can support multiple models to the specific CLI that supports the proprietary model.
2 comments
aseipp 335 days ago
Anthropic or Google offering a product and having margins they leverage is not "lock in" when there are dozens of alternatives at many various price points, including ones that can be run entirely locally (at high capex cost). It's like market fact #0 that, today, there is very little moat here other than capital, which is why OpenAI has now got multiple viable competitors despite their head start. Their APIs get copied, their tools get copied, the only way they remain competitive is with huge investments back into the core product to retain their leads. This is just what a competitive market looks like right now, and these offerings exist exactly because of downward pressure from other forces. The goal is of course to squeeze other players as much as possible, but these products have not yet proven to be sticky enough for their mere existence to do that. And there are many other players who have a lot of incentive to keep that downward pressure applied.

What you're describing is really just called "Offering a product for sale" and yes typically the people doing it will do, say, and offer things that encourage using their product over the competitors. That isn't "lock in" in any sense of the word. What are they supposed to do? Say "Our shit sucks and isn't price effective compared to others and we bring nothing to the table?" while giving you stuff for free?

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LeafItAlone 335 days ago
At present, the tools are effectively the same. Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Google Gemini, etc. are basically the same CLI tools. Every so often one will introduce a new feature (e.g. MCP support), but it’s not long before the others also include it. It is easy to swap between them (and Aider) and on tasks where I want a “second opinion”, I do.

Even if they make their tooling cheaper, that’s not going to lock me in. It has to be the best model or have some killer feature. Which, again, could be usurped the next day with the rate these tools are advancing.

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