[Loic]

They put no limits on the API usage, as long as you pay.

Here, they put limits on the "under-cover" use of the subscription. If they can provide a relatively cheap subscription against the direct API use, this is because they can control the stuff end-to-end, the application running on your system (Claude Code, Claude Desktop) and their systems.

As you subscribe to these plans, this is the "contract", you can use only through their tools. If you want full freedom, use the API, with a per token pricing.

For me, this is fair.

[rglullis]

> If they can provide a relatively cheap subscription against the direct API use

Except they can't. Their costs are not magically lower when you use claude code vs when you use a third-party client.

> For me, this is fair.

This is, plain and simple, a tie-in sale of claude code. I am particularly amused by people accepting it as "fair" because in Brazil this is an illegal practice.

[nerdjon]

> This is, plain and simple, a tie-in sale of claude code. I am particularly amused by people accepting it as "fair" because in Brazil this is an illegal practice

I am very curious what is particularly illegal about this. On the sales page nowhere do they actually talk about the API https://claude.com/pricing

Now we all know obviously the API is being used because that is how things work, but you are not actually paying a subscription for the API. You are paying for access to Claude Code.

Is it also illegal that if you pay for Playstation Plus that you can't play those games on an Xbox?

Is it illegal that you can't use third party netflix apps?

I really don't want to defend and AI company here but this is perfectly normal. In no other situation would we expect access to the API, the only reason this is considered different is because they also have a different service that gives access to the API. But that is irrelevant.

[jltsiren]

It's basically the difference between pro-market capitalism and pro-business capitalism. The value to the society comes from competition in the market and from the businesses' ability to choose freely how they do business. When those two goals are in conflict, which one should be prioritized?

Anthropic provides an API third-party clients can use. The pro-market position is that the API must be available at every pricing tier, as the benefits from increased competition outweigh the imposed restrictions to business practices. The pro-business position is that Anthropic must be allowed to choose which tiers can use the API, as the benefits from increased freedom outweigh the reduced competition in the market.

[wasfgwp]

So if Claude code didn’t communicate with Anthropic’s server using a well defined public api but some obscure undocumented binary format it would be fine?

Or should every app/service be required to expose documented APIs?

[jltsiren]

This is not a technical question.

The immediate pro-market position is that if third-party clients are allowed / possible, Anthropic should be allowed to favor its own clients with lower prices.

But the position can go further if the service in question can be considered infrastructure. For example, a company that owns a mobile network may be required to let virtual operators use their infrastructure for a reasonable price. And a company owning a power grid may be required to become a neutral infrastructure provider that is not allowed to generate/sell power.

[wasfgwp]

Anthropic is neither a monopoly nor has a dominant market position. Generally standards applied to companies like that are very different due to good reason.

[jltsiren]

EDIT: Anthropic should not be allowed to favor its own clients with lower prices.

[nerdjon]

Like I mentioned somewhere else I can see why some people think they are entitled to do this and I also fully understand wanting to do it from a cost standpoint.

While I do personally disagree with thinking that you should be able to do this when it was never sold in that way, at the end of the day as a customer you can choose if you want to use the product in the way that they are saying or use something else if you don’t want to support that model.

However the person I was responding too brought up legality which is a very different discussion.

[CuriouslyC]

Imagine if video service came with a free TV that watched you, and was really opinionated about what you watch, and you could only watch your videos on the creeper TV.

[nerdjon]

Then I would not use it because it does not work the way I want it to work...

But if that is the service they are making and they are clear about what it is when you sign up... That does not make it illegal.

I can see why people think they should be entitled to do this, but it does not align with how they are selling the service or how many other companies sell services. In most situations you don't get unlimited access to the individual components of how a service works (the API), you are expected to use the service (in this case Claude Code) directly.

[rglullis]

> That does not make it illegal.

"Both parties are okay with the terms" is far from being sufficient to make something "legal".

Tie-in sales between software and services is not different from price dumping. If any of the Big Tech corporations were from any country that is not the US, the FTC would be doing anything in their power to stop them.

[nerdjon]

> Tie-in sales between software and services is not different from price dumping.

I disagree, in many cases what you are specifically paying for is the combination of the software and the service that are designed to work together. And in many cases do not work independent of eachother.

There are countless cases of this, that what you are paying for is a thing that is made up of a piece of software and a serverside component. MMO's (and gaming in general) being a major example of this, but so are many of the apps I pay for subscriptions for on my phone.

The actual technical implementation of how it works is irrelevant when it is clear what it is you are paying for.

> "Both parties are okay with the terms" is far from being sufficient to make something "legal".

True but the opposite is also true, just because you don't like the terms it does not make it illegal.

[skeledrew]

> Tie-in sales between software and services

Look at it this way: the service that you're accessing is really a (primarily desired) side-effect of the software. So re subscriptions, what they're actually providing are the apps (web, desktop, etc), and the apps use their service to aid the fulfillment of their functionality. Those wanting direct access to the internal service can get an API key for that purpose. That's just how their product offering is structured.

[joombaga]

The Telly comes with a second screen for ads that you're not allowed to shut off. https://www.telly.com/

[Forgeties79]

That’s definitely a pitch lol

[pocksuppet]

Video service does work like that. They call it DRM.

[wasfgwp]

I can’t was Netflix on Amazon’s streaming app or the other way around? So yeah, its the same

Anthropic isn’t handing out free PCs or forcing people to use them.

[smileysteve]

I think you just described American cable boxes... Except they charge us a monthly fee and an additional monthly fee for the box.

Or any smart tv with free ip tv.

[Reddit_MLP2]

Is that not most if not all smart TVs today? Basically nearly every TV made and sold right now?

[theturtletalks]

I've heard they actually cache the full Claude Code system prompt on their servers and this saves them a lot of money. Maybe they cache the MCP tools you use and other things. If another harness like Opencode changes that prompt or adds significantly to it, that could increase costs for them.

What I don't understand is why start this game of cat and mouse? Just look at Youtube and YT-DLP. YT-DLP, and the dozens of apps that use it, basically use Youtube's unofficial web API and it still works even after Youtube constantly patches their end. Though now, YT-DLP has to use a makeshift JS interpreter and maybe even spawn Chromium down the line.

[duskdozer]

Some people drop out of the game as it gets harder. I've basically stopped looking at youtube videos unless I want it enough to download it (and wait if the current workarounds broke) with how much they've clamped down on no-account usage. Most I suspect just give in to the company's terms.

[skeledrew]

I just use NewPipe all the way.

[duskdozer]

It hadn't worked for me for a long time, though I did notice an update recently, so maybe it's good again. I like it better than Grayjay

[cma]

> Their costs are not magically lower when you use claude code vs when you use a third-party client.

If subsidizing that offering is a good hook to get higher paying API users on board, then some of that cost is a customer aquisition cost, whereas the cost to them of providing the API doesn't have the same proportion that they can justify as a customer acquisition cost.

[rglullis]

I absolutely have zero concerns about their cost to acquire new customers. As a (former) customer, all I am concerned is the freedom to consume the service I am paying for however I see fit.

[brookst]

Is there any service in the world that gives you complete freedom on how you consume it? I can’t think of one.

Netflix: limits number of devices and stream quality and offline use.

AWS: does not allow any number of applications (spamming, crypto mining, adult content)

Airlines: do not allow smoking, boom boxes

Is there any service that gives complete freedom?

[rglullis]

I am not asking for "complete" freedom, am I? Can you please argue in good faith and not resort to cheap rhetoric tricks?

[votepaunchy]

“the freedom to consume the service I am paying for however I see fit” sure sounds like complete freedom.

[rogerthis]

Unless it's illegal in more places, I think they won't care. In my experience, the percentage of free riders in Brazil is higher (due to circumstances, better said).

[pigpop]

While the cost may not be lower the price certainly can be if they are operating like any normal company and adding margin.

[canibal]

But they could charge the third-party client for access to the API.

[regularfry]

> Except they can't. Their costs are not magically lower when you use claude code vs when you use a third-party client.

I don't have a dog in this fight but is this actually true? If you're using Claude Code they can know that whatever client-side model selection they put into it is active. So if they can get away with routing 80% of the requests to Haiku and only route to Opus for the requests that really need it, that does give them a cost model where they can rely on lower costs than if a third-party client just routes to Opus for everything. Even if they aren't doing that sort of thing now, it would be understandable if they wanted to.

[joseda-hg]

It (CC) does have a /models command, you can still decide to route everything to Opus if you just want to burn tokens I guess it's not default so most wouldn't, but still, people willing to go to a third party client are more likely that kind of power user anyway

They still have the total consumption under their control (*bar prompt caching and other specific optimizations) where in the past they even had different quotas per model, it shouldn't cost them more money, just be a worse/different service I guess

[skeledrew]

> it shouldn't cost them more money

As things are currently, better models mean bigger models that take more storage+RAM+CPU, or just spend more time processing a request. All this translates to higher costs, and may be mitigated by particular configs triggered by knowledge that a given client, providing particular guarantees, is on the other side.

[joseda-hg]

That’s kind of the point. Even if users can choose which model to use (and apparently the default is the largest one), they could still say (For roughly the same cost): your Opus quota is X, your Haiku quota is Y, go ham. We’ll throttle you when you hit the limit.

[skeledrew]

But they don't want the subscription to be quota'd like that. The API automatically does that though, as different models use different amounts of tokens when generating responses, and the billing is per token. And quite literally is having the user account for the actual costs of usage, which is the thing said users are trying to avoid, on their own terms, and getting upset about when they aren't.

[ac29]

> It (CC) does have a /models command, you can still decide to route everything to Opus if you just want to burn tokens I guess it's not default so most wouldn't

Opus is claude code's default model as of sometime recently (around Opus 4.6?)

[brookst]

That’s not how Claude Code works. It’s not like a web chatbot with a layer that routes based on complexity of request.

[skeledrew]

You don't control what happens when a request hits their endpoint though.

[narrator]

I think what most people don't realize is running an agent 24/7 fully automated is burning a huge hole in their profitability. Who even knows how big it is. It could be getting it on the 8/9 figures a day for all we know.

There's this pervasive idea left over from the pre-llm days that compute is free. You want to rent your own H200x8 to run your Claude model, that's literally going to cost $24/hour. People are just not thinking like that. I have my home PC, it does this stuff I can run it 24/7 for free.

[starkgoose]

there are usage limits preventing you from running it 24/7 on all subscriptions tiers

[butlike]

This bolster's OP's point, to an extent

[Xunjin]

I understand you mean for free in the sense that you don't pay a third party to use it, however let's no forget that you still use the power grid and that's not free. Also worth to note that energy prices have increased worldwide.

[dspillett]

Depending on utilisation and good use of low-power or sleep (or full off) states when things aren't actively processing, it can still be a _lot_ cheaper to run things at home than on a rented service. Power costs have increased a lot in recent years, but so have compute-per-watt ratios and you are not paying the that indirect compute price when the processors are asleep or off whereas with subscription access to LLMs you are paying at least the base subscription each month even if you don't use it at all in that period. Much the same as the choice between self-hosting an open-source project or paying for a hosted instance - and in both cases people don't tend to consider the admin cost (for some of us the admin is “play time”!) so the self-hosted option it does practically feel free.

[regenschutz]

Maintaining hardware also isn't free. Time is money.

[darkwater]

Time is money if you have another good use of that time. If you like spending that time doing something, then it's literally free.

[mickeyp]

Sure it's $24/hour, but it'll crank through tens of thousands of tokens per second --- those beefy GPUs are meant for large amounts of parallel workflow. You'll never _get_ that many tokens for a single request. That's why the mathematics work when you get dozens or hundreds of people using it.

No. The sauce is in KV caching: when to evict, when to keep, how to pre-empt an active agent loop vs someone who are showing signs of inactivity at their pc, etc.

[admx8]

Coder doing the coding should use subscription, and now they ban the choice of your preferred ide for agentc coding. API is for automation not coding. I'm going to cancel their subscription today, I already use codex with opencode.

[notpushkin]

This is honestly the key difference here. I’m morally okay with using Claude Max Whatever with something like OpenCode because it’s literally the same thing from the usage pattern perspective. Plugging Nanoclaw into it is a whole another thing.

[ethbr1]

It probably doesn't help that the creator of OpenClaw just got hired by Anthropic's competitor.

This sounds like engineering, finance, and legal got together and decided they were in an untenable position if OpenAI started nudging OpenClaw to burn even more tokens on Anthropic (or just never optimize) + continually updated workarounds to using subscription auth. But I'm sure OpenAI would never do something like that...

At the end of the day, it's the same 'fixed price plan for variable use on a constrained resource' cellular problem: profitability becomes directly linked to actual average usage.

[skeledrew]

> OpenAI started nudging OpenClaw to burn even more tokens on Anthropic

Not possible: OpenClaw is run by a foundation, and is open source, which means OpenAI has no leverage to do such a thing.

[ethbr1]

Because open source has always been completely independent of unrelated corporate entities who employ people to work on it?

[skeledrew]

Because anyone can actually check the code, which means if there's any funny business, someone will come across it eventually and blow it open.

[stavros]

I don't see how it's fair. If I'm paying for usage, and I'm using it, why should Anthropic have a say on which client I use?

I pay them $100 a month and now for some reason I can't use OpenCode? Fuck that.

[dragonwriter]

You aren't paying for usage, you are paying for the product that the subscription is offered to. If you are paying for usage, well, that's their billed by token-usage API plan, which they are quite happy for you to use with any client you want.

[stavros]

Even worse, if I'm paying a subscription for the product, and I don't want to use the product, what's it to them?

[FeepingCreature]

You are free to not use it. You are not free to use the API provided specifically for the product, which you are not explicitly paying for, for a different product.

You can of course use OpenCode or any other project with the API, which is also offered as a separate product. People just don't want to do that because it's not subsidized, ie. more expensive. But the entire reason it's subsidized is that Anthropic can use the data to improve their product.

[rglullis]

> But the entire reason it's subsidized is that Anthropic can use the data to improve their product.

This is grade A, absolute crap. It's subsidized because everyone else is subsidizing it, and everyone is doing it because they are trying to lock their consumer share.

The solution is quite simple. Just get the FTC to forbid tie-in sales so that we don't get the huge corporations using their infinite resources to outlive the competition. Anthropic/Amazon/Google/OpenAI/Facebook can offer any type of service they want, but if the access to the API costs $X when offered standalone, then that is the baseline price for anything that depends on the API to work.

[FeepingCreature]

I'm fine with this as well. I just dislike everyone here presenting it like this is Anthropic being unreasonable. Given the product that is offered and why it's being offered, this is completely reasonable to do.

I don't use the Anthropic subscriptions either.

[xvector]

Do you not understand that they run the regular subscription at a huge loss? In exchange they require you to stick with Claude Code.

You are free to use the API.

[regenschutz]

Why can't they run the API at a huge loss too then??

[dragonwriter]

Because if you do everything at a huge loss, you run out of runway very quickly.

[hluska]

I’m not saying this is a bubble; I don’t know whether than it is or not. But if it is a bubble, I’ve only seen one bubble this big in tech. When that bubble popped, the only companies that survived kept their costs in check. Some raised a round right before the bubble popped but cost control was always part or their survival.

[hobofan]

> If I'm paying for usage

You are not paying for usage. You are paying for usage via their application.

If their business plan is based on how quickly a human can enter requests and react to the results, and Claude Code is optimized for that, why should you be allowed to use an alternative client that e.g. always tries to saturate the token limits?

[admx8]

Btw API is not for coding, it's designed for pipelines, automation, products. They just kill competition making better software like opencode.

[NewsaHackO]

Is that your belief to what their API should be used for?

[stavros]

But a) I'm not doing that and b) they can just ban that, like they have rate limits. Why ban OpenCode?

[barrkel]

They have rate limits, but they also want to control the nozzle, and not all their users use all their allocation all the time.

In reality, heavy subscription users are subsidized by light subscription users. The rate limits aren't everything.

If agent harnesses other than Claude Code consume more tokens than average, or rather, if users of agent harnesses other than CC consume more tokens than average, well, Anthropic wouldn't be unhappy if those consumers had to pay more for their tokens.

[notpushkin]

> If agent harnesses other than Claude Code consume more tokens than average, or rather, if users of agent harnesses other than CC consume more tokens than average

Do they, though?

[PierceJoy]

The speculative reasoning I've seen is that they have optimizations in their CC client that reduces their costs. If that's true, I think it's fair that they can limit subscription usage to their client. If you don't want those optimizations and prefer more freedom, use the API.

[heliumtera]

They rather have yolo permissions to run arbitrary code on your machine and phone home all the time, then opencode having it and phoning home all the time.

[terminalbraid]

Stop giving money to the company that doesn't give you what you want.

[amelius]

It is important that the company knows why they are losing customers, though.

[kalleboo]

I canceled my Claude subscription (other reasons) and they had an "exit interview" question of why you canceled. They know why.

[brookst]

Internal sales data is probably a lot more effective and attended to than HN posts.

[butlike]

You're touching on the eternal App Store debate. "It's my phone, I should be able to install whatever I want on it!" Which is true, but also hasn't been true since the mid-90s (early 2000s at the latest).

[skeledrew]

Not quite though. You can install Claude's apps wherever they're supported, and maybe even fiddle with the source code (I'm unsure). And you can use any other coding apps that you want. The only real restriction is how those apps are allowed to connect to the providers' services, which are running on their servers, etc. There's a movement from "my local domain" to "their remote domain", and they're allowed to have full control of theirs as you - would prefer, I think - full control of yours.

[TZubiri]

Read the ToS, you are paying to use their products. If you want to use other products that integrate with the Anthropic LLMs they offer a product which is the API. You can use Opencode by connecting your API and being charged per token.

Doesn't that make sense? If you use it more you get charged more, if you use it less you get charged less.

[admx8]

Sure, that's why I'm cancelling my max subscription because I'm tied to opencode :)

[stavros]

But you understand that they changed the ToS today, and that's what I'm complaining about, right? "Read the ToS" isn't an answer to "I don't like this ToS change".

[TZubiri]

I didn't see today's ToS change. But this was always against ToS. OpenClaw specifically is built against tech that breaks ToS.

Probably the ToS change was to make it more clear.

To be fair, the developer is the one breaking the ToS in the most significant way, breaking boilerplate reverse engineering clauses.

But the user also is very aware that they are doing something funny, in order to authenticate, the user is asked to authorize Claude Code, n ot Opencode or OpenClaw, it's clearly a hack and there is no authorization from Anthropic to OpenClaw, and you are not giving Anthropic authorization to give access to OC, the user asks Anthropic to give access to Claude Code, the only reason this works is because OC is pretending to be Claude Code.

The bottom line issue is that as a user you are paying for a subscription to a package that includes an expected usage. That package is not metered, but it is given on the condition that you will use it as it is expected to be used, by chatting manually with the chatbot, which results in a reasonable expected token usage. By using a program that programatically calls the chat interface, the token consumption increases beyond what was part of the original deal, and so the price should be different.

A similar scenario would be if you go to an all you can eat buffet, you pay for a single person, but then you actually unload an army of little clones that start eating the whole buffet. Technically it was an all you can eat buffet and you paid the price right? Well no, come on, don't play dumb.

[everdrive]

Now just imagine the rug-pull if you ever get really dependent on the product.

[arghwhat]

Their subscriptions aren't cheap, and it has nothing really to do with them controlling the system.

It's just price differentiation - they know consumers are price sensitive, and that companies wanting to use their APIs to build products so they can slap AI on their portfolio and get access to AI-related investor money can be milked. On the consumer-facing front, they live off branding and if you're not using claude code, you might not associate the tool with Anthropic, which means losing publicity that drives API sales.

[skerit]

It would be less of an issue if Claude-Code was actually the best coding client, and would actually somehow reduce the amount of tokens used. But it's not. I get more things done with less tokens via OpenCode. And in the end, I hit 100% usage at the end of the week anyway.

[cik]

The problem is incentives. The organization selling the per-token model doesn't have the incentive, at scale to have you reduce token consumption. Other technologies do, hence adding value.

[fauigerzigerk]

It doesn't really make sense to me because the subscriptions have limits too.

But I agree they can impose whatever user hostile restrictions they want. They are not a monopoly. They compete in a very competitive market. So if they decide to raise prices in whatever shape or form then that's fine.

Arbitrary restrictions do play a role for my own purchasing decisions though. Flexibility is worth something.

[randusername]

I'm with the parent comment. It was inevitable Netflix would end password-sharing. It was inevitable you'd have to pick between freeform usage-based billing and a constrained subscription experience. Using the chatbot subscription as an API was a weird loophole. I don't feel betrayed.

[tom_m]

They tier it. So you are limited until you pay more. So you can't just right away get the access you need.

[throwaway24778]

I don't and would never pay for an LLM, but presumably they also want for force ads down your throat eventually, yea? Hard to do if you're just selling API access.

[bilekas]

But the idea of an API is more to encourage creativity and other people/companies building products and services on or around your systems. This used to be seen as a positive as it would mean you were an important cog in other peoples products and so more users, exposure, brand awareness etc.

[FeepingCreature]

Anthropic do of course sell API access and you can of course use any product with it.

[k8sToGo]

Compared to the heavily subsidized subscriptions, I don't think API is sold at loss.

Also why would you create a throwaway for this question? Are you trying to rage bait?

[bilekas]

> Also why would you create a throwaway for this question? Are you trying to rage bait?

You should never question anyone's route to privacy :)

[throwaway24778]

> Are you trying to rage bait?

If you have to ask, it's probably not rage bait. I'm just too lazy to come up with a username.

[butlike]

1:29 until you're able to push to the `main` branch.

Please enjoy these messages from our sponsors.