[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.

[rglullis]

> 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 like Claude Code and the Anthropic models, they can and do work perfectly independently.

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

This is not me "not liking it". Like I said somewhere else in this thread: these types of tie-in are illegal in Brazil. This practice is clearly not done to favor the consumer. You can bet that if the US was anything closer to a functional democracy and the laws were not written by lobbyists, this would be illegal in the US as well.

[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.