[skeledrew]

> Of course it was.

You'd have to point me to an authoritative source on that (explicitly saying users are allowed to use their models via private APIs in apps of the user's choosing). If something isn't explicitly provided in the contract, then it can be changed at any point in any way without notice.

Honestly, I'm not big on capitalism in general, but I don't understand why people should expect companies to provide things exactly the way they want at exactly the prices they would like to be charged (if at all). That's just not how the world/system works, or should, especially given there are so many alternatives available. If one doesn't like what's happening with some service, then let the wallet do the talking and move to another. Emigration is a far more effective message than complaining.

[rglullis]

> I don't understand why people should expect companies to provide things exactly the way they want at exactly the prices they would like to be charged

This is a gross misrepresentation of my argument.

I wouldn't be complaining at all if they went up and said "sorry, we are not going to subsidize anyone anymore, so the prices are going up", and I wouldn't be complaining if they came up and said "sorry, using a third party client incurs an extra cost of on our side, so if you want to use that you'd have to pay extra".

What I am against is the anti-competitive practice of price discrimination and the tie-in sale of a service. If they are going to play this game, then they better be ready for the case the strategy backfires. Otherwise it's just a game of "heads I win, tails you lose" where they always get to make up the rules.

> Emigration is a far more effective message than complaining.

Why not both? I cancelled my Pro subscription today. I will stick with just Ollama cloud.

[skeledrew]

It's not tie-in. They give users 2 choices: a) use their service via their public API, with the client(s) of their choice, at the regular price point; b) use the apps they provide, which use a private API, at a discounted price point. The apps are technically negative value for them from a purely upfront cost perspective as their use trigger these discounts and they're free by themselves.

Good on you re that cancel. May you find greener grass elsewhere.

[rglullis]

> They give users 2 choices: a) use their service via their public API, with the client(s) of their choice, at the regular price point; b) use the apps they provide, which use a private API, at a discounted price point.

There was a third choice, which was better than both of the ones presented: use any other client that can talk with our API, at whatever usage rate they deemed acceptable. If the "private API" was accessible via OAuth, then it's hardly "private".

We can argue all day, when I signed up there was nothing saying that access was exclusive via the tools they provided. They changed the rules not because it was costing them more (or even if does, they are losing money on Pro customers anyway so arguing about that is silly) but because they opened themselves for some valid and fair competition.

[skeledrew]

There was no third choice if they didn't explicitly state that there was.

> If the "private API" was accessible via OAuth, then it's hardly "private".

If you invite people on your porch for a party, and someone finds that you left the house key under the mat and went off to restock, then it's hardly "private". It's perfectly fine for whomever feels like to take the party indoors without your permission. Pretty much what you're saying, reframed, but I seriously doubt you'd agree to random people entering parts of yours premises to which you didn't explicitly invite them.

[rglullis]

Try not making it sound like the company is doing me a favor by letting me access the thing I was paying for. I wasn't "invited to a party", I was sold on an agreement that by paying a guaranteed monthly fee I could have access to the model at a rate that was lower than the pay-as-you-go rate from the API.

The primary offering is access to the models. That's what the subscription is about. They can try as hard as they want to market it as Claude being the product and access to the model being an ancillary service, but to me this is just marketing bs. No one is signing-up for Claude because their website is nicer, or because of Claude Code.

[skeledrew]

> I was sold on an agreement that by paying a guaranteed monthly fee I could have access to the model at a rate that was lower than the pay-as-you-go rate from the API

Yes, that agreement is there, with the condition that their app is used. That's option B. And I'd think it fairly obvious that if one has to go to extraordinary lengths to gain access, like finding a key under a mat, or needing to login with an official client to gain access to a token for an unofficial client, then - implicitly - it's highly unlikely that that method of access is part of the agreement. And Anthropic has now made it explicitly clear that no, that access method is not part of the agreement.