Maybe scared wasn't the best word... but we cannot deny Opus is a great - if not greatest - model at coding and Anthropic is the only one serving it a reasonable prices when going through their subscription model.
I mean this is blatantly false. Codex just rolled out a $100 a month plan with higher usage and lower quotas than Claude and GPT 5.4 is more capable than Opus 4.6. At least for the systems work I do.
And if you can't stomach OpenAI, GLM 5.1 is actually quite competent. About Opus 4.5 / GPT 5.2 quality.
In my case T&C on using inout/output is so bad in almost Lal the other providers, that I'm forbidden from using them for work (and it doesn't make sense to pay a separate sub if I have basically two at this point, one direct with Anthropic, one via github.com copilot).