[ifwinterco]

At this point everyone doing these kind of flows (using claws or any other flows that run agents in a loop 24/7) using any kind of subscription-based billing for inference must be aware they're on borrowed time.

Enough people have gone over the economics - you're costing OpenAI/Anthropic money, potentially a lot of money, so it's inevitable that sooner or later that particular party will come to an end.

Having said that, doing it by running a regex on your prompts to look for keywords is a bit loose

[halJordan]

We all get the "realpolitik" of it. That doesn't mean anthropic just gets to ignore the contract they signed. Well it does as long as you're fighting the fight for them before it even gets to anthropic.

[ifwinterco]

I strongly dislike all of these companies (and the people who run them), and I don't love LLMs in general, although I use them every day because they are useful for my job.

But the simple fact is, if you're paying $20/mo and using $200/mo of tokens, that is not going to last forever.

The only way to make it last a bit longer for the people with relatively sane usage patterns is to try and stop people absolutely taking the piss

[tremon]

That's not true, you're using RIAA-style wishful accounting here. If the company is willing to sell me $200 worth of tokens for $20, that's still worth only $20 to me.

[harvey9]

The worth of something to you can be more or less than the number of dollars you paid for it. If those tokens let you build something that you sell for far more dollars or saves you time that you put more value on.

[colordrops]

Ok well they need to do it above board and legally then.

[anigbrowl]

I don't get it though. Why not just revise the billing so that if users are hitting the servers above some defined frequency, they get charged more?

I'm tired of this startup-adjacent mindset that promotes endless adversarial scamming. I absolutely think people should be able to run OpenClaw or whatever harnesses they want, but I also think they should pay in some proportion to usage rather than trying to exploit an all-you-can-eat buffet offer to stock their own catering business.

[nsvd2]

If they do that, they lose market share to their competitors, which kills their ability to raise investor capital, which kills the company, because they are almost entirely funded by investor capital.

[AlotOfReading]

The demo above uses the prompt "hi". The openclaw string is in the git history, which Claude goes looking for.

[ifwinterco]

You're right, didn't read that properly. Okay then that actually makes sense if that's a (relatively) deterministic way to work out if openclaw is used

[taormina]

It's definitely not! Now I can Claude Code proof all future PRs into my open source repo with a single commit message.

[efromvt]

that is a terrible way to figure out if openclaw is used, hah

[AstroBen]

The only reasonable thing to do if you care about the longevity of your workflow is to build it around open-weight models.

If you choose to not be able to get work done without Claude you're at the mercy of whatever they want.

[ransom1538]

Oh it's way worse than people realize. The monthly vs api keys is a huge issue for them. They will have to end monthly subscription plans. You can pay $20 a month and use $10k in api tokens. They are in all out panic trying to fix this. But yes, the house of cards is ending.

The company ending part is when they have to cut the $20 a month plan and take things away. They are creating a massive group of coders that can't code - soon to have no way to code. This cohort will rampage through all social forums.

[_fzslm]

They might not be able to scale it, and indeed they might indeed have to jack the prices. But vibe coding is here to stay. Maybe it'll recede for a few years while people figure out the scaling. But the Pandora's Box is opened and it ain't closing

[monkpit]

> You can pay $20 a month and use $10k in api tokens.

Do you have a source? I would be interested to read more about any hard figures that have been posted like this.

[oblio]

They can just do token caps. But they don't want to do that because "infinite" sells better.