Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw

#261

Post by xtracto » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 1:46 AM UTC

crawshaw wrote: post #232

Based on this and recent product releases, Anthropic seems keen on building a closed ecosystem around their excellent model. That is their business choice, I suspect it will work well. But I cannot say I am particularly excited to have my entire development stack owned by one company.

As a non-American, I love what Chinese companies are doing. The progress they are showing and the fact they are sharing the weights of the models is great. I can't wait for the day when companies that "have no moat" like A. , Cursor or even OpenAI are left with a bunch of float matrices and hardware.

I understand people from the US will have an anti-Chinese reaction, but for us in the "third world" that can use both techs, the openess is always good.

Re: Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw

#262

Post by jmalicki » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 1:46 AM UTC

goosejuice wrote: post #251

brookst wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is priced correctly. Just because outliers can be money-losing doesn’t mean you should raise the price for everyone.

> Just because outliers can be money-losing doesn’t mean you should raise the price for everyone. If they are losing money then it's not priced correctly. That's what I responded to. Yes, subscriptions work as you say. Plenty of people under utilize subscriptions from prime, to credit cards, to netflix. But if they lost money overall, they too would raise prices. Because that's how economics works. Shortage of capaci…

Yes, they chose the knob of ToS, because that was the way to price it correctly.

Re: Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw

#263

Post by rohansood15 » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 1:47 AM UTC

This email gives out the endgame - eventually, Claude subscription would be ~30% cheaper than API costs.

Our engineering team averages 1.5k per dev per month on credit costs, without busting Max limits today.

Re: Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw

#264

Post by nothinkjustai » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 1:48 AM UTC

tinyhouse wrote: post #200

I really started to like Pi. That's unfortunate that I won't be able to use it with Opus (way too expensive without a subscription). I'm optimistic that open source coding models will be able to keep up. AI is too important, we're shooting ourselves in the foot if we don't adopt open source tools and models. The more adoption the better it will become.

The copilot plans work with pi and are stupidly cheap for what you get.

Re: Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw

#265

Post by jeffpersonified » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 1:49 AM UTC

Less than 24hr notice on a Friday: either Anthropic is dropping S tier next week or they massively fumbled over the past 2 months in self owns and outages.

Re: Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw

#266

Post by Yokohiii » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 1:49 AM UTC

goosejuice wrote: post #194

jmalicki wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren't paying to be using that limit all of the time. You are paying to be using that limit some of the time. There are 5 hour windows when you are sleeping and can't use it. There are weekend limits. Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that. It's structured so users can have bursts of unlimited usage, and spend ~15% of the theoretical max cap, and that's still cheaper than a…

> Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that. Then it's not priced correctly. As I said, you can do all of this without OpenClaw.. claude code ships with everything you need to maximize the limits.

It is priced incorrectly, but that is intentional. You can't create a tiered paid plan for the whole world that fits everyone. You can't create nuanced extra plans to satisfy all the outliers. It's an bet to keep the customers and still having a good margin. Think of ecom, returns are a big struggle for any large company because they are unpredictable and subject to abuse, shipping fees are just an sophisticated guess to cover that cost. Not a subscription, same mechanics. The only thing here to criticize is, if it's a good thing to make everything a subscription and disguise the real cost.

Re: Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw

#267

Post by colechristensen » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 1:50 AM UTC

mccoyb wrote: post #214

colechristensen wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This strikes me the same way the people in college who would print 497 empty pages at the end of the semester for the quota "they'd paid for" or that one guy who made lemonade at restaurants with the free lemon wedges and sugar packets. "Contempt for users" is silly. Adjusting terms to handle users who use things as not intended isn't contempt.

Contempt for users is not silly when the CEO of said company has repeatedly claimed they will replace SWEs "end-to-end" by next year. I'm not sure what to say. You're either listening to the actions of these companies, or you're not in a place where you feel the need to be concerned be their actions. I'm in a place where I'm concerned by their actions, and the impact that their claims and behavior have on the working…

At no point in the last 10,000 years of human civilization has there not been a developing technology that threatened to forever reshape and displace a class of labor.

Or are you also upset about the modern plight of the telephone operator, farrier, or coal miner?

Re: Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw

#268

Post by xtracto » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 1:51 AM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #30

christopher8827 wrote: post #19

This is why people are switching over to Codex

Codex just ended their double-usage offer and OpenAI just had an exec shakeup, so it'll be interesting to see how Codex reacts, or if people have usage issues with Codex.

So the VC gravy is drying. We should see the enshitification of LLM providers in the rest of 2026 and 2027. The bubble has to burst at some point.

Re: Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw

#269

Post by dimmke » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 1:51 AM UTC

jmalicki wrote: post #190

goosejuice wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're saying is conceptually true for subscription services in general, but thats not why they are making this change. There's a 5 hour limit and a weekly limit. Those are hard token limits. Everyone on a plan pays for the max set of tokens in that plan. The limits manage capacity. The solution to that isn't a change of ToS, it's adjusting the limits. In other words this is about Anthropic subsidizing their own…

You aren't paying to be using that limit all of the time. You are paying to be using that limit some of the time. There are 5 hour windows when you are sleeping and can't use it. There are weekend limits. Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that. It's structured so users can have bursts of unlimited usage, and spend ~15% of the theoretical max cap, and that's still cheaper than a…

I feel like Anthropic is going down a bad path here with billing things this way. Especially as local LLM continues to develop so fast.

I downgraded from my $200 a month plan to my $20 plan and hit limits constantly. I try to use the API access I purchased separately, and it doesn't work with Claude Code (something about the 1 million context requiring extra usage) so I have to use it Continue. Then I get instantly rate limited when it's trying to read 1-2 files.

It just sucks. This whole landscape is still emerging, but if this is what it's like now, pre enshittification, when these companies have shitloads of money - it's going to be so much worse when they start to tighten the screws.

Right now my own incentive is to stop being dependent on Claude for as much as I can as quickly as I can.

Re: Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw

#270

Post by echelon » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 1:52 AM UTC

stavros wrote: post #207

jmalicki wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren't paying to be using that limit all of the time. You are paying to be using that limit some of the time. There are 5 hour windows when you are sleeping and can't use it. There are weekend limits. Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that. It's structured so users can have bursts of unlimited usage, and spend ~15% of the theoretical max cap, and that's still cheaper than a…

How can an OpenClaw user use 6 times what a human subscriber is using when I'm four hours into the week and 15% of my weekly limit is already used up, just by coding? OpenClaw can't use 600% of my weekly limits.

Without data, this is just a bunk excuse to defend the walled garden practices.

With data, it's an engineering target.

They could just 429 badly behaved clients.