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

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351–360 of 928 posts

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

#351

Marketing geniuses. They had 2 options here: 1. Make a better product/alternative to Openclaw and start eating their userbase. They hold the advantage because the ones "using their servers too much" are already their clients so they could reach out and keep trying to convert. Openclaw literally brought them customers at the door. 2. Do everyone royally and get them off their platform - with a strong feeling of dislik…

but are they really doing that? I mean it says you can keep using OpenClaw you just have to allocate money to the extra usage or an api token, I have no plan on not using it because Opus makes the claw so smart, I’ll just put more money towards the extra usage rather than the beefier sub

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

#352
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Efficient token use will be the new code/vim golf. Whether it's human token use, or future OpenClaws

I've mention before that we should have a look at Telegraph/telegram speak. There was a HUGE industry in word efficiency at that time. There are hundreds of books. I even think an LLM trained to communicate using telegram style might even be faster and way cheaper.

Why use many word when few do trick?

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

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think my next steps are: 1) try out openai $20/month. I've heard they're much more generous. 2) try out open router free models. I don't need geniuses, so long as I can see the thinking (something that Claude code obfuscates by default) I should be good. I've heard good things about the CLIO harness and want to try openrouter+clio

Openrouter free models have 50 requests per day limit + data collection. As per their doc.

You can charge $10 on the account and get unlimited requests. I abused this last week with the nemotron super to test out some stuff and made probably over 10000 requests over a couple of days and didn't get blocked or anything, expect 5xx errors and slowdowns tho.

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

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gues…

>You can't create a tiered paid plan for the whole world that fits everyone. I mean, you can. Electricity is already sold that way. Subscribers with uncharacteristic usage spikes don't get blackouts, they get a slightly larger bill, and perhaps get moved up a tier.

Very valid. My comment was fixated around the fact that big tech has the addiction to have subscriptions for everything. It's common that you provide generic subscription plans for the masses and supply "call us" custom plans for the specific (usually corporate) needs. If anthropic doesn't provide that or vibe coders are too cheap to do that, then those are issues, but the subscription models are itself valid. It is certainly misleading to a degree, but we've stopped complaining about this a while ago.

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

#355

Just give me a subscription tier where I’m not being blocked out every afternoon. Im hitting rate limits within 1:45 during afternoons. I can’t justify extra usage since it’s a variable cost, but I can justify a higher subscription tier.

Based on the way subscriptions work for every other business, if you’re hitting the limits, you are not profitable for them. My guess is a plan with double the limits would need to be 5-10x as expensive.

This is only an issue between 12pm and ~4pm ET. If I work at any other time of day, I never hit my usage limit.

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

#356
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If gyms faced a situation where people would go and spend 18 hours working out every day for a month, they would probably change how they billed things. Not the best example. The upkeep cost of a gym is pretty flat regardless of how much people use the facilities. Two people can't use a single machine at the same time make it wear out twice as fast. The price of memberships is not correlated to usage, it's inversely…

>Two people can't use a single machine at the same time make it wear out twice as fast The machine doesn't care about the number of people using it. If it's constantly being used, it will wear out faster. You are conflating "we price based on expected under-utilization" with "costs don't scale with usage." Those are different things. The inverse correlation you talk about isn't relevant here - People buy gym membersh…

>If it's constantly being used, it will wear out faster.

Yeah, but there's an absolute limit to that, beyond which the cost doesn't keep increasing. Beyond that point, the QoS goes down (queues).

>You are conflating "we price based on expected under-utilization" with "costs don't scale with usage."

I'm not conflating anything, I'm responding to what you said:

>If gyms faced a situation where people would go and spend 18 hours working out every day for a month, they would probably change how they billed things.

Why would a gym need to change how they bill things if all their customers were aiming for maximal utilization, when their costs would barely see any change? I doubt your typical gym operates on razor-thin margins.

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

#357

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.

they could have locked OpenClaw out but instead they took the time to adjust the way it works so people can still use it

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

#358
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's one thing to pay $5 or $20 per month, which although it's a substantial difference, people pay that much for the convenience of having stuff ready and available - and it's a completely different thing to pay $200 per month. People don't pay that much for occasional usage and many/most people will organise themselves to use all or most of their weekly allowance when the expense is in that ballpark. If Anthropic m…

>They have to be honest about what they can offer for $200 Their expectation must have been a human using the service at a human capacity. This is different from an automated agent orchestrating a ton of different agents at the same time doing a lot of things. There is a difference.

The whole industry is about robots telling robots what to do, why wouldn't they have expected automation?

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

#359

> for third-party harnesses What's the exact definition of third-party harnesses? They have an Agent SDK in Claude Code that can be used. Are they trying to say that only Anthropic products can use pro/max plans?

Great question. I've read that the agent sdk is ok as long as it's not for external use - meaning you aren't selling access to it. Unclear now though!

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

#360
post #286

I don’t understand why they’re catching any flak here lol if you want to use the frontier model more then pay for it? Graceful handling from Anthropic

exactly! they actually chose the better approach rather than just locking us out
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