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

fluoridation wrote: post #468

Yokohiii wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Custom payment schemes are late stage profit generation. It requires hoards of salespeople or an AI that can actually do math. It's just how hyperscaling works. You are not wrong, but in the wrong timeline.

I'm not talking about custom, negotiated service contracts, I'm talking about simply charging people for what they use.

But that would be using (a special Claude code version) of the API; as it stands now, I have tried the current api for fun and I hit $200 well within an hour. So if they would charge for real use, no one would use it as there are competitors who have less harsh limits with tier plans still. If all go away then I will be running open models on vast.ai or so as those are now viable (been testing with glm 5 and it's great for coding). So tier subscriptions cannot go away as it will end those companies fast.

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

#496

Post by karlpoppery » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 6:41 AM UTC

Is any code that auto launches Claude Code considered a "harness"?

I'm hoping that they won't bother you unless you specifically max out the subscription limits every time

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

#497

Post by jhrmnn » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 6:45 AM UTC

teekert wrote: post #484

KeplerBoy wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and the staff will tell them to stop that or charge them extra for it.

Yes and they will hide their sushi-grabbing because somewhere deep inside they know it's not part of the deal, while at the same time still strongly feeling that they have indeed paid for it. Ah, to be human!

The cooperative and competitive sides of our soul fighting it out in a single situation

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

#498

Post by fmbb » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 6:51 AM UTC

dimmke wrote: post #330

fluoridation wrote: post #314

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…

> Anthropic doesn't sell based on a "golly gee I hope people dont use this" gap - they sell compute. Different business.

There is nothing anywhere hinting at that.

They don’t sell compute. They sell a subscription for LLM token budgets that they hope people don’t use because the compute is vastly more expensive than what they charge or what users are ever willing to pay.

Especially with enterprise subscription plans the idea is for customers to never utilize anywhere close to their limits.

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

#499

Post by 59nadir » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 6:55 AM UTC

briHass wrote: post #344

password4321 wrote: post #61

GitHub Copilot supports Anthropic models with any client but they have a monthly usage cap after which it is pay-per-prompt. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46936105 Billing can be bypassed using a combo of subagents with an agent definition > "Even without hacks, Copilot is still a cheap way to use Claude models" 20260116 https://github.blog/changelog/2026-01-16-github-copilot-now-... https://github.com/feature…

GHCP also has magical rate limits that hit users that slam multi-agent workflows or other crazy request burners. Mind you, I think GHCP is a great service at an excellent price, but the hardcore vibe coders complain about the rate limits that I've never personally experienced using the CLI.

That's weird, because every time I see someone even talking positively about Claude Code they always seem to mention they're hitting their 5 hour limits in 2-3 hours all the time, they're hitting their overall limits all the time, and so on.

Meanwhile I can't even seem to spend my $20 Cursor Composer 2 tokens using their agent. I've been doing useless shit just to see how much usage I can cram in there and it'd probably take 10 hours of vibecoding like a loser every day to hit the limits at this point.

With that said I'm not going to pay for something that doesn't allow me to use whatever I want to use (in terms of harness, etc.), so both Anthropic (who were already disqualified because of their ridiculous limits) and Cursor is out (AFAIK you can't an agent other than their `agent` binary without some ridiculous hack like proxying all of the calls through `agent`.

I can't imagine all of the providers pretending their agents are real value going forward, but even if they do there's still stuff like OpenRouter which doesn't give a shit, may as well use something like that.

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

#500

Post by ramon156 » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 7:00 AM UTC

May I suggest trying Z.ai coding plan? I've had a good experience, and its 1/3rd of the price.

When I do use AI, I already have a solid plan of what I need. Sometimes I ask it to look something up. I never do both in one prompt.

GLM 5.1 can do both, and its way way cheaper. I also don't hit my limit that fast (Plus I get to use it in OpenCode).