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Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

code.claude.com

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Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#191

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

MillionOClock wrote: post #132
jes5199 wrote: post #64

there’s a million small scale AI apps that just aren’t worth building because there’s no way to do the billing that makes sense. If anthropic wanted to own that market, they could introduce a bring-your-own-Claude metaphor, where you login with Claude and token costs get billed to your personal account (after some reasonable monthly freebies from your subscription). But the big guys don’t seem interested in this, may…

I am a bit worried that this is the situation I am in with my (unpublished) commercial app right now: one of the major pain points I have is that while I have no doubt the app provides value in itself, I am worried about how many potential users will actually accept paying inference per token... As an independent dev I also unfortunately don't have investors backing me to subsidize inference for my subscription plan.

I recommend kimi. It's possible for people to haggle with it to get cheap for the first month and as such try out your project and best part of the matter is that kimi intentionally supports api usage in any of their subscribed plan and they also recently changed their billing to be more token usage based like others instead of their previous tool calling limits

It's seriously one of the best models. very comparable to sonnet/opus although kimi isn't the best in coding. I think its a really great solid model overall and might just be worth it in your use case?

Is the use case extremely coding intensive related (where even some minor improvement can matter for 10-100x cost) or just in general. Because if not, then I can recommend Kimi.

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#192

Post by avaer »

jes5199 wrote: post #64

there’s a million small scale AI apps that just aren’t worth building because there’s no way to do the billing that makes sense. If anthropic wanted to own that market, they could introduce a bring-your-own-Claude metaphor, where you login with Claude and token costs get billed to your personal account (after some reasonable monthly freebies from your subscription). But the big guys don’t seem interested in this, may…

This is going to happen. Unfortunately.

I shudder to think what the industry will look like if software development and delivery becomes like Youtubing, where the whole stack and monetization is funneled through a single company (or a couple) get to decide who gets how much money.

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#193

Post by oger »

So here goes my OpenClaw integration with Anthropic via OAuth… While I see their business risk I also see the onboarding path for new paying customers. I just upgraded to Max and would even consider the API if cost were controllable. I hope that Anthropic finds a smart way to communicate with customers in a constructive way and offers advice for the not so skilled OpenClaw homelabbers instead of terminating their accounts… Is anybody here from Anthropic that could pick up that message before a PR nightmare happens?

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#194

Post by johnfn »

Uehreka wrote: post #156
slopinthebag wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the internet has hundreds of thousands of super smart coders with the most powerful ai models as well, I think it's a bit harder than you're assuming. you just need to inspect the network traffic with Claude code and mimic that

OK sure, but you’d better hope Claude Code gets it right on the first try, or that’s $200 down the drain. Also, what if the detection mechanism involves a challenge-response that happens once a week? Or randomly a couple times a month? Or after 15 minutes of use from a new public IP? Or arbitrarily if you ask it to code something with a particular topic? There are lots of ways they could be doing this. And remember a…

Then just run Claude Code in a PTY and proxy requests in and out?

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#196

Post by woutr_be »

ChaitanyaSai wrote: post #171

OK I hope someone from anthropic reads this. Your API billing makes it really hard to work with it in India. We've had to switch to openrouter because anthropic keeps rejecting all the cards we have tried. And these are major Indian banks. This has been going on for MONTHS

It’s the same here in Hong Kong. I can’t use any of my cards (personal or corporate) for OpenAI or Anthropic.

Have to do everything through Azure, which is a mess to even understand.

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#197

Post by KingMob »

mirzap wrote: post #155
paxys wrote: post #31

I don't think it's a secret that AI companies are losing a ton of money on subscription plans. Hence the stricter rate limits, new $200+ plans, push towards advertising etc. The real money is in per-token billing via the API (and large companies having enough AI FOMO that they blindly pay the enormous invoices every month).

They are not losing money on subscription plans. Inference is very cheap - just a few dollars per million tokens. What they’re trying to do is bundle R&D costs with inference so they can fund the training of the next generation of models. Banning third-party tools has nothing to do with rate limits. They’re trying to position themselves as the Apple of AI companies -a walled garden. They may soon discover that screwi…

> They are not losing money on subscription plans. Inference is very cheap - just a few dollars per million tokens. What they’re trying to do is bundle R&D costs with inference so they can fund the training of the next generation of models.

You've described every R&D company ever.

"Synthesizing drugs is cheap - just a few dollars per million pills. They're trying to bundle pharmaceutical research costs... etc."

There's plenty of legit criticisms of this business model and Anthropic, but pointing out that R&D companies sink money into research and then charge more than the marginal cost for the final product, isn't one of them.

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#198

Post by esafak »

gardnr wrote: post #159
esafak wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They must be getting something out of it, because we sure aren't.

Cory Doctorow has a word for this..

They think their position is strong enough to lock users in. I'm not so sure.

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#199

Post by dakolli »

paxys wrote: post #23
MillionOClock wrote: post #4

I really hope someone from any of those companies (if possible all of them) would publish a very clear statement regarding the following question: If I build a commercial app that allows my users to connect using their OAuth token coming from their ChatGPT/Claude etc. account, do they allow me (and their users) to do this or not? I totally understand that I should not reuse my own account to provide services to other…

I don't see how they can get more clear about this, considering they have repeatedly answered it the exact same way. Subscriptions are for first-party products (claude.com, mobile and desktop apps, Claude Code, editor extensions, Cowork). Everything else must use API billing.

And at that point, you might as well use OpenRouter's PKCE and give users the option to use other models..

These kinds of business decisions show how these $200.00 subscriptions for their slot/infinite jest machines basically light that $200.00 on fire, and in general how unsustainable these business models are.

Can't wait for it all to fail, they'll eventually try to get as many people to pay per token as possible, while somehow getting people to use their verbose antigentic tools that are able to inflate revenue through inefficient context/ouput shenanigans.

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