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Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

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Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#291

Post by redbluered »

kar1181 wrote: post #278
dfabulich wrote: post #112

For folks not following the drama: Anthropic's $200/month subscription for Claude Code is much cheaper than Anthropic's pay-as-you-go API. In a month of Claude Code, it's easy to use so many LLM tokens that it would have cost you more than $1,000 if you'd paid via the API. Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscript…

Anthropic want you to use claude code cli badly and are prepared to be very generous if you do. People want to take that generosity without the reciprocity. I don't normally like to come down on the side of the megabigcorp but in this case anthropic aren't being evil. Not yet anyway.

I think they are.

The key question is about why they want to you to use the CLI. If you're not the customer, you're the product.

There's also a monopolistic aspect to this. Having the best model isn't something over can legally exploit to gain advantage in adjacent markets.

It reeks of "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run," Windows showing spurious error messages for DR-DOS, and Borland C++ losing to the then-inferior Visual C++ due to late support of new Windows features. And Internet Explorer bundling versus Netscape.

Yes, Microsoft badly wanted you to use Office, Visual C++, MS-DOS, and IE, but using Windows to get that was illegal.

Microsoft lost in court, paid a nominal fine, and executives were crying all the way to the bank.

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#292

Post by sho »

wooger wrote: post #248
dfabulich wrote: post #112

For folks not following the drama: Anthropic's $200/month subscription for Claude Code is much cheaper than Anthropic's pay-as-you-go API. In a month of Claude Code, it's easy to use so many LLM tokens that it would have cost you more than $1,000 if you'd paid via the API. Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscript…

It's hard to understand what Anthropic are getting from forcing more people to use Claude Code vs any other tools via the API. Why do they care? Do they somehow get better analytics or do they dream that there's a magical lock-in effect... from a buggy CLI?

I suspect that they lose control over the cheaper models CC can choose for you for eg. file summaries or web fetch. Indeed, they lose web fetch and whatever telemetry it gives them completely.

It's not unreasonable to assume that without the ability to push haiku use aggresively for summarization, the average user in OC vs CC costs more.

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#294

Post by rockatanescu »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #62
dboon wrote: post #15

This is an unusual L for Anthropic. The unfortunate truth is that the engineering in opencode is so far ahead of Claude Code. Obviously, CC is a great tool, but that's more about the magic of the model than the engineering of the CLI. The opencode team[^1][^2] built an entire custom TUI backend that supports a good subset of HTML/CSS and the TypeScript ecosystem (i.e. not tied to Opencode, a generic TUI renderer). Th…

> Anyway, this is embarrassing for Anthropic. Why? A few times in this thread I hear people saying "they shouldn't have done this" or something similar but not given any reason why. Listing features you like of another product isn't a reason they shouldn't have done it. It's absolutely not embarrassing, and if anything it's embarrassing they didn't catch and do it sooner.

The Claude plans allow you to send a number of messages to Anthropic models in a specific interval without incurring any extra costs. From Anthropic's "About Claude's Max Plan Usage" page:

> The number of messages you can send per session will vary based on the length of your messages, including the size of files you attach, the length of current conversation, and the model or feature you use. Your session-based usage limit will reset every five hours. If your conversations are relatively short and use a less compute-intensive model, with the Max plan at 5x more usage, you can expect to send at least 225 messages every five hours, and with the Max plan at 20x more usage, at least 900 messages every five hours, often more depending on message length, conversation length, and Claude's current capacity.

So it's not a "Claude Code" subscription, it's a "Claude" subscription.

The only piece of information that might suggest that there are any restrictions to using your subscription to access the models is the part of the Pro plan description that says "Access Claude Code on the web and in your terminal" and the Max plan description that says "Everything in Pro".

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#295

Post by whatsupdog »

dfabulich wrote: post #266
moltar wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To extend your all you can eat analogy. It’s similar to how all you can eat restaurants allow you to eat all you can within the bounds of the restaurant, but you aren’t allowed to bring the food out with you.

Not really. At a buffet restaurant, if you could take the food out with you, you'd takeaway more food than you can eat at one sitting. OpenCode users and Claud Code™ CLI users use tokens at approximately the same rate. This is more like an all-you-can-eat restaurant requiring you to eat with their flimsy plastic forks, forbidding you to bring your own utensils.

Why is this being downvoted? This is the perfect analogy.

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#296

Post by KronisLV »

vidarh wrote: post #286
casparvitch wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess one issue is that you pay $200/month whether you use it or not. Potentially this could be better for Anthropic. What was not necessarily foreseeable (ok maybe it was) back when that started was that users have invented all kinds of ways to supervise their agents to be as efficient as possible. If they control the client, you can't do that.

I can easily get Claude Code to run for 8-10 hours unsupervised without stopping with sub-agents entirely within Claude Code. I think it is more likely that if you stick with Claude Code, then you are more likely to stick with Opus/Sonnet, whereas if you use a third party CLI you might be more likely to mix and match or switch away entirely. It's in their interest to get you invested in their tooling.

> if you use a third party CLI you might be more likely to mix and match or switch away entirely.

I really like doing this, be it with OpenCode or Copilot or Cline/RooCode/KiloCode: I do have a Cerebras Code subscription (50 USD a month for a lot of tokens but only an okayish model) whereas the rest I use by paying per-token.

Monthly spend ends up being somewhere between 100-150 USD total, obviously depending on what I do and the proportion of simple vs complex tasks.

If Sonnet isn’t great for a given task, I can go for GPT-5 or Gemini 3.

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#297

Post by dotancohen »

IgorPartola wrote: post #59
dboon wrote: post #15

This is an unusual L for Anthropic. The unfortunate truth is that the engineering in opencode is so far ahead of Claude Code. Obviously, CC is a great tool, but that's more about the magic of the model than the engineering of the CLI. The opencode team[^1][^2] built an entire custom TUI backend that supports a good subset of HTML/CSS and the TypeScript ecosystem (i.e. not tied to Opencode, a generic TUI renderer). Th…

My favorite is running CC in a screen session. There if I type out a prompt and then just start holding down the backspace key to delete a bunch of characters, at some point they key press refresh rate outruns CC’s brains and it just starts acting like it moved the cursor but didn’t delete anything. It is an embarrassing bug, but one that I suspect wouldn’t be found in automated testing.

If you want to work around this bug, Claude Code supports all the readline shortcuts such as Ctrl-W and Ctrl-U.

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#298

Post by PunchyHamster »

moltar wrote: post #254
dfabulich wrote: post #112

For folks not following the drama: Anthropic's $200/month subscription for Claude Code is much cheaper than Anthropic's pay-as-you-go API. In a month of Claude Code, it's easy to use so many LLM tokens that it would have cost you more than $1,000 if you'd paid via the API. Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscript…

To extend your all you can eat analogy. It’s similar to how all you can eat restaurants allow you to eat all you can within the bounds of the restaurant, but you aren’t allowed to bring the food out with you.

...no, that's more like "but you can't bring your own fork"

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#299

Post by prodigycorp »

visarga wrote: post #158
IgorPartola wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite is running CC in a screen session. There if I type out a prompt and then just start holding down the backspace key to delete a bunch of characters, at some point they key press refresh rate outruns CC’s brains and it just starts acting like it moved the cursor but didn’t delete anything. It is an embarrassing bug, but one that I suspect wouldn’t be found in automated testing.

Talking about embarrassing bugs, Claude chat (both web and iOS apps) lately tend to lose the user message when there is a network error. This happens every day to me lately. It is frustrating to retype a message from memory, first time you are "in the flow" second time it feels like unjust punishment. With all the Claude Code in the world how come they don't write good enough tests to catch UI bugs? I have come to th…

This is an old bug. I cant believe they haven't fixed it yet. My compliments for the Claude frontend start and end at artifacts.

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#300

Post by danmaz74 »

dfabulich wrote: post #112

For folks not following the drama: Anthropic's $200/month subscription for Claude Code is much cheaper than Anthropic's pay-as-you-go API. In a month of Claude Code, it's easy to use so many LLM tokens that it would have cost you more than $1,000 if you'd paid via the API. Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscript…

> More importantly, Anthropic should have open sourced their Claude Code CLI a year ago. (They can and should just open source it now.)

"Should have" for what reason? I would be happy if they open sourced Claude Code, but the reality is that Claude Code is what makes Anthropic so relevant in the programming more, much more than the Claude models themselves. Asking them to give it away for free to their competitors seems a bit much.

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