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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

#471

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…

I agree with the principle, but reality dictates that users and exposure is the real currency. So while annoying it is understandable that Anthropic subsidizes their own direct users.

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

#472

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…

What part of a TOS is ridiculous? Claude Code is obviously a loss leader to them, but developer momentum / market share is important to them and they consider it worth it. What part of “OpenCode broke the TOS of something well defined” makes you think it’s all Anthropic’s fault?

I keep hearing those claims that's they lose money on it, but I have more and more doubts about this being true.

GPU compute cost has falled down in the last two years a lot.

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

#473
post #58

This will piss a lot of people off, and seems like a strange move. I get that this was always a hack and against the ToS. But I've been paying Anthropic money every month to do exactly what I would have done with Claude Code, but in another harness that I like better. All they've achieved here is that I am no longer giving them money. Their per-token pricing is really expensive compared to OpenAI, and I like the resu…

> it just takes twice as long.

but time is also money. Personally if I could pay more money to get answers faster, I'd pay double.

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

#474

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…

> Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers?

Most subscribers dont use up all their allocated tokens. Theyre banning these third parties because they consistently do use all their allocated tokens.

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

#475

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…

> let's sell a loss leader > oh no, people are actually buying the loss leader I'm looking forward to the upcoming reckoning when all these AI companies start actually charging users what the services cost.

I see zero reason to believe the $200 subscription is losing money. Anthropic makes subscriptions cheaper because 1. Most users dont use all their allocated tokens 2. subscriptions create a lock in effect, even if its a weak one 3. Easier to raise money when you can point to your ARR from subscriptions 4. Lowering revenue variance month to month is very valuable for businesses

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

#476
post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure you're participating in good faith? I'll go ahead and indulge you for the benefit of the audience though. The generic term is predatory pricing and it's regulated to some extent in pretty much every country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing#Legal_aspect... When carried out at the international level it's known as dumping. The WTO has provisions against it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dum…

As the Wikipedia page calls out, predatory pricing is generally in the context of a dominant firm throwing their weight around to dominate the market. You could make this case against large incumbents like Microsoft and Google, but Anthropic is actually the upstart here. In any case, all this depends on how you define the "market", and the entire market for AI-assisted coding is very nascent and fast-moving to make a…

That's the context where it tends to get regulated. Indeed it doesn't apply to Anthropic. Neither is Anthropic a party to the WTO.

I was asked for examples of behavior that distorts the market being regulated and provided two of them. There are other examples out there as well.

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

#477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor behavior is still poor behavior even if the relevant ToS aligns with it.

Why is it poor behavior though?

Restricting users from using third party tools is commonly viewed as poor behavior. I'm not inclined to rehash that debate here, although I might respond to specific (contextually relevant) counterpoints if you feel like making them.

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

#478
post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the reality is that Claude Code is what makes Anthropic so relevant in the programming more, much more than the Claude models themselves but Claude Code cannot run without Claude models? What do you mean?

Relative to their competitors who also have comparable models, Anthropic's design choices in effectively managing context with a very well thought out and coherent design, makes them stand out.

If you enjoy working out of the terminal and CLI/TUI's then it's not even close. Gemini, Codex, CoPilot, and every other CLI I can think of are awful. Stumbling, bumbling and you'd be lucky to keep your file tree in tact even with tight permissions (short of a sandbox).

Claude Code feels like my early days when pair programming was all the rage.

If you have the time OpenCode comes the closest and lets you work across providers seamless.

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

#479

Anthro is having its Apple moment: too many customers means the company is always on the news, for better or worse. When iPhones receive negative reviews it's not like only Apple screwed up; others did too, but they sell so much less than Apple that no one hears about them: "Apple violated my privacy a tiny bit" makes the news; "Xiaomi sold my fingerprint info to 3rd party vendors" doesn't. Similarly, Anthropic is un…

You're being downvoted because not only is Claude Code bad at what it does, none of the LLMs can actually code meaningfully, they can just statistically regurgitate other people's code without understanding what it does.

Saying otherwise is just extreme copium.

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

#480

Engineer working on Amp here. I'm very surprised that it took them this long to crack down on it. It's been against the terms of service from the start. When I asked them back in March last year whether individuals can use the higher rate limits that come with the Claude Code subscription in other applications, that was also a no. Question is: what changed? New founding round coming up, end of fiscal year, planning f…

I thought inference was relatively cheap - no?
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