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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

#511

Post by starkgoose »

narrator wrote: post #461
Loic wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They put no limits on the API usage, as long as you pay. Here, they put limits on the "under-cover" use of the subscription. If they can provide a relatively cheap subscription against the direct API use, this is because they can control the stuff end-to-end, the application running on your system (Claude Code, Claude Desktop) and their systems. As you subscribe to these plans, this is the "contract", you can use onl…

I think what most people don't realize is running an agent 24/7 fully automated is burning a huge hole in their profitability. Who even knows how big it is. It could be getting it on the 8/9 figures a day for all we know. There's this pervasive idea left over from the pre-llm days that compute is free. You want to rent your own H200x8 to run your Claude model, that's literally going to cost $24/hour. People are just…

there are usage limits preventing you from running it 24/7 on all subscriptions tiers

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

#512

Post by dspillett »

Xunjin wrote: post #489
narrator wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what most people don't realize is running an agent 24/7 fully automated is burning a huge hole in their profitability. Who even knows how big it is. It could be getting it on the 8/9 figures a day for all we know. There's this pervasive idea left over from the pre-llm days that compute is free. You want to rent your own H200x8 to run your Claude model, that's literally going to cost $24/hour. People are just…

I understand you mean for free in the sense that you don't pay a third party to use it, however let's no forget that you still use the power grid and that's not free. Also worth to note that energy prices have increased worldwide.

Depending on utilisation and good use of low-power or sleep (or full off) states when things aren't actively processing, it can still be a _lot_ cheaper to run things at home than on a rented service. Power costs have increased a lot in recent years, but so have compute-per-watt ratios and you are not paying the that indirect compute price when the processors are asleep or off whereas with subscription access to LLMs you are paying at least the base subscription each month even if you don't use it at all in that period. Much the same as the choice between self-hosting an open-source project or paying for a hosted instance - and in both cases people don't tend to consider the admin cost (for some of us the admin is “play time”!) so the self-hosted option it does practically feel free.

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

#513

Post by skerit »

neya wrote: post #444

Anthropic is just doing this out of spite. They had a real scenario to win mindshare and marketshare and they fucked up instead. They could have done what Open AI did - hired the OpenClaw/d founder. Instead, they sent him a legal notice for trademark violation. And now they're just pissed he works for their biggest competitor. Throw all tantrums you want, you're on the wrong side of this one, Anthropic.

Agreed! I don't understand how so many people on here seem to think it is completely reasonable for Anthropic to act like this.

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

#515

Post by edg5000 »

dudeinhawaii wrote: post #246
edg5000 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> eat the losses Look at your token usage of the last 30 days in one of the JSON files generated by Claude Code. Compare that against API costs for Opus. Tell me if they are eating losses or not. I'm not making a point, actually do it and let me know. I was at 1 million. I'm paying 90 EUR/m. That means I'm subsidizing them (paying 3-4 times what it would cost with the API)! And I feel like I'm a pretty heavy user. Al…

I just ran some numbers and it works out if you're a prolific user. Over 9 days I would have spent roughly $63 dollars on Codex with 11.5M input tokens plus 141M cached input tokens and 1.3M output tokens. That roughly mirrors the $100-200/wk in API spending that drove me to the subscription. | Category | Tokens | Rate (/1M) | Estimated Cost | |---|---:|---:|---:| | Input (uncached) | 11,568,331 | $1.75 | $20.24 | |…

My hopes are on harness engineering allowing cheaper (but still large) models to shine. I'm evaluating DeepSeek because it would allow insane agent armies. Although DeepSeek charges for thinking tokens, something easy to overlook.

DeepSeek has the tendency to think... a lot!. Without a good harness I can't evaluate it well; time will tell.

OpenAI doesn't; it's embedded into the price, I think.

Cheap = we can run 10x the workloads, bigger imagination = innovation. Maybe 10 dumb agents in a loop can beat 1 Opus? Haha.

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

#516

Post by pigpop »

rglullis wrote: post #501
Loic wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They put no limits on the API usage, as long as you pay. Here, they put limits on the "under-cover" use of the subscription. If they can provide a relatively cheap subscription against the direct API use, this is because they can control the stuff end-to-end, the application running on your system (Claude Code, Claude Desktop) and their systems. As you subscribe to these plans, this is the "contract", you can use onl…

> If they can provide a relatively cheap subscription against the direct API use Except they can't. Their costs are not magically lower when you use claude code vs when you use a third-party client. > For me, this is fair. This is, plain and simple, a tie-in sale of claude code. I am particularly amused by people accepting it as "fair" because in Brazil this is an illegal practice.

While the cost may not be lower the price certainly can be if they are operating like any normal company and adding margin.

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

#517

Post by kalleboo »

amelius wrote: post #464
terminalbraid wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop giving money to the company that doesn't give you what you want.

It is important that the company knows why they are losing customers, though.

I canceled my Claude subscription (other reasons) and they had an "exit interview" question of why you canceled. They know why.

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

#518

Post by neya »

skerit wrote: post #513
neya wrote: post #444

Anthropic is just doing this out of spite. They had a real scenario to win mindshare and marketshare and they fucked up instead. They could have done what Open AI did - hired the OpenClaw/d founder. Instead, they sent him a legal notice for trademark violation. And now they're just pissed he works for their biggest competitor. Throw all tantrums you want, you're on the wrong side of this one, Anthropic.

Agreed! I don't understand how so many people on here seem to think it is completely reasonable for Anthropic to act like this.

Apple/OpenAI = god

Anthropic = good

Google = evil

That's pretty much HN crowd logic to be honest

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

#519

Post by theturtletalks »

rglullis wrote: post #501
Loic wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They put no limits on the API usage, as long as you pay. Here, they put limits on the "under-cover" use of the subscription. If they can provide a relatively cheap subscription against the direct API use, this is because they can control the stuff end-to-end, the application running on your system (Claude Code, Claude Desktop) and their systems. As you subscribe to these plans, this is the "contract", you can use onl…

> If they can provide a relatively cheap subscription against the direct API use Except they can't. Their costs are not magically lower when you use claude code vs when you use a third-party client. > For me, this is fair. This is, plain and simple, a tie-in sale of claude code. I am particularly amused by people accepting it as "fair" because in Brazil this is an illegal practice.

I've heard they actually cache the full Claude Code system prompt on their servers and this saves them a lot of money. Maybe they cache the MCP tools you use and other things. If another harness like Opencode changes that prompt or adds significantly to it, that could increase costs for them.

What I don't understand is why start this game of cat and mouse? Just look at Youtube and YT-DLP. YT-DLP, and the dozens of apps that use it, basically use Youtube's unofficial web API and it still works even after Youtube constantly patches their end. Though now, YT-DLP has to use a makeshift JS interpreter and maybe even spawn Chromium down the line.

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

#520

Post by rglullis »

I just cancelled my Pro subscription. Turns out that Ollama Cloud with GLM-5 and qwen-coder-next are very close in quality to Opus, I never hit their rate limits even with two sessions running the whole day and there zero advantage for me to use Claude Code compared to OpenCode.
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