It sounds pretty reasonable to me that they sell a subscription without API access at a different price than the one with that feature. It's obviously a very useful feature or the workaround wouldn't exist, right?
To me it sounds like the CLI subscription is a loss-leader designed to get you hooked so you'll upgrade once you realize it's valuable enough to pay extra for the "premium" features. It also sounds pretty reasonable to ban products designed to cheat them out of the difference in cost.
Am I missing some nuance, or is this just internet people being cheap?
The cli subscription actually actively cannibalizes the API business in my experience. I think this is a product decision: if you use it to code, they want to control the user experience.
If you use it to back up 100,000 MAUs, then they want you to use the API.
I was originally an API user but the cli subscription is so much cheaper that I switched over. This is a combination of th CLI getting much more useful and reasoning models using many more tokens.
Comparing this to API access feels odd to me. Opencode does not magically convert your subscription into API usage. It is just an alternative to the official CLI. It has a web UI, smoother UX, and less flickering. Nothing groundbreaking, but it is pretty annoying that even something as simple as tagging files with @ is still so laggy.
How do you think Claude Code and OpenCode communicate with Anthropic? Through the API. Maybe it's accessed slightly differently for subscription users. Anthropic is saying you can't use the API via a subscription anywhere you want. Only Claude Code can use it that way.
It sounds pretty reasonable to me that they sell a subscription without API access at a different price than the one with that feature. It's obviously a very useful feature or the workaround wouldn't exist, right?
To me it sounds like the CLI subscription is a loss-leader designed to get you hooked so you'll upgrade once you realize it's valuable enough to pay extra for the "premium" features. It also sounds pretty reasonable to ban products designed to cheat them out of the difference in cost.
Am I missing some nuance, or is this just internet people being cheap?
The cli subscription actually actively cannibalizes the API business in my experience. I think this is a product decision: if you use it to code, they want to control the user experience.
If you use it to back up 100,000 MAUs, then they want you to use the API.
I was originally an API user but the cli subscription is so much cheaper that I switched over. This is a combination of th CLI getting much more useful and reasoning models using many more tokens.
Comparing this to API access feels odd to me. Opencode does not magically convert your subscription into API usage. It is just an alternative to the official CLI. It has a web UI, smoother UX, and less flickering. Nothing groundbreaking, but it is pretty annoying that even something as simple as tagging files with @ is still so laggy.
How do you think Claude Code and OpenCode communicate with Anthropic? Through the API. Maybe it's accessed slightly differently for subscription users. Anthropic is saying you can't use the API via a subscription anywhere you want. Only Claude Code can use it that way.
3 replies →