Comment by scwoodal
4 days ago
Why does it matter to Anthropic if my $200 plan usage is coming from Claude Code or a third party?
Doesn’t both count towards my usage limits the same?
4 days ago
Why does it matter to Anthropic if my $200 plan usage is coming from Claude Code or a third party?
Doesn’t both count towards my usage limits the same?
If you buy a 'Season's Pass' for Disneyland, you cant 'sublet' it to another kid to use on the days you don't; It's not really buying a 'daily access rate'.
Anthropic subs are not 'bulk tokens'.
It's not an unreasonable policy and it's entirely inevitable that they have to restrict.
I’m not subletting my sub to anyone. I’m the only one using the third party harness.
I’m using their own SDK in my own CLI tool.
It’s not a literal sublet to someone else, it’s subletting your tokens to another tool.
At its core it’s a tragedy of commons situation. Using a third party tool like OpenClaw is augmenting your usage far beyond what was anticipated when the subscription plan was made.
Same deal for unlimited storage on drive until people started abusing it.
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Running with the Disney analogy, it's like if Disney didn't let you wear a shirt with a universal or Warner property on it in their parks
Absurd, and not beyond the realm of possibility
It’s still me going to Disneyland, I just take a different route
Disingenuous analogy.
It's more buying a season pass for Disneyland, then getting told you can't park for free if you're entering the park even though free parking is included with the pass. Still not unreasonable, but brings to light the intention of the tool is to force the user into an ecosystem rather.
It's not a disingenuous analogy ... whatever it is.
But 'you can't park even though the ticket includes parking' is not an appropriate analogy because 3rd party use is definitely not intended. They did not 'state one thing' and the 'disallow it'.
This is a pretty straight forward case of people using their subscription for 'adjacent' use, and Anthropic being more explicit about it.
There's nothing fancy going on here.
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They're losing money on this $200 plan and they're essentially paying you to make you dependent on Claude Code so they can exploit this (somehow) in the future.
It's a bizarre plan because nobody is 'dependent' on Claude Code; we're begging to use alternatives. It's the model we want!
You’re not really paying for the model, you’re paying for the tool, the ecosystem, and the application layer around it.
Sonnet 4.6 in CC doesn’t behave the same way as Sonnet 4.6 in Antigravity.
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And it's their 'ecosystem' they want to sell you.
When using Claude Code, it's possible to opt out of having one's sessions be used for training. But is that opt out for everything? Or only message content, such that there could remain sufficient metadata to derive useful insight from?
They don't get as much visibility into your data, just the actual call to/from the api. There's so much more value to them in that, since you're basically running the reinforcement learning training for them.
Increasing the friction of switching providers as much as possible is part of their strategy to push users to higher subscription tiers and deny even scraps to their competitors.
Probably because the $20 plan is essentially a paid demo for the higher plans.
Any user who is using a third-party client is likely self-selected into being a power user who is less profitable.