Comment by TheDong

"claude -p" does not charge api rates by itself, I just ran "claude -p 'write hello world to foo.txt'", and it didn't.

What they changed is that if you have OpenClaw run 'claude -p' for you, that gets your account banned or charged API rates, and if they think your usage of 'claude -p' is maybe OpenClaw, even if it's not, you get charged API rates or banned.

It seems so silly to me. They built a feature with one billing rate, and the feature is a bash command. If you have a bad program run the bash command, you get billed at a different rate, if you have a good script you wrote yourself run it, you're fine, but they have literally no legitimate way to tell the difference since either way it's just a command being run.

The justification going around is that OpenClaw usage is so heavy that it impacts the service for other people, but like OpenClaw was just using the "claude code max" plan, so if they can't handle the usage the plan promises, they should be changing the plan.

If they had instead said "Your claude code max plan, which has XX quota, will get charged API rates if you consistently use 50% of your quota. The quota is actually a lie, it's just the amount you can burst up to once or twice a week, but definitely not every day" and just banned everyone that used claude code a lot, I wouldn't be complaining as much, that'd be much more consistent.