If you don't want to get locked in to Claude Code, you can pay more. Just like you can pay more for an unlocked non-carrier subsidized phone. (Which I personally do.)
Looks like they actually walked this bit back
In other words, it is not like giving free nuts at bar to make you drink more beer but more like Nestle giving baby formula so that the babies get use to that instead of mothers milk
The monthly plans are heavily subsidized by the API users - why should Anthropic subsidize your use of pi.dev?
Because if not that’s just normal market segmentation since enterprise users are willing to pay many times mores than private individuals.
Anthropic isn’t setting is’s price based on cost + fixed profit margin they are charging as much as each market is willing to bear..
What does it matter which tool I use when I hit the limit?
And even if you pay-as-you-go Anthropic seems to prefer their own tools
From my experience people who complain loudly about the price tend to be people who are either (1) working primarily on hobby projects so are unwilling to pay much for Claude Code or (2) using astronomical amount of tokens through elaborately orchestrated multi-agent setups that only make sense when someone else is paying the bill.
Of course LLMs are a commodity at this point but if someone is using Codex, Pi etc. at home it becomes more likely they won’t be picking Claude Code at their day job either.
I have worked in shops that made it difficult for me just to get a paid for RustRover or CLion license, and had to out of pocket it. The monthly sub for Claude or Codex is equivalent to the total license cost for that.
It's not entitled to expect your $200/month tooling expense to have a level of reliability and consistency.
If your employer is paying for it, fine. I am my own employer. I don't fancy becoming dependent on tooling that costs me as much as my family's whole monthly mobile plan and then having it degrade in unpredictable ways or rug pull me on quota. Or have geo-political drama as part of its release cycle.
It's totally reasonable for tech folks to be leery of a company using a strong market position from one system (Windows/Claude) to push mediocre complementary software (IE/CC).
Dario took the tremendous goodwill his row with Hegseth gave him and blew it. The major problems are Anthropic’s back-end instability and front-end kludginess (Electron!) revealing the gap between Anthropic’s capability and marketing, and Dario bizarrely copying Altman’s 2023 fire-and-brimstone playbook that had already massively backfired.
And if the Electron app were flawless, that would be one thing. It isn’t. It’s buggy, feature light, constantly updating and slow.
Claude is a buggy mess because it's slop, not because it's electron. Heck, it runs a full Linux VM under the covers without asking.. it's insane.
Most Electron apps are crap because they transparently communicate the developer prioritizing their own efficiency over the trade-offs to UX choosing a cross-platform platform entails.
In most cases, I don’t care that an app looks crappy as long as it works. For Anthropic, however, the irony undermines its argument that Claude is ready to replicate developers.
I personally hate it due to various reasons but I don’t feel like the Electron part is the issue (Java based Jetbrains IDEs generally seem way more bloated)
From Claude Code being written in React (!!) to acquiring the Bun people so they they could have their very own bespoke JS/TS runtime (and then... rewriting the whole thing), to having the CC "native" app being Electron, etc.
It just seems like it comes down to a choice at the highest level to hire people from a "full stack" background, and build in and and prioritize TypeScript as their dev language, for better or for worse.
I personally think it's worse and that shows in the performance and quality of CC, but I'm biased.
Codex, FWIW, is written in Rust, and it is by far snappier and more reliable, though less featureful for now.
Their super app is oversized, but that's the MS playbook with Teams, overusing resource to justify upgrade budget from IT dept, typical enterprise sales trick.
>if you don't want to get locked in to Claude Code
All of these companies are built around eventually locking you in then selling to some other company. "Just pay more" is not a real solution. Once the competition dies down and there are only a handful of companies (if we are even lucky enough for that) with viable LLM products, your ability to jump ship is going to diminish. It always does. There is no way they aren't working on better lock in tactics.
The global LLM market seems trending towards fragmentation. And lock-in appears to be diminishing, not increasing, particularly for companies that set up a multi-model workflow.
Wait until investors stop giving out money out of FOMO. Google/Facebook/etc. gonna swoop in on anyone who is remotely viable and independent anyway
OpenRouter isn’t subsidizing much. No subsidy would mean the subscriptions go away in favor of API only. That doesn’t really speak at all to either of your points regarding consolidation or lock-in.
Except they themselves cannot afford it and as the article also mentioned, their level of service and uptime is atrocious for the price they are offering.
Their unpredictable pricing model is designed to make it easy for you to lose more money without you knowing. Unannounced model switching, nerfing old/new models, classifiers detecting 'unsafe' instructions to downgrade the selected model and overcharging API prices and locking subscriptions to a broken vibe-coded harness.
You don't get anything by defending Anthropic, given their past behavior.
You're just upset that you don't get to use their VC money the way you want to use it lol. It either is a good deal or it isn't, if it is just say, thanks free VC money, if it isn't say fuck you.
You have to get into the weeds though on what exactly counts as a "product delivered". Like, Apple doesn't charge for new versions of macOS. But are "Macs" separate stacks together or are they the fusion of hardware and software, and if so on what levels? There are all sorts of products surrounding us that are running software that we still treat as unified objects after all, right down to smart light bulbs or a "plain" lithium battery pack which still requires controllers to manage charging and USB negotiation etc. Chips and software are in tons and tons of "basic" hardware stuff yet we just buy the object as a singular entity.
I'm not saying that dumping can't be a thing but the lines aren't always clear cut either. You also have to get into bog standard business scaling issues and profit vs investment. If you take on debt to invest in capital that you believe will lower per unit costs if you build enough volume and then turn a profit, you're "selling at a loss" but that's how tons of business works, that's why there is risk right? Doesn't seem good to discourage that.
It seems more fruitful to approach things from the perspective of monopolies, competition, corporate governance etc in general, granted not that a lot of governments have been great about that either in recent history.
If pricing below cost were illegal, it would essentially make starting up a business—any business—impossible.
> You're just upset that you don't get to use their VC money the way you want to use it lol.
I don't particularly care about Claude or harnesses.
2.) Early bird specials, again, aren't loss leaders. They're a way to get sales on the left side of the bell curve. The restaurant food is still the product, not a subsidy.
3.) Free soda with large fry doesn't actually exist (though it sounds like it should, right?)
4.) Happy hour wings (again, see #2)
None of these are bundling so I don't really get why you bothered to comment
Thats not true at all. You can use the Agent SDK [1], which uses your subscription [2]. I use it via ACP [3] with custom system prompts and tooling. I have found it very powerful and flexible. It has its own agent loop, of course, so maybe thats the limitation using it with opencode?
[1] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview
[2] They were talking about giving credits for the SDK usage rather than it using your allowance directly, but that seems to have been put on hold for now. If and when that changes, I will likely jump ship, but I am more than happy with it right now.
[3] there isn't an official ACP wrapper - zed have one but its quite limited. its trivial to build one though, or you can just use the SDK directly and wire it into your interface of choice.
linked by another comment: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau...
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau...
https://the-decoder.com/anthropic-backs-off-unpopular-billin...
So... maybe we can still use third party harnesses with Claude Code subscriptions... for now? Until they change their mind again?
The way I read this is: yes, if the third party harness uses Anthropic's Agent SDK. Most of them do not, AFAIK, and are still against ToS (though maybe its not enforced for now)
So this wasn't even about third-party harnesses that replace the toolset Claude has access to, and try to call the Claude API with subsidized credentials. No, this was literally a blessing for their desktop UI's over others, all driving Claude Code's CLI at the end of the day.
To the broader point, it's hard not to see that as arbitrary and borderline spyware. Software that sniffs the context in which it's executed and uses that to phone home about billing is the type of thing you'd expect from the most corporate parts of the gaming industry, not a frontier lab, but here we are.
> If you want to autocomplete, like I do, you don’t need Fable, or even Opus; Sonnet works fine.
It reads like "if you want to go to the grocery store, you don't need a space shuttle, or even a SR-71 Blackbird; a Cessna works fine."
def frobQux(Qux qux, int radians) {
Don't leave me hanging: how do you frob a qux a certain number of radians?
isn't he just contrasting 2 use cases of LLMs?
On a modern-ish GPU these should run really fast with little latency. They cost nothing and don't send your data to anyone.
Whenever you are faced with a corpo you should conceptualize it as a system that will happily mow you over for increased profits, unless it is legally bound to not prioritize profits above everything else and its structural incentives push it in a pro-social direction.
People do like to join corporate brand loyalty teams, which just seems to me like a way to guarantee disappointment.
I've used a Mac essentially continuously for 28 years. Always the not-quite cheapest, often secondhand, and always in the context of a job that required deep understanding of Linux; the Mac itself offers complementary, somewhat overlapping tools.
Macs never quite frustrate me more than the alternatives, but I maintain an interest in possible alternatives, and at any point if switching made a fundamental difference, I'd switch. I have found a Windows convertible tablet to be a better lightweight travel companion than a Mac or an iPad, and I have a solid, reliable Kubuntu machine on my desk.
IMO as a professional tech user you should always have options, and you should often re-evaluate those options wherever you can do that at no real cost.
Edit: I forgot they also don't let me use remote control (which isn't that good anyway) with a oauth key in the env var! So i have to get on a terminal and do the whole login flow for my containerized agents. Massive pain, so lame.
I've already got it hooked up to local models if there's no viable hosted option.
We are currently in the "$7/mo Netflix with all the good movies" era of AI that will leave and never return.
Then the cost would end up being deprecation + electric + some low operating margin (i.e. what non SOTA models cost on OpenRouter)
Migrating my skills/agents and config was fairly straightforward.
Pi's agent harness seems to be more responsive and quicker than CC (perhaps with the prompt caching and squashing it does behind the scenes)
Tempted to do a write-up on migration.
I am only using Pi with Github Copilot as I am scared I will get my Claude account banned if I use the Oauth with Pi.
pi.dev
OpenAI, as much as I dislike them, seems to be the only big AI lab that doesn't care what agent harness you use, so that's where my $100 a month goes.
Nowadays I went from Claude 20x to 5x and been using the GLM model on OpenCode... No regrets.
But actually their own codex harness is quite decent on its own and doesn't have the quality issues or bloat that Claude Code does. Native Rust and open source. And in fact I've got a configuration here to point it at GLM which I also use (via Neuralwatt subscription) in addition to OpenAI's sub.
I do not like opencode's philosophy on the clipboard, it tries to be too clever.
me: Can you implement the next thing
OpenCode+Codex: Yep I'll do that next. <does nothing and returns to prompt>
me: Well?
OpenCode+Codex: <starts implementing>
me: Looks good, let's fix this one issue.
OpenCode+Codex: Sure let's do that. <does nothing and returns to prompt>
me: <bangs head against wall>
--
I've found the codex cli to be much better in this regard, it doesn't nearly derp out so much at higher token counts.
Opus is still my favourite model (I've found 4.6 specifically gives me the best results in OpenCode), but with all the shenanigans Anthropic is pulling, Codex is a close enough substitute.
And yeah, I am supplementing with GLM 5.2 and have actually found it quite complimentary.
One of Codex's weaknesses is "excessive staging" -- basically it's quite cautious and pushes a very incremental approach. This is good for working in an established codebase (which most work is anyways). But for yeeting new projects, Claude always shone better for me (though it often left a mess of race conditions and unhandled negative cases that I had to clean up by hand or with codex)
GLM actually does pretty well in this regard, with the right prompting. It's more "creative" than GPT.
You can say it's inconvenient but it's hard to argue they're being greedy when they do these things to merely lose a little bit less money on every subscription they sell.
TFA is probably overly inflammatory but it's worth pointing out how this loss leader cycle works.
These companies are not your friends, they're burning VC money to subsidize services before the eventual rug pull, enshittification is coming.
Edit: Compare to the fourth article on the front page:
4. - Road to Elm 1.0 (elm-lang.org) | 181 points, 4 hours ago
How many businesses are actually dependent on Claude? As in - Anthropic’s pricing or licensing changes can kill their business?
How many developers are “Claude developers” and can’t be effective with other tools?
This discussion is full of people saying they won’t use Claude anymore, and presumably some of them will actually do that. That’s good, there are alternatives.
No need to picture general anti-AI stance as some kind of herecy to be punished by the Inquisition Of The Holy Progress.
By all means, put pressure on companies who are doing this. Public opinion does matter. But the fundamentals are just not going to change without regulation. It is a tough nut to crack.
I saw a guy trashing Anthropic on Threads the other day, looked up his LinkedIn and he worked for OpenAI in PR.
Their only options. They have to eventually show a return on the investment bonfire that they have been burning. This is apparently all they are teaching at business school now, since it seems to be what almost all companies are doing.
In another year the open source models will be good enough for almost anything.
When your choices are a Cadillac or a bicycle, a lot of people will take the Cadillac. When you add in the option of a Hyundai, that gets the job done for a huge number of needs.
If agi why not agi shaped?
This is a non-sequitur.
Most consumer apps don't even list all the bugfixes.
I wouldn’t call Fable “enshittification.”
Anthropic knows what they have.
I’m looking around for the article with the marketshare chart over time and I’ll update my comment if I find it.
This is the closest article I could find, though the one I had read earlier had a nice graph and was updated to 2026:
https://chatforest.com/guides/anthropic-overtakes-openai-ent...
Here’s a decent one:
https://menlovc.com/perspective/2025-the-state-of-generative...
LLM Market Share: Anthropic Extends Its Lead in the Enterprise
Fable returning wrong answers if it suspects the topic is sensative is the ultimate icing on the huge cake of lies and gaslighting they’ve been baking the past 6 months.
Citation, please? On the original release they downgraded models silently to Opus 4.8 when they suspected it was being used for LLM development, but they stopped doing that. Now when you hit one of the guardrail subjects it downgrades to Opus 4.8 visibly in all cases.
I've never seen anything suggesting they're deliberately returning wrong answers. Maybe you're thinking of Gemini's anti-distillation tech?
I spent a few weeks in the OpenClaw Discord and there was a competitive sport there where people were posting screenshots of how many hundreds of billions of tokens they were burning per day. It was like what I saw a while back with people on r/DataHoarder abusing the unlimited free storage plans and putting petabytes of torrents onto them. (Well, not technically abusing ;)
---
EDIT: Oh my goodness and I forgot the black market for Anthropic tokens (70-90% discounted, which seems to strongly imply they come from the subscriptions)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5paRa6E5rCM
---
That being said it does also of course make normal users sad.
(My harness uses less tokens than Claude Code! But I'm not allowed to use it, because we can't have nice things.)
Don't quote me on this but I recall (in March?) OpenAI saying it's totally cool to use your sub with 3rd party stuff, on like the same day when Anthropic was being grilled hard for their changes. (Never interrupt your opponent when he is making a mistake!) I don't know if they can keep that up though, now that the VC money apparently ran out and everyone needs to actually become profitable overnight.
They basically gave stuff away for free and now they're speed-running enshittification. The end state will be an abusive, adversarial, fully monetized, vendor lockin experience like Oracle or Broadcom. Nobody is forced to play.
Open models like GLM 5.2 are getting good enough to handle 90% of tasks, and will eat most of their usage unless they start serving it at cost. And on the 1% work they fearmongered their way into falling under government control, which will limit how much they can commercialize the frontier.
Nobody will keep paying their premiums and put up with their BS when they can have similar models at cost of inference in any harness that they want.
Most people either don’t have the money to buy hardware to run open models and/or don’t have the utilisation to make renting cost effective.
you can use these in hermes, cursor, openclaw, opencode, etc with 2 lines of config that claude code will happily do for you if you ask
GLM 5.2, deepseek 4 Flash and the newly released Hy3 are Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6 level models at a tiny fraction of the cost.
I'm on the $200 claude plan and blew through my weekly limits with Fable in a day, then ended up wasting $20 with opus 4.8 overages in an hour to finish out work in active sessions. Since then I've been using GLM 5.2 with openrouter + opencode and am spending less than $5/day for equivalent output.
But it's a very competitively priced model other providers can offer (since it's open) so it's a much cheaper alternative than claude in practice.
I assume that is what they meant.
You'd need at least 24 new M4 Max Studios, or 16 new M3 Ultra Studios, or 3 used 512 GB M3 Ultra Studios just to power one GLM 5.2 instance. And even then, you're probably looking at < 5 tokens per second.
Personally, I think it makes way more sense to pay a model provider $3/1M tokens.
You'll never get proper price competitive utilization on personal hardware vs a cloud inference provider that can batch and pipeline requests optimally to maximize utilization, unless you yourself start running batch jobs.
Even once local hardware and models catch up to todays frontiers, by that time there will be 10x better cluster sized models available at a similar discount.
But, and this is the problem corporations face, that's the truth TODAY. They need to make decisions for the next quarter at minimum, for a year ideally. I don't envy IT leadership in this environment, there's no right answer along the lines of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". Any choice today may potentially make you look silly in 90 days.
People who don't wanna spend too much on LLMs and are trying to optimize whats subsidized even on the Max plans are customers Anthropic is honestly better off without.
We have yet to see any company use Fablr to increase their profits. Until and unless you can increase your profits with the expensive models, it makes no sense to pay for them.
IOW, the expensive AI providers only draw is goodwill.
If you're a software engineer you should do your best to advocate for more open tools and treat this company as radioactive.
Opencode/Pi/ohmypi are much better than claude code. And with models like GLM/Kimi/Qwen you can get really really far. Add in a design tool like Paper so your AI can "see" what it's designing and you can close the gap incredibly tight.
Try it and free yourself.
If you want a look at the timeline where the microwave solved cooking, this was an interesting article: https://malmesbury.substack.com/p/my-journey-to-the-microwav.... You can apparently sear meat with a microwave (provided you have the necessary pan).
> Second, microwave cooking fell victim to the same curse that threatens every new easy-to-use technology: it became low-status tech.
Of course they won't give you thousands of dollars of inference for a couple hundred bucks without making sure you're properly tied to their walled garden.
Yeah, of course Dario and any other Anthropic spoke person will vastly exaggerate the capabilities of their product and promote vibe coding and now "loop engineering", just like Coca-Cola would love for you to drink gallons of Diet Coke everyday, just like Oracle some twenty ago promoted for Enterprises that they could just use Oracle Databases to serve web applications right from the DB, as this would force you to use more CPUs and Oracle DB is licensed by core.
The business model for inference is metered usage, more usage => mode money. Again, the subscription model is just a bump in the road to acquire customers, once you're metered, the more you use, the better for anthropic.
Why people get surprised with that stuff?
Surely, they're not making up for the costs of training and R&D and may be losing money on the hardcore users, but rest assured they are not losing thousands of dollars for each customer on average.
I agree that this is their goal. The reason that people don't understand why Anthropic wont let the subscription be used with other harnesses is because they believe that this hope of Anthropic is just that: a hope.
I personally don't believe that a harness is a moat.
Even more specifically, the very fact that people would prefer, if they had the option, to use other harnesses with roughly equivalent feature sets strongly implies that the harness is not bringing them any value they couldn't get from a bunch of other places, including open-source equivalents.
Anthropic might want you to use their harness for their own reasons (control over caching, logging your interactions for training data, et cetera), but the idea that the Claude Code harness itself is bringing significant value which would help to lock users into the Anthropic ecosystem more than the Claude models alone do is kind of laughable. So _of course_ it seems like a baffling and arbitrary restriction to many users.
Whenever you don't understand how people can think things on the internet, consider that they might be younger than you. They may not be, but it makes the world far less rage inducing. None of us are born knowing everything.
But surely those fully autonomous coding loops will solve all those 9,100+ open issues on GitHub? Why haven't they?
What happened to Claude's C Compiler [0], or that browser "built from scratch" by Cursor? [1]
Why aren't the agents maintaining it if they are supposed to be cheaper than humans?
> But why do they have us by the balls? Dario and Boris have us convinced that “coding is solved” with their loops. But microwaves didn’t solve cooking.
They have you by the balls if you allow them to, if you continue to listen to their bullshit.
Both of them are essentially salesmen at this point. They don't care if they are wrong and will sell Claude to whoever is thinking of planning the next mass layoff. Their definition of "AGI" is different to yours.
The correct answer to all of this pricing nonsense that Anthropic and others are doing is local open weight models that you run on your own machine. They know this and powerful local models undercut their entire business model if hosted by others or if a smaller local model matches the performance of larger ones.
Shhh, you may pop the bubble and cause the collapse of the US economy.