Similarly, on a home internet connection you might pay for a given size of pipe, but most residential ISPs don't allow running publicly accessible servers on your connection because you'll typically use way more of the bandwidth.

> We are paying for a certain amount of token consumption

I dont think you are. The specific arrangement you have is you pay for a subscription to be used with Claude Code. It isnt access to tokens, so you can do whatever you please.

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An analogy would be a refillable cup for a soda at a restuarnt. They will allow you to refill how many ever times you want, but only using the store provided cup - and you cant bring your own 2L hydroflask or whatever. You're paying not just for the liquid, but for the entire setup.

To use your analogy, if Shell sold you a subscription to fill up your Hummer up to 30 times a month, they wouldn't let you use that subscription to fill gas cans with a GMC logo taped to the side. They couldn't, without overcharging the people who just want to average out their cost of driving.

Interestingly, it looks like I haven't received a non-receipt email from them since August 2025.

How is what you are asking for different from what they are saying?

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/12429409-manage-extra...

> you’ll no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw.

My understanding is that Conductor and others aren't using it.

> Obviously step-3.5-flash is nowhere near the raw performance of sonnet

I feel like these two statements conflict with each other.

inb4 skill issue I could probably beat you coding by hand with you using Claude code

I think using it to write small documentation or small scripts would be a good use case for it, but serious development work you Hit the usage limits way too fast.

Only thing now is that the cheaper (worse) chinese model coding plans have huge limits, so I lean on those now. Requires a lot more hand-holding though.

It's like if I buy a hot dog every month and they tell me they're raising the price next month, or discontinuing honey mustard. Inconvenient but they're not doing anything wrong.

Especially since, given my back of the napkin math, they're giving us a pretty decent discount on the subscription plans.

Anthropic not allowing Claiude Code subscriptions to be used with other projects isn't "pulling the rug out"; you paid for an API subscription to use Claude Code, and now you're using it for a different purpose and a different product.

If Tesla offered $10/month charging for your Tesla, and then a bunch of people turned around and use their Tesla Charge subscription to charge all different electric vehicles, and battery packs, and also hooked up a crypto mining rig to it, would you be surprised if they said "Nope, we're cutting this off. You can only use your Tesla Charge subscription for your Tesla vehicle"?

ChatGPT found it was a great idea and that I can use Claude for planning and gave me instructions on how to best hand off the building part. Claude told me it’s a horrible idea.

Claude also burns much more liberally through tokens, eg reading through entire irrelevant docs.

Openclaw is great for resolving this since I much more control which work goes where and also gives a much better user experience without all the back and forth to understand what context it has (my use case is to build things from my phone while I’m in senseless meetings in my day job).

Fully agree on the alternatives. In the end Claude’s experience is worse, while it still makes bad decisions if you let it. Better to get a good workflow on a less capable model.

When they shut down open code, I thought it was a lame move and was critical of them, but I could understand at least where they're coming from. With this though, it's ridiculous. Claude core tools are still being used in this case. Shelling out to it to use it there's no different than a normal user would do themselves.

If this continues, I'll be taking my $200 subscription over to open AI.

Also what's the point of Claude -p if not integration with 3rd party code? (They have a whole agents SDK which does the same thing.. but I think that one requires per token pricing.) I guess they regret supporting subscription auth on the -p flag

Imagine not being able to connect services together or compose building-blocks to do what you want. This is absolute insanity that runs counter to decades of computing progress and interoperability (including Unix philosophy); and I'm saying this as someone who doesn't even care for using AI.

When this happens I will have to look at other providers and downgrade my subscription. Conductor is just too powerful to give up. It’s the whole reason why I’m on a max plan.

There's a good chance they do not have the infrastructure to do that.

Oh no, there's plenty of us willing to say we told you so.

What's more interesting to me is what it's going to look like if big companies start removing "AI usage" from their performance metrics and cease compelling us to use it. More than anything else, that's been the dumbest thing to happen with this whole craze.

2 weeks ago, I had only hit my limit a single time and that was when I had multiple agents doing codebase audits.

OpenAI seems to mostly be chasing the consumer market, but not doing great at it.

For SaaS, use the SaaS API. For product, use the product.

They subsidize the product with "don't care how much" pricing so they have users to build out features without users worrying about cost. If it's not actual users using the product, then features will be built in OpenClaw instead of Claude.

The earlier they draw this line, the better.

However, announcing it the day before it is effective is a huge unforced error, even if it were just a consequence of the TOS. They gain nothing by making people scramble.

Also better to announce at the same new ways to support plugging in to Claude Code - something to encourage integration/cooperation. No fences unless the field inside is flowering.

Software as a service businesses are exceptionally high margin and so we have got used to businesses being able to be laissez-faire about usage. LLM APIs are not SaaS, they’re not high margin, Anthropic (and OpenAI and others) have tight margins. The question is not a philosophical one about whether someone should or should not have to pay, it is a practical one: Anthropic cannot afford to subsidise third-party use of their API.