[leobuskin]

A lot of people use LLM subscriptions, they don't use API keys. Why devtool devs continue to ignore this? I mean, ok, you have your "pricing" reselling an access to LLM models, that's the only, probably, simple way to monetize it, but it's a bad way in 2025, seriously. Allow me to bring my oauth with claude max, and/or offload whatever you do to my local claude code (or if there's some magic behind orchestration use SDK). And, oops, there's nothing to monetize and the entire thing can be recreated with vibe coding within a few weeks (it's not so much there, let's be honest).

I apologize for the writing style, don't take it personally, just every devtool product I see on HN nowadays fails for this particular reason.

[jsunderland323]

No it's all good and it's a fair point.

So from my vantage point we need some way to create revenue. We have tried to make as much of the tool free as we can. We do a 10% markup on tokens issued by us. That's better than cursor who does 25%. We support BYOK so you can use your own claude key, and vertex key. If you do that you are basically just paying us a flat troll tole of $16/month to use our entire frontend but you are free to be unbounded by a markup on your tokens. We actually prefer this because it's better unit economics for us. So please bring your own key!

[leobuskin]

But here's the thing: most of your real audience doesn't have API keys (except a few enterprise-ish folks or startups who got credits). They already pay subscription(s) (and will continue to pay the maximum, which will keep growing). The entire token resale model creates a weird economy and interdependency that shouldn't exist in the first place. In the end, all the deals with top-tier labs will be changing, most middlemen will start manipulating the token exchange rate at some point, and there's no transparency or single source of trust. What's the Endspiel here?

[jcheng]

AFAIK, every tool out there that lets you do oauth with your Claude Max plan is doing so with the same copy-pasted client id/secret that are extracted from Claude Code. It's not clear at all that this is above board, and when I asked our Anthropic rep, they encouraged us not to do this.

If there's an official way for 3rd party devs to piggyback on Anthropic plans, someone please tell me how!

[swyx]

fyi sometimes its because anthropic may have disallowed it. oauthing with your plan to bring the anthropic subsidy to non anthropic products is understandably a tricky deal unless you're scaled enough to make it make sense for both sides.