[jsumrall]

Honestly very confused by the people happy or agreeing with Anthropic here. You can use their API on a pay-per-use basis, or (as I interpreted the agreement) you can prepay as a subscription and use their service with hourly & weekly session limits.

What's changed is that I thought I was subscribing to use their API services, claude code as a service. They are now pushing it more as using only their specific CLI tool.

As a user, I am surprised, because why should it matter to them whether I open my terminal and start up using `claude code`, `opencode`, `pi`, or any other local client I want to send bits to their server.

Now, having done some work with other clients, I can kind of see the point of this change (to play devils' advocate): their subscription limits likely assume aggregate usage among all users doing X amount of coding, which when used with their own cli tool for coding works especially well with client side and service caching and tool-calls log filtering— something 3rd party clients also do to varying effectivness.

So I can imagine a reason why they might make this change, but again, I thought I was subscribing to a prepaid account where I can use their service within certain session limits, and I see no reason why the cli tool on my laptop would matter then.

[F7F7F7]

This is like asking why you can use ChatGPT in the Claude desktop app. “They are both Electron apps. What’s the problem?”

[awestroke]

Because they get no telemetry or usage data if you use a third party tool.

Just pay per token if you want to use third party tools. Stop feeling entitled to other people's stuff.