[rglullis]

Try not making it sound like the company is doing me a favor by letting me access the thing I was paying for. I wasn't "invited to a party", I was sold on an agreement that by paying a guaranteed monthly fee I could have access to the model at a rate that was lower than the pay-as-you-go rate from the API.

The primary offering is access to the models. That's what the subscription is about. They can try as hard as they want to market it as Claude being the product and access to the model being an ancillary service, but to me this is just marketing bs. No one is signing-up for Claude because their website is nicer, or because of Claude Code.

[skeledrew]

> I was sold on an agreement that by paying a guaranteed monthly fee I could have access to the model at a rate that was lower than the pay-as-you-go rate from the API

Yes, that agreement is there, with the condition that their app is used. That's option B. And I'd think it fairly obvious that if one has to go to extraordinary lengths to gain access, like finding a key under a mat, or needing to login with an official client to gain access to a token for an unofficial client, then - implicitly - it's highly unlikely that that method of access is part of the agreement. And Anthropic has now made it explicitly clear that no, that access method is not part of the agreement.

[rglullis]

> that agreement is there, with the condition that their app is used.

And setting this condition is what constitutes a tie-in sale.

> if one has to go to extraordinary lengths to gain access

BS! Sorry, there is nothing extraordinary about using an undocumented API.