They're subsidizing their tokens as long as you use their software. That's a fair exchange, I never understood why people took issue with it.
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.)
Part of the point is that they've added all sorts of caveats - `claude -p` used to be "using their software", but isn't anymore, even though it's just invoking the same harness non-interactively
And their constant flipflopping is why they lost their Goodwill with me. It was too much work just to make sure I wasn't breaking their AUP week to week. They will say one thing and then directly contradict it in a social media post. I was constantly losing features that were the reasons I signed up with them.
The issue with this kind of subsidy is that it is designed to lock you in and not as a loss leader.
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
I think the subscription is also designed as a loss leader. The ai labs know the real money is in enterprise, and that enterprises mostly don’t want to use the most expensive option. How do they convince enterprises to sign up for their expensive api then? Give it to the employees for cheap so they tell bosses they want Claude code at work.
I want only their model, the rest is just garbage. I used Opus with pi.dev, worked perfectly fine. Fast and does exactly what it needs to do. Claude Code is slow, sluggish, buggy. Why are you forcing me to use it? Why should I pay an order of magnitude more to use pi.dev? That doesn't sound reasonable to me.
Well, they are wishing to lock you into their ecosystem, so that switching would be a high-friction decision. And then they can simply raise prices without you leaving.
Agreed. The level of entitlement around how we all deserve to use a product in a category that didn't even exist 12 months ago with increasing performance at the same price forever is insane.
Consumers want to pay as little as possible and companies want to charge them as much as they possibly can. That’s how markets work I don’t understand what does “entitlement” have to do with anything. If loud consumers somehow manage to coerce companies into lowering prices/offering better products that’s a massive win for almost everyone (of course usually its just noise that doesn’t change anything, however it did work on a few occasions).
The the article was talking about how Anthropic costs too much and how there are cheaper options available then yes I would agree with you. But this article has a conspiratorial and moral crusade tone which is what I'm responding to. The article says "In my opinion (which may be in the minority), it’s unethical to:
lock in your customers to a closed system for maximum market gain
put down the competition when they pose a risk to your product
make hypocritical claims on how your product increases quality when your own software sucks
artificially restrict one’s own product as a fear-mongering marketing stunt
test dynamic pricing on your users to see how much more they’ll pay for less
change the terms of your product after the sale without notifying your user base"
anthropic is not just a business operating in a market, they are "unethical" and "fear-mongering" and "hypocritical".
I also think that the people who are complaining loudest about Anthropics pricing and changes are the customers Anthropic is least interested in retaining.
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.
Short term yes. But there is a reason why IDEs, game engine and other development tools have very high cheap or free versions for this market segment. Since these users end up having a huge influence on what companies they work at / end up working at spend their money on.
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.
C'mon, get real. The monthly subscription costs on these services are several multiples what software engineers have formerly paid for development tools.
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.
I mean, it has definite Borg Bill Gates vibes, doesn't it?
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).
That analogy only works partially, because when IE6 was released, it was the best browser by far. IE only became terrible once MSFT actively stopped developing it, and other browsers kept getting better.
On the other hand, Claude Code was the best coding agent when it was released, but there's no way Anthropic is going to let its cash cow stagnate. Like, I think pretty much all of Anthropic's revenue spike in the last few months was driven by the tokenmaxxing mania.
My take is most of Claude Code's problems originate from insufficient compute capacity and all kinds of workarounds they're doing to mitigate that fundamental limitation.
If that were the only issue, I’d say Anthropic were fine.
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.
Using Electron in this day and age shows a particular lack of effort, considering how easy it is to use an agent harness to build native versions of apps. I mean, we're a tiny little business and we somehow find the bandwidth to do it.
Anthropic being a big company means they could trivially hire an iOS team. The failure to make a good native app is a business decision. Claude or not, leadership could've snapped their fingers, allocated the budget, and fixed the frontend UX by now if it were important enough.
> Anthropic being a big company means they could trivially hire an iOS team
Anthropic is primarily limited by how fast they can identify and onboard people who will be a good fit. Allocating that to ios would trade off against allocating that staffing growth elsewhere (ex: reliability, making the next generation model even better).
I don't understand why people care about Electron? Evaluate the quality of the software based on its own merits IMO. VS Code, Slack, Postman, Obsidian.. I use this software every day and my only complaint is Slack's RAM usage (which honestly has no negative effect on my machine, but just seems silly for a messaging app).
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.
> don't understand why people care about Electron?
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.
Yet… VS code somehow became the most popular IDE that happens to be generally viewed favorably by most of its users.
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)
It just seems like Anthropic has made a deliberate choice to make themselves a TypeScript dev shop.
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.
Interestingly I just skimmed through a video linked in TFA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlGRN8jh2RI and Boris Cherny explains that they chose TypeScript and React for Claude Code primarily because it was "on distribution" and the models back then just weren't good enough at other languages.
So it's interesting that Codex is written in Rust. Amongst other things it could mean OpenAI had more powerful models that could handle Rust, or their engineers had to handhold the agents a lot more up front, or Rust has structural advantages that could overcome being less represented in the training data.
Codex also I think put its first version out a bit later?
IMHO building the agent harness at least partially by hand is kind of key? I think going hogwild with "vibe coding" the actual harness is partially why CC is a bit of a rats nest. I think it's genuinely gotten out of control in terms of their ability to reason about it. Just my opinion, I'm sure Boris disagrees.
Also Codex itself distributed via NPM same as Claude. But it distributes a compiled Rust binary. Which is compiled from open source.
I used to think Claude Code was released much earlier too, and my initial theory was that OpenAI as a follower had the benefit of more powerful models... but when I looked it up, Codex was first released in April 2025 [1], whereas CC Beta was released in Feb 2025 [2] -- only a couple of months apart!
I'm sure each lab is keenly aware of what the other is doing (how else could they time so many of their releases so close to each other?) so it's highly probable they started developing each app about the same time, and likely even knew the technical details involved. Which is why it's additionally interesting that OpenAI started off with Rust while CC used Electron.
I'll say their poor Chat product is the worst. Its been having this issue of losing connection will kill the chat session since day 1, and never bother fix it.
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.
>... Dario bizarrely copying Altman’s 2023 fire-and-brimstone playbook that had already massively backfired.
I've said this before, they always knew it was terrible marketing, but they just can't help themselves because they actually believe it.
From multiple accounts, the people working at these labs, who are most exposed to the latest models' capabilities and how they're being used out in the world, are simultaneously excited and terrified about what they're building.
In a way that's even scarier than the "Capitalist sociopaths marketing AI to other Capitalist sociopaths" rationale everybody assumes.
You shouldn't have to pay your carrier to unlock your phone and in many countries it's actually illegal.
>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.
> 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
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
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.
I'm not sure the security/safety stuff is entirely in their control at this point, though you can argue that they are indirectly responsible through encouraging regulation via their positions on safety/risk.
> They're subsidizing their tokens as long as you use their software. That's a fair exchange, I never understood why people took issue with it.
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.
Yes, the subsidized loss leader product is evolving fast. If you want stable costs, the API plan is right there. You simultaneously say they cannot afford the API pricing but also claim they are overcharging, it sounds like you just want to get mad ad Anthropic.
> If you want stable costs, the API plan is right there.
Why don't you ask Microsoft [0], Tesla [1] and Alibaba [2] on why they believe it is not only expensive, but it also a security risk for them?
Like I said, You don't get anything for defending Anthropic and they are not going to hire you into their sales team.
> You simultaneously say they cannot afford the API pricing but also claim they are overcharging, it sounds like you just want to get mad ad Anthropic.
Read it again. "Except they themselves cannot afford it"
They is "Anthropic" given that I said "themselves". Who are the ones that cannot afford to subsidize tokens forever due to the even cheaper Chinese alternatives. They all know that the answer is open weight models and why Anthropic cannot raise prices and why the above companies are ditching them for open weight models.
Do you also think all you can eat buffets should be illegal? What about early bird specials? Free soda with a large fry? Happy hour wings? Where does the “bundling” end?
1.) All you can eat buffets ARE the product, not a loss leader, so there's no bundle there.
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
I just searched and found free medium fries with a large soda at McD if you order through the app. Seems like bundling to me, and you have to use their particular app.
Sure, and perhaps it should be prohibited. But it's also a matter of impact.
But it's just hard to care too much about a commoditized product and an app with tons of competition. And McDonald's is not keeping any competitors away by locking their fries offer behind their app.
How does it stifle competition / innovation? You can use other harnesses, pay API for anthropic models or cheap chinese models.
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.
Because the US models haven’t had to compete on the actual price of providing the unsubsidized service, the Chinese models are probably ahead of us in terms of what can actually be delivered profitably (which is a pretty bad result given the level of investment).
>Any service or product delivered at a loss seems pretty plainly anti-competitive.
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.
Well if their gross margins are positive (I really doubt they aren’t) there isn’t much of a case to be made. You can expect meaningful R&D and capital investments to pay off short term and you can’t make any meaningful projections either to determine if they are dumping or not.
The entire LLMaaS industry is priced below cost. Even if the marginal cost of electricity and bandwidth to produce one token is less than the price of that token, the amortized infrastructure and R&D costs make the entire venture unprofitable.
If pricing below cost were illegal, it would essentially make starting up a business—any business—impossible.
You can’t calculate what that cost is though regardless. If the gross margin is positive you can’t confidently challenge their longterm growth projections however optimistic or unrealistic they are.
While I did not flag this, it is clearly a hit piece. Why write an article to publish in July that does not include June data? Unless of course one looks at June uptime and finds that does not align with their story.
In June, I figure Anthropic subscriptions were partially powered by those big mobile gas generators that are pushed around the xAI parking lots. Makes sense availability improved.
I began writing this article a while back and forgot to update the screenshot. The June uptime has significantly improved, but that may not always be the case
I agree that without context, Sonnet is overkill for just autocomplete code suggestions. My point later in that section is that to have an autocomplete mindset (where an AI is a helpful tool rather than a driver), you only need a decent subset of models, not the best of the best.
Sounds like the author is using "autocomplete" as a derogatory way of referring to LLMs in general (eg. "LLMs can't code, they're just autocomplete on steroids")
And it goes and reads your code and suggests a reasonable way to frob a qux a certain number of radians. Which is at the same time (a) pretty useful!, (b) fairly new, we’ve only been able to do this since 2023 or so, but (c) also not that hard by 2026 standards because capabilities have advanced so much in the last three years.
Generative autocomplete with an underpowered model is pretty annoying. It hallucinates parameters and APIs. Something like Sonnet seems like the right level of sophistication.
For people who saw this and might want a recomendation, I like running a tiny qwen model with llama cpp. Qwen2.5 coder 0.5B or 1.5B (not the instruct version)
On a modern-ish GPU these should run really fast with little latency. They cost nothing and don't send your data to anyone.
> To be clear, I’m not anti-AI. [...] If you want to autocomplete [...] But if you want to use FOSS trusted tools like Zed, OpenCode, Pi, Nanocoder, etc. [...]
Are you saying that using LLMs for code autocomplete is like using an aeroplane to go to the grocery store? Because clearly there was no autocomplete before the new AI spring.
> So... maybe we can still use third party harnesses with Claude Code subscriptions... for now?
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)
Something that many don't realize is that Claude Desktop and the Agent SDK are both just wrappers around pools of CLI instances, literally running `claude --input-format stream-json --output-format stream-json`.
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.
I believe you're right and I'm familiar with the actual distinction – the confusion is mostly about how they _feel_ about it, and what'll change from here.
It says "Pausing." I've already pivoted to no longer use claude -p in my custom tooling and pipelines built around claude code in response to the original announcement. Doesn't look like I should waste my time at this point.
> Your Claude subscription—which is a cheaper version of the Anthropic API—is restricted to use with the Claude Code CLI/Desktop, Claude CoWork, or @Claude in Slack.
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?
[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.
The fun part is they planned for this to change to API pricing. When they announced that I started shifting off claude code immediately so I could keep my custom tooling. Damage is done. I won't build up around claude code or agent sdk any longer because I expect this to change. The announcement says they're "pausing" the change so expect this and avoid the lock-in!
The more interesting question is why would you at any point ever extend any goodwill to an unbounded corporate entity?
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.
It is weird how IT people either forget, or don't know, that the only reason we have PCs as a standard is that IBM insisted AMD also be able to make the x86 architecture so that they had two possible suppliers.
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.
Think I'm about to switch. I can't build the automations i'm trying to with claude code anymore. Since they locked away the non-interactive usage and channels can't be used without interacting with the console on startup. I had a good web interface for running CC in containers in k8s but I think it's time to bail out and build around a codex subscription and pi.dev now. I have local models hooked up to pi dev and that's working well. Had it build itself Channels equivalent so agents can talk to each other and receive webhooks. I bet Anthropic will build these things into their ecosystem eventually, but I want it now and running on my cloud.
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.
It reminds me of people who built businesses on top of APIs provided by Facebook, Reddit, etc. One day the company decides to rug pull the public interface, either to replace it with their own competing product or nothing at all. The anti-competitive pratice makes sense but what I don't understand is the latter case, which is common, where the company is just removing possibilities of how users can participate in their ecosystem and platform. Not only destroying third-party opportunities for profit, but not even providing their own alternative.
I'm happy using Codex for alternative harnesses and non-interactive usage, but it does make me wonder when OpenAI will start to squeeze their customers in the same way.
Agreed, these types of posts often feel like they're missing the forest for the trees. Sure, migrate away from Claude and maybe that will provide some runway, but all of these companies are built on the same economic fundamentals that do not scale.
We are currently in the "$7/mo Netflix with all the good movies" era of AI that will leave and never return.
Or LLMs become a commodity if open models are ever good enough for > 95% of use cases. The product if fundamentally different than tv-shows or movies since its so interchangeable.
Then the cost would end up being deprecation + electric + some low operating margin (i.e. what non SOTA models cost on OpenRouter)
That's why I'm switching to open weight models. I'm running models locally, self-hosting and using third party for various things. Like it says in the article each model has its strengths and none of the proprietary harnesses allow you to orchestrate different models depending on their strengths. It's cheaper, more flexible, private, more resistant to rug pulls, and brings back some fun to building for me vs just auto-accept, yell BAD CLAUDE when it breaks, repeat ad nauseam.
Its more like Netflix being the only service with movies available at 8k, some other options having movies at 4k and then a free option where they're only at 1080p.
One way of reading this is an article about how good Anthropic's product is. "Look at how many serious flaws users have been willing to accept in order to keep using this thing"
It also contextualizes the urgency of their attempts at regulatory capture. Once Chinese models have the same capabilities, there's almost no reason not to use them.
Work as long as you’re the only one (or the few) in town. Nad giving it for free (or nearly free). I have Cursor and when I use it, I keep it to auto, never caring about which model I use.
Pi is the first, and and only agent I've ever seriously used, which I picked up after watching one of Marco Zechner's talks about it. His design approach and vision for pi resonated with me, and I've pretty much used it every day since. I, like Marco, am also a grumpy old person, so that might have had something to do with it. I have my own customizations for things like fuzzy autocompleting the name of Emacs buffers and symbols from my project's TAGS file, and a handful of skills. It's a pleasure to work with, and so far it's been my experience that if pi doesn't behave the way I want, it's pretty easy to modify to suit my needs.
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.
FYI the name is Mario Zechner[0]. I'm also grumpy and old and also use Pi for the same reasons as you. I also use an OpenAI subscription (the models aren't entirely bad), but am ready to jump ship to OpenCode Go or GLM Coding Plan any minute. And I've been watching the Claude Code shitshow with glee!
what is the current statement on Oauth Claude use with Pi. I remember there was some back and forth from Anthropic? I currently use my Claude sub with Pi.
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.
Codex works great in opencode until it gets up to around 200k context. Then it starts doing things like:
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.
I went back and forth between the two for months, often having both in various proportions. But I had enough reliability issues with Anthropic back in March timeframe that I just threw in the towel. I find GPT "boring" to work with but it's a steady hand and there's really nothing I throw at it that it can't do.
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.
Feels weird to be complaining about this stuff when all of these AI companies are still haemorrhaging money to offer these services.
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.
> 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.
I do find it challenging to understand what the TOS/AUP allow and not, and what qualifies for subscription and not. If I somehow muster confidence in my interpretation, I continue to doubt that it will be stable over even the short term.
It's been almost 3 weeks since my Claude account has been suspended with ZERO explanation. They initially gave an appeal review timeline of 10 days which has long passed and again no accountability or even an estimated date. Please be careful putting your trust and professional life on such tools! More details below;
I don’t get the comparison images; they’re of Claude’s start up and open code’s code diff and the author then claims that they prefer open code’s based off those images.
You're correct and if I showed Claude Code's diff, it would still just be an inline editor. I prefer OpenCode for its sidebar UI and that it isn't riddled with unresolved issues.
Comparisons to Microsoft’s monopoly power are pretty lame when Anthropic’s hold on the market is so tenuous.
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.
This post is now number 83 on the third page (at +3hr). When I commented on it earlier, it was near the top of the first page. A result of lots of flagging?
Edit: Compare to the fourth article on the front page:
4. - Road to Elm 1.0 (elm-lang.org) | 181 points, 4 hours ago
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.
Their api stability genuinely makes no sense, how are they a near trillion dollar company with models so good they are treated as weapons yet have almost no 9's of uptime.
Reliability issues occuring in the hypergrowth stage of a company's lifetime has always been pretty common, way before agents were involved in the scaling. And that was for products for which the computational load for a single client was negligible. For inference though, even a single client's load is pretty terrifying.
How do you use API keys with Claude subscription? I can't see any keys at claude.ai settings. Only panel I could find was behind another login and it didn't have a subscription option.
I don't expect technology companies to do the right thing by the consumer. There is a niche for companies or NGOs that manage to stick to their core mission, but the incentive structure for software (very high capital cost, near zero marginal cost, huge opportunities for rent-seeking) is just always going to push them to these behaviours. It's not a conspiracy theory, either. VCs deliberately bank on this --- they have to if they want to get return on investment.
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.
Anthropic takes every chance they make not only to behave suspicious and anti-consumer but also announce that they are acting in ways that hurt you while telling you it’s a feature.
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.
It's the nature of the safetyist position. It creates everything that it claims to avoid (duplicitous behavior, misaligned outputs, unresponsive systems).
> Fable returning wrong answers if it suspects the topic is sensative
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?
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.
Switching costs are still low. Anthropic can only do this while they maintain frontier status, and while they do, they can charge whatever they want. An Oracle or Broadcom would fall behind and lose all its customers in an instant.
Anthropic's behavior regarding restricting the subscription to their own products is rational, and matches Google's behavior on this front too.
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)
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.
It's looking like Anthropic is realizing that they're about to get squeezed so they need to juice revenue for their IPO before it becomes obvious to everyone else.
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.
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.
This is where I’m at. While I’d LOVE to have a powerful near-frontier model at home, I don’t have the extra funds necessary to purchase a tricked-out Mac Studio…and if I did, I’d pay off debts.
And also the weights for GLM 5.2 are 1.5 TB. The only Studios Apple sells today are hard-capped to 64 GB (M4 Max) or 96 GB (M3 Ultra) only.
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.
Deep Learning models are designed to get max throughput on GPUs, which ends up being batched workloads.
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.
Cost per task, GLM (due to its poor token efficiency) still lags. GPT 5.5 on low seems to wipe the floor with it. All the Chinese models still like to use tons of tokens. It shows up in time per task as well.
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.
>Dario and Boris have us convinced that “coding is solved” with their loops. But microwaves didn’t solve cooking.
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).
As long as they have the best model they can afford to lose goodwill.
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.
That's like saying as long as expensive cars are faster than cheaper cars, the expensive manufacturer can afford losing goodwill.
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.
Anthropic's behavior is why I don't use their models or advocate for them anymore. They behave icky, like a tick trying to suck the blood from everyones public web contributions THEN lock down everything THEN attempt to legislate open source.
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.
I agree with everything in this post, but that doesn't mean I want to go back to a life without Claude Code. I've been working alone all this time, and finally it feels like I have someone to talk to
They stole the entire internet to create tools with the explicit goal of taking away people's ability to earn a living. The fact that they have goodwill to lose at all is a testament to our unbelievably short attention spans.
Complaining about external providers not supporting the subsidized prices Claude charge to its subscribers makes no sense. Of course, Claude Code subscription is a loss leader, it is an offering built to create a market for a new product in a very competitive environment in the hopes of capturing a dominant market position with a fully validated product with a healthy demand from business.
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.
I agree with you on substance, but this "thousands of dollars in inference" figure is overstated. The margins on inference in the API pricing by Anthropic are absurd. We know from the pricing of third-party inference providers of similarly-capable open models that inference is cheap. The "thousands of dollars" is an exaggeration using the API pricing markup and assuming all subscribers would be using 100% of their limits all the time.
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.
> Of course, Claude Code subscription is a loss leader, it is an offering built to create a market for a new product in a very competitive environment in the hopes of capturing a dominant market position with a fully validated product with a healthy demand from business.
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.
> The reason that people don't understand why Anthropic wont let the subscription be used with other harnesses
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.
> As of writing, Claude Code CLI only has around 9100 open Github issues, with small unresolved issues like it completely freezing for the last 6+ months or a screen flickering issue open for more than a year.
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.
They're subsidizing their tokens as long as you use their software. That's a fair exchange, I never understood why people took issue with it.
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.)
Part of the point is that they've added all sorts of caveats - `claude -p` used to be "using their software", but isn't anymore, even though it's just invoking the same harness non-interactively
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau...
Looks like they actually walked this bit back
And their constant flipflopping is why they lost their Goodwill with me. It was too much work just to make sure I wasn't breaking their AUP week to week. They will say one thing and then directly contradict it in a social media post. I was constantly losing features that were the reasons I signed up with them.
"pausing" not walking back, I've already shifted to other harnesses
The issue with this kind of subsidy is that it is designed to lock you in and not as a loss leader.
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
I think the subscription is also designed as a loss leader. The ai labs know the real money is in enterprise, and that enterprises mostly don’t want to use the most expensive option. How do they convince enterprises to sign up for their expensive api then? Give it to the employees for cheap so they tell bosses they want Claude code at work.
I want only their model, the rest is just garbage. I used Opus with pi.dev, worked perfectly fine. Fast and does exactly what it needs to do. Claude Code is slow, sluggish, buggy. Why are you forcing me to use it? Why should I pay an order of magnitude more to use pi.dev? That doesn't sound reasonable to me.
> Why should I pay an order of magnitude more to use pi.dev?
The monthly plans are heavily subsidized by the API users - why should Anthropic subsidize your use of pi.dev?
I’m not sure why are people throwing the word “subsidizing” so much. Do we know that they are actually losing money on subscriptions?
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..
Where is the difference when I hit my 5 hour limit or weekly limit with Claude Code compared to PI or OpenCode?
If you do it outside of Claude Code, you're not using their software, which is the intended outcome of the subsidy.
Why?
What additional benefit do they get if I use their tools?
Every request goes to their LLM either way
Well, they are wishing to lock you into their ecosystem, so that switching would be a high-friction decision. And then they can simply raise prices without you leaving.
There is no evidence that subscriptions lose money. It’s just as likely that subscriptions break even and the api has 10x margins
Because the subscription aren’t flat rates, they have a limit.
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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48788599
Agreed. The level of entitlement around how we all deserve to use a product in a category that didn't even exist 12 months ago with increasing performance at the same price forever is insane.
Consumers want to pay as little as possible and companies want to charge them as much as they possibly can. That’s how markets work I don’t understand what does “entitlement” have to do with anything. If loud consumers somehow manage to coerce companies into lowering prices/offering better products that’s a massive win for almost everyone (of course usually its just noise that doesn’t change anything, however it did work on a few occasions).
The the article was talking about how Anthropic costs too much and how there are cheaper options available then yes I would agree with you. But this article has a conspiratorial and moral crusade tone which is what I'm responding to. The article says "In my opinion (which may be in the minority), it’s unethical to:
lock in your customers to a closed system for maximum market gain put down the competition when they pose a risk to your product make hypocritical claims on how your product increases quality when your own software sucks artificially restrict one’s own product as a fear-mongering marketing stunt test dynamic pricing on your users to see how much more they’ll pay for less change the terms of your product after the sale without notifying your user base"
anthropic is not just a business operating in a market, they are "unethical" and "fear-mongering" and "hypocritical".
I also think that the people who are complaining loudest about Anthropics pricing and changes are the customers Anthropic is least interested in retaining.
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.
Short term yes. But there is a reason why IDEs, game engine and other development tools have very high cheap or free versions for this market segment. Since these users end up having a huge influence on what companies they work at / end up working at spend their money on.
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.
C'mon, get real. The monthly subscription costs on these services are several multiples what software engineers have formerly paid for development tools.
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.
Why compare to what historical tooling (which is very different in terms of how it's built and what it does) instead of to value over replacement?
If you need stability for your business you can pay API prices, just like business plans for internet are also more expensive.
In Canada at least it’s not legal to charge for unlocking a carrier-locked phone as it’s considered anti-competitive.
I mean, it has definite Borg Bill Gates vibes, doesn't it?
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).
That analogy only works partially, because when IE6 was released, it was the best browser by far. IE only became terrible once MSFT actively stopped developing it, and other browsers kept getting better.
On the other hand, Claude Code was the best coding agent when it was released, but there's no way Anthropic is going to let its cash cow stagnate. Like, I think pretty much all of Anthropic's revenue spike in the last few months was driven by the tokenmaxxing mania.
My take is most of Claude Code's problems originate from insufficient compute capacity and all kinds of workarounds they're doing to mitigate that fundamental limitation.
If that were the only issue, I’d say Anthropic were fine.
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.
Using Electron in this day and age shows a particular lack of effort, considering how easy it is to use an agent harness to build native versions of apps. I mean, we're a tiny little business and we somehow find the bandwidth to do it.
It shows Anthropic doesn’t trust its agents to write native apps. That cuts cleanly against its marketing.
And if the Electron app were flawless, that would be one thing. It isn’t. It’s buggy, feature light, constantly updating and slow.
Anthropic being a big company means they could trivially hire an iOS team. The failure to make a good native app is a business decision. Claude or not, leadership could've snapped their fingers, allocated the budget, and fixed the frontend UX by now if it were important enough.
> Anthropic being a big company means they could trivially hire an iOS team
Anthropic is primarily limited by how fast they can identify and onboard people who will be a good fit. Allocating that to ios would trade off against allocating that staffing growth elsewhere (ex: reliability, making the next generation model even better).
I don't understand why people care about Electron? Evaluate the quality of the software based on its own merits IMO. VS Code, Slack, Postman, Obsidian.. I use this software every day and my only complaint is Slack's RAM usage (which honestly has no negative effect on my machine, but just seems silly for a messaging app).
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.
> don't understand why people care about Electron?
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.
Yet… VS code somehow became the most popular IDE that happens to be generally viewed favorably by most of its users.
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)
It just seems like Anthropic has made a deliberate choice to make themselves a TypeScript dev shop.
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.
Interestingly I just skimmed through a video linked in TFA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlGRN8jh2RI and Boris Cherny explains that they chose TypeScript and React for Claude Code primarily because it was "on distribution" and the models back then just weren't good enough at other languages.
So it's interesting that Codex is written in Rust. Amongst other things it could mean OpenAI had more powerful models that could handle Rust, or their engineers had to handhold the agents a lot more up front, or Rust has structural advantages that could overcome being less represented in the training data.
Well, Codex came long after Claude Code, no? So at that time the situation with models and Rust support was probably already different...
Codex also I think put its first version out a bit later?
IMHO building the agent harness at least partially by hand is kind of key? I think going hogwild with "vibe coding" the actual harness is partially why CC is a bit of a rats nest. I think it's genuinely gotten out of control in terms of their ability to reason about it. Just my opinion, I'm sure Boris disagrees.
Also Codex itself distributed via NPM same as Claude. But it distributes a compiled Rust binary. Which is compiled from open source.
I used to think Claude Code was released much earlier too, and my initial theory was that OpenAI as a follower had the benefit of more powerful models... but when I looked it up, Codex was first released in April 2025 [1], whereas CC Beta was released in Feb 2025 [2] -- only a couple of months apart!
I'm sure each lab is keenly aware of what the other is doing (how else could they time so many of their releases so close to each other?) so it's highly probable they started developing each app about the same time, and likely even knew the technical details involved. Which is why it's additionally interesting that OpenAI started off with Rust while CC used Electron.
1. https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/16/openai-debuts-codex-cli-an...
2. https://github.com/jqueryscript/anthropic-claude-timeline
I'll say their poor Chat product is the worst. Its been having this issue of losing connection will kill the chat session since day 1, and never bother fix it.
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.
>... Dario bizarrely copying Altman’s 2023 fire-and-brimstone playbook that had already massively backfired.
I've said this before, they always knew it was terrible marketing, but they just can't help themselves because they actually believe it.
From multiple accounts, the people working at these labs, who are most exposed to the latest models' capabilities and how they're being used out in the world, are simultaneously excited and terrified about what they're building.
In a way that's even scarier than the "Capitalist sociopaths marketing AI to other Capitalist sociopaths" rationale everybody assumes.
You shouldn't have to pay your carrier to unlock your phone and in many countries it's actually illegal.
>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.
> 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
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.
>The global LLM market seems trending towards fragmentation.
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
> Wait until investors stop giving out money out of FOMO
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.
.
I'm not sure the security/safety stuff is entirely in their control at this point, though you can argue that they are indirectly responsible through encouraging regulation via their positions on safety/risk.
> They're subsidizing their tokens as long as you use their software. That's a fair exchange, I never understood why people took issue with it.
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.
Yes, the subsidized loss leader product is evolving fast. If you want stable costs, the API plan is right there. You simultaneously say they cannot afford the API pricing but also claim they are overcharging, it sounds like you just want to get mad ad Anthropic.
> If you want stable costs, the API plan is right there.
Why don't you ask Microsoft [0], Tesla [1] and Alibaba [2] on why they believe it is not only expensive, but it also a security risk for them?
Like I said, You don't get anything for defending Anthropic and they are not going to hire you into their sales team.
> You simultaneously say they cannot afford the API pricing but also claim they are overcharging, it sounds like you just want to get mad ad Anthropic.
Read it again. "Except they themselves cannot afford it"
They is "Anthropic" given that I said "themselves". Who are the ones that cannot afford to subsidize tokens forever due to the even cheaper Chinese alternatives. They all know that the answer is open weight models and why Anthropic cannot raise prices and why the above companies are ditching them for open weight models.
[0] https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-cancels-c...
[1] https://letsdatascience.com/news/tesla-limits-employee-ai-sp...
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
Okay, if it's bad for the price they're offering, use the more expensive API. If they themselves can't afford it I don't know what you want here.
This method of bundling should be illegal in general, as it stiffles competition.
Do you also think all you can eat buffets should be illegal? What about early bird specials? Free soda with a large fry? Happy hour wings? Where does the “bundling” end?
1.) All you can eat buffets ARE the product, not a loss leader, so there's no bundle there.
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
> Free soda with large fry doesn't actually exist
I just searched and found free medium fries with a large soda at McD if you order through the app. Seems like bundling to me, and you have to use their particular app.
Sure, and perhaps it should be prohibited. But it's also a matter of impact.
But it's just hard to care too much about a commoditized product and an app with tons of competition. And McDonald's is not keeping any competitors away by locking their fries offer behind their app.
How does it stifle competition / innovation? You can use other harnesses, pay API for anthropic models or cheap chinese models.
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.
Because the US models haven’t had to compete on the actual price of providing the unsubsidized service, the Chinese models are probably ahead of us in terms of what can actually be delivered profitably (which is a pretty bad result given the level of investment).
Any service or product delivered at a loss seems pretty plainly anti-competetive. Whether it is actually subsidized to that extent, I’m not sure.
>Any service or product delivered at a loss seems pretty plainly anti-competitive.
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.
Well if their gross margins are positive (I really doubt they aren’t) there isn’t much of a case to be made. You can expect meaningful R&D and capital investments to pay off short term and you can’t make any meaningful projections either to determine if they are dumping or not.
The entire LLMaaS industry is priced below cost. Even if the marginal cost of electricity and bandwidth to produce one token is less than the price of that token, the amortized infrastructure and R&D costs make the entire venture unprofitable.
If pricing below cost were illegal, it would essentially make starting up a business—any business—impossible.
You can’t calculate what that cost is though regardless. If the gross margin is positive you can’t confidently challenge their longterm growth projections however optimistic or unrealistic they are.
you have no evidence that it is served at a loss
It would make it impossible for makers of 3rd-party harnesses to compete with Claude Code. This principle is not just limited to LLMs.
> 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.
Not sure why this was flagged, Anthropic has obviously been burning bridges. I thought this line was funny though:
> 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."
While I did not flag this, it is clearly a hit piece. Why write an article to publish in July that does not include June data? Unless of course one looks at June uptime and finds that does not align with their story.
In June, I figure Anthropic subscriptions were partially powered by those big mobile gas generators that are pushed around the xAI parking lots. Makes sense availability improved.
I began writing this article a while back and forgot to update the screenshot. The June uptime has significantly improved, but that may not always be the case
I agree that without context, Sonnet is overkill for just autocomplete code suggestions. My point later in that section is that to have an autocomplete mindset (where an AI is a helpful tool rather than a driver), you only need a decent subset of models, not the best of the best.
Sounds like the author is using "autocomplete" as a derogatory way of referring to LLMs in general (eg. "LLMs can't code, they're just autocomplete on steroids")
It’s talking about how you can type
And it goes and reads your code and suggests a reasonable way to frob a qux a certain number of radians. Which is at the same time (a) pretty useful!, (b) fairly new, we’ve only been able to do this since 2023 or so, but (c) also not that hard by 2026 standards because capabilities have advanced so much in the last three years."int radians" is a pretty strong code smell! I would be very worried about any struggle l autocomplete that followed something like that ;)
Why would anyone be using Fable, Opus or even Sonnet for that type of work? You don’t need an advanced reasoning model for that at all.
If you already knew that the answer was to frob a qux, you wouldn't need the reasoning trash either.
> Why would anyone be using Fable, Opus or even Sonnet for that type of work? You don’t need an advanced reasoning model for that at all.
Don't leave me hanging: how do you frob a qux a certain number of radians?
Generative autocomplete with an underpowered model is pretty annoying. It hallucinates parameters and APIs. Something like Sonnet seems like the right level of sophistication.
Then the author needs to be more specific because there are special models for code autocomplete that are much faster.
For people who saw this and might want a recomendation, I like running a tiny qwen model with llama cpp. Qwen2.5 coder 0.5B or 1.5B (not the instruct version)
On a modern-ish GPU these should run really fast with little latency. They cost nothing and don't send your data to anyone.
> To be clear, I’m not anti-AI. [...] If you want to autocomplete [...] But if you want to use FOSS trusted tools like Zed, OpenCode, Pi, Nanocoder, etc. [...]
isn't he just contrasting 2 use cases of LLMs?
Are you saying that using LLMs for code autocomplete is like using an aeroplane to go to the grocery store? Because clearly there was no autocomplete before the new AI spring.
It worth noting that – just to add to the confusion – they apparently cancelled the June 15th change just before it was due to go live:
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?
> So... maybe we can still use third party harnesses with Claude Code subscriptions... for now?
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)
Something that many don't realize is that Claude Desktop and the Agent SDK are both just wrappers around pools of CLI instances, literally running `claude --input-format stream-json --output-format stream-json`.
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.
I believe you're right and I'm familiar with the actual distinction – the confusion is mostly about how they _feel_ about it, and what'll change from here.
It says "Pausing." I've already pivoted to no longer use claude -p in my custom tooling and pipelines built around claude code in response to the original announcement. Doesn't look like I should waste my time at this point.
They didn't apparently cancel it, they did cancel it. I'm still using a third party harness absolutely fine.
> Your Claude subscription—which is a cheaper version of the Anthropic API—is restricted to use with the Claude Code CLI/Desktop, Claude CoWork, or @Claude in Slack.
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.
The fun part is they planned for this to change to API pricing. When they announced that I started shifting off claude code immediately so I could keep my custom tooling. Damage is done. I won't build up around claude code or agent sdk any longer because I expect this to change. The announcement says they're "pausing" the change so expect this and avoid the lock-in!
linked by another comment: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau...
You're correct, but my point was that it was going to shift to API pricing. Although it looks like that's been put on hold as others have pointed out.
The more interesting question is why would you at any point ever extend any goodwill to an unbounded corporate entity?
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.
It is weird how IT people either forget, or don't know, that the only reason we have PCs as a standard is that IBM insisted AMD also be able to make the x86 architecture so that they had two possible suppliers.
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.
Think I'm about to switch. I can't build the automations i'm trying to with claude code anymore. Since they locked away the non-interactive usage and channels can't be used without interacting with the console on startup. I had a good web interface for running CC in containers in k8s but I think it's time to bail out and build around a codex subscription and pi.dev now. I have local models hooked up to pi dev and that's working well. Had it build itself Channels equivalent so agents can talk to each other and receive webhooks. I bet Anthropic will build these things into their ecosystem eventually, but I want it now and running on my cloud.
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.
It reminds me of people who built businesses on top of APIs provided by Facebook, Reddit, etc. One day the company decides to rug pull the public interface, either to replace it with their own competing product or nothing at all. The anti-competitive pratice makes sense but what I don't understand is the latter case, which is common, where the company is just removing possibilities of how users can participate in their ecosystem and platform. Not only destroying third-party opportunities for profit, but not even providing their own alternative.
Wasn't facebooks pull a result of the huge Cambridge analytica scandal.
Afaik no. That scandal was not about their public api.
I'm happy using Codex for alternative harnesses and non-interactive usage, but it does make me wonder when OpenAI will start to squeeze their customers in the same way.
When they release a model that’s generally considered superior to Opus/Fable and/or start running out of money.
At the very least the harness will be able to connect to non-OpenAI stuff as soon as the (if) the same thing happens. :)
I've already got it hooked up to local models if there's no viable hosted option.
Of course they will. It'll buy you a few months, but if you want stability your only option is API.
Agreed, these types of posts often feel like they're missing the forest for the trees. Sure, migrate away from Claude and maybe that will provide some runway, but all of these companies are built on the same economic fundamentals that do not scale.
We are currently in the "$7/mo Netflix with all the good movies" era of AI that will leave and never return.
Or LLMs become a commodity if open models are ever good enough for > 95% of use cases. The product if fundamentally different than tv-shows or movies since its so interchangeable.
Then the cost would end up being deprecation + electric + some low operating margin (i.e. what non SOTA models cost on OpenRouter)
That's why I'm switching to open weight models. I'm running models locally, self-hosting and using third party for various things. Like it says in the article each model has its strengths and none of the proprietary harnesses allow you to orchestrate different models depending on their strengths. It's cheaper, more flexible, private, more resistant to rug pulls, and brings back some fun to building for me vs just auto-accept, yell BAD CLAUDE when it breaks, repeat ad nauseam.
Its more like Netflix being the only service with movies available at 8k, some other options having movies at 4k and then a free option where they're only at 1080p.
One way of reading this is an article about how good Anthropic's product is. "Look at how many serious flaws users have been willing to accept in order to keep using this thing"
Model is the product, people will put up with anything as long as you're on the pareto frontier of performance x cost.
It also contextualizes the urgency of their attempts at regulatory capture. Once Chinese models have the same capabilities, there's almost no reason not to use them.
Work as long as you’re the only one (or the few) in town. Nad giving it for free (or nearly free). I have Cursor and when I use it, I keep it to auto, never caring about which model I use.
I have been using Claude code for a while and have recently migrated to Pi
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
Pi is the first, and and only agent I've ever seriously used, which I picked up after watching one of Marco Zechner's talks about it. His design approach and vision for pi resonated with me, and I've pretty much used it every day since. I, like Marco, am also a grumpy old person, so that might have had something to do with it. I have my own customizations for things like fuzzy autocompleting the name of Emacs buffers and symbols from my project's TAGS file, and a handful of skills. It's a pleasure to work with, and so far it's been my experience that if pi doesn't behave the way I want, it's pretty easy to modify to suit my needs.
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.
FYI the name is Mario Zechner[0]. I'm also grumpy and old and also use Pi for the same reasons as you. I also use an OpenAI subscription (the models aren't entirely bad), but am ready to jump ship to OpenCode Go or GLM Coding Plan any minute. And I've been watching the Claude Code shitshow with glee!
[0]: https://mariozechner.at/
what is the current statement on Oauth Claude use with Pi. I remember there was some back and forth from Anthropic? I currently use my Claude sub with Pi.
No idea,
Anyone from Anthropic here who could answer this?
It was so good when it was possible to use Claude subscription on OpenCode.
Nowadays I went from Claude 20x to 5x and been using the GLM model on OpenCode... No regrets.
I am using both opencode and claude on Paseo. Worth a look. paseo.sh
Codex GPT sub works perfect in opencode FWIW.
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.
Codex works great in opencode until it gets up to around 200k context. Then it starts doing things like:
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.
I went back and forth between the two for months, often having both in various proportions. But I had enough reliability issues with Anthropic back in March timeframe that I just threw in the towel. I find GPT "boring" to work with but it's a steady hand and there's really nothing I throw at it that it can't do.
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.
Feels weird to be complaining about this stuff when all of these AI companies are still haemorrhaging money to offer these services.
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.
Harder to make a spicy article if you can't argue the companies are greedy.
> 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.
I do find it challenging to understand what the TOS/AUP allow and not, and what qualifies for subscription and not. If I somehow muster confidence in my interpretation, I continue to doubt that it will be stable over even the short term.
It's been almost 3 weeks since my Claude account has been suspended with ZERO explanation. They initially gave an appeal review timeline of 10 days which has long passed and again no accountability or even an estimated date. Please be careful putting your trust and professional life on such tools! More details below;
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597861
I don’t get the comparison images; they’re of Claude’s start up and open code’s code diff and the author then claims that they prefer open code’s based off those images.
You're correct and if I showed Claude Code's diff, it would still just be an inline editor. I prefer OpenCode for its sidebar UI and that it isn't riddled with unresolved issues.
Comparisons to Microsoft’s monopoly power are pretty lame when Anthropic’s hold on the market is so tenuous.
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.
This post is now number 83 on the third page (at +3hr). When I commented on it earlier, it was near the top of the first page. A result of lots of flagging?
Edit: Compare to the fourth article on the front page:
This more recent post has 219 points.> To be clear, I’m not anti-AI. I’m only against unethical companies with anti-consumer practices, and the perpetrators behind them.
No need to picture general anti-AI stance as some kind of herecy to be punished by the Inquisition Of The Holy Progress.
There seems to be a smear campaign against Anthropic ever since the DoD incident.
OpenAI has a $8B PR budget. Makes you wonder if they'd spend any of that on social media.
I saw a guy trashing Anthropic on Threads the other day, looked up his LinkedIn and he worked for OpenAI in PR.
People use Threads? Seems like an empty place to do native marketing.
> enshittification, vendor lock in
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.
Their api stability genuinely makes no sense, how are they a near trillion dollar company with models so good they are treated as weapons yet have almost no 9's of uptime.
If agi why not agi shaped?
Reliability issues occuring in the hypergrowth stage of a company's lifetime has always been pretty common, way before agents were involved in the scaling. And that was for products for which the computational load for a single client was negligible. For inference though, even a single client's load is pretty terrifying.
How do you use API keys with Claude subscription? I can't see any keys at claude.ai settings. Only panel I could find was behind another login and it didn't have a subscription option.
you don't. they are distinct entities. https://platform.claude.com -> api keys
> Each changelog entry has a bug fix in almost every release, which is a sign of reliable and stable software!
This is a non-sequitur.
Most consumer apps don't even list all the bugfixes.
I don't expect technology companies to do the right thing by the consumer. There is a niche for companies or NGOs that manage to stick to their core mission, but the incentive structure for software (very high capital cost, near zero marginal cost, huge opportunities for rent-seeking) is just always going to push them to these behaviours. It's not a conspiracy theory, either. VCs deliberately bank on this --- they have to if they want to get return on investment.
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.
Btw, they are also getting aggressive with bans. Furthermore the process to repeal is broken in the UI, and there is no way to get support
Anthropic takes every chance they make not only to behave suspicious and anti-consumer but also announce that they are acting in ways that hurt you while telling you it’s a feature.
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.
It's the nature of the safetyist position. It creates everything that it claims to avoid (duplicitous behavior, misaligned outputs, unresponsive systems).
I haven't seen leadership this bad since the late 90's. I'm pretty sure at this point that Claude could run the company better than Dario.
> Fable returning wrong answers if it suspects the topic is sensative
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 think this article is contradictory of the reality that Anthropic is picking up B2B marketshare like crazy, recently overtaking OpenAI.
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
For companies that supposedly are worth trillions, Anthropic and their competitors sure have awfully weak moats.
The lawsuits will come, paying the piper is inevitable.
Who would sue, and on what ground?
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.
Switching costs are still low. Anthropic can only do this while they maintain frontier status, and while they do, they can charge whatever they want. An Oracle or Broadcom would fall behind and lose all its customers in an instant.
Anthropic's behavior regarding restricting the subscription to their own products is rational, and matches Google's behavior on this front too.
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.
It's looking like Anthropic is realizing that they're about to get squeezed so they need to juice revenue for their IPO before it becomes obvious to everyone else.
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.
> 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.
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.
https://openrouter.ai/models
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.
Ahhh that makes a lot more sense. Thanks for the detailed explanation.
GLM 5.2 is monstrous in size, no one is running that on their own hardware.
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.
Fortunately, multiple model providers are offering open weights models at significantly lower prices than closed models.
This is where I’m at. While I’d LOVE to have a powerful near-frontier model at home, I don’t have the extra funds necessary to purchase a tricked-out Mac Studio…and if I did, I’d pay off debts.
Probably wouldn't matter if you had the funds either since MacStudios are 3-4 months out for purchase.
And also the weights for GLM 5.2 are 1.5 TB. The only Studios Apple sells today are hard-capped to 64 GB (M4 Max) or 96 GB (M3 Ultra) only.
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.
Deep Learning models are designed to get max throughput on GPUs, which ends up being batched workloads.
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.
Cost per task, GLM (due to its poor token efficiency) still lags. GPT 5.5 on low seems to wipe the floor with it. All the Chinese models still like to use tons of tokens. It shows up in time per task as well.
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.
>Dario and Boris have us convinced that “coding is solved” with their loops. But microwaves didn’t solve cooking.
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).
Haha thanks for that article (I microwave most of my meals). I wonder if this statement from the article will apply to AI:
> Second, microwave cooking fell victim to the same curse that threatens every new easy-to-use technology: it became low-status tech.
Oh that's an interesting parallel
As long as they have the best model they can afford to lose goodwill.
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.
That's like saying as long as expensive cars are faster than cheaper cars, the expensive manufacturer can afford losing goodwill.
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.
Anthropic bad! Straight to the top of HN please!
Anthropic's behavior is why I don't use their models or advocate for them anymore. They behave icky, like a tick trying to suck the blood from everyones public web contributions THEN lock down everything THEN attempt to legislate open source.
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.
I agree with everything in this post, but that doesn't mean I want to go back to a life without Claude Code. I've been working alone all this time, and finally it feels like I have someone to talk to
Sounds like Claude Code is not what you're looking for
They stole the entire internet to create tools with the explicit goal of taking away people's ability to earn a living. The fact that they have goodwill to lose at all is a testament to our unbelievably short attention spans.
Complaining about external providers not supporting the subsidized prices Claude charge to its subscribers makes no sense. Of course, Claude Code subscription is a loss leader, it is an offering built to create a market for a new product in a very competitive environment in the hopes of capturing a dominant market position with a fully validated product with a healthy demand from business.
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?
I agree with you on substance, but this "thousands of dollars in inference" figure is overstated. The margins on inference in the API pricing by Anthropic are absurd. We know from the pricing of third-party inference providers of similarly-capable open models that inference is cheap. The "thousands of dollars" is an exaggeration using the API pricing markup and assuming all subscribers would be using 100% of their limits all the time.
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.
> Of course, Claude Code subscription is a loss leader, it is an offering built to create a market for a new product in a very competitive environment in the hopes of capturing a dominant market position with a fully validated product with a healthy demand from business.
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.
> The reason that people don't understand why Anthropic wont let the subscription be used with other harnesses
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.
> Why people get surprised with that stuff?
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.
> As of writing, Claude Code CLI only has around 9100 open Github issues, with small unresolved issues like it completely freezing for the last 6+ months or a screen flickering issue open for more than a year.
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.
[1] https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler
[0] https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender
>But surely those fully autonomous coding loops will solve all those 9,100+ open issues on GitHub? Why haven't they?
Shhh, you may pop the bubble and cause the collapse of the US economy.