Why does it matter to Anthropic if my $200 plan usage is coming from Claude Code or a third party?

Doesn’t both count towards my usage limits the same?

bluegatty 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you buy a 'Season's Pass' for Disneyland, you cant 'sublet' it to another kid to use on the days you don't; It's not really buying a 'daily access rate'.

Anthropic subs are not 'bulk tokens'.

It's not an unreasonable policy and it's entirely inevitable that they have to restrict.

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scwoodal 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I’m not subletting my sub to anyone. I’m the only one using the third party harness.

I’m using their own SDK in my own CLI tool.

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Unearned5161 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s not a literal sublet to someone else, it’s subletting your tokens to another tool.

At its core it’s a tragedy of commons situation. Using a third party tool like OpenClaw is augmenting your usage far beyond what was anticipated when the subscription plan was made.

Same deal for unlimited storage on drive until people started abusing it.

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scwoodal 3 hours ago | parent [-]

My Claude sub isn’t unlimited.

I didn’t set the limits on the plan; change those if it’s a problem, not irritate your customer base.

	▲	Unearned5161 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You have strong dedication towards taking things literally. The issue is not that it's limited or unlimited, but rather about expected token usage across a user cohort. When you set a usage limit on something like Claude, or a gym, or a tutoring center, you need to do two things at once; set the limit high enough to attract the aspirations of your intended client base ("oh good this gym lets me go every day of the month if I want to"), but priced accurately enough so that you actually turn a profit on the average usage across most users (you ended up going 20 times the first month, but settled into 15 times a month after). If there was suddenly a drug that you could take that would, while you slept, make your body walk to the gym and workout, so that you could max out that usage, the gym would be entitled to adjust either the pricing, the limit, or prohibit going to the gym while on the drug, given that they can't actually sustain all their members going every day. As a correction, I've done some reading and when I said tragedy of the commons, what would fit better is a "congestion externality in a club good".

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croes 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s still me going to Disneyland, I just take a different route

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JimmaDaRustla 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Disingenuous analogy.

It's more buying a season pass for Disneyland, then getting told you can't park for free if you're entering the park even though free parking is included with the pass. Still not unreasonable, but brings to light the intention of the tool is to force the user into an ecosystem rather.

	▲	bluegatty 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's not a disingenuous analogy ... whatever it is. But 'you can't park even though the ticket includes parking' is not an appropriate analogy because 3rd party use is definitely not intended. They did not 'state one thing' and the 'disallow it'. This is a pretty straight forward case of people using their subscription for 'adjacent' use, and Anthropic being more explicit about it. There's nothing fancy going on here.

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minimaxir 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Any user who is using a third-party client is likely self-selected into being a power user who is less profitable.

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digdugdirk 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They don't get as much visibility into your data, just the actual call to/from the api. There's so much more value to them in that, since you're basically running the reinforcement learning training for them.

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operatingthetan 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Probably because the $20 plan is essentially a paid demo for the higher plans.

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hackingonempty 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Increasing the friction of switching providers as much as possible is part of their strategy to push users to higher subscription tiers and deny even scraps to their competitors.

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zb3 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They're losing money on this $200 plan and they're essentially paying you to make you dependent on Claude Code so they can exploit this (somehow) in the future.

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esafak 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's a bizarre plan because nobody is 'dependent' on Claude Code; we're begging to use alternatives. It's the model we want!

	▲	alexandre_m 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You’re not really paying for the model, you’re paying for the tool, the ecosystem, and the application layer around it. Sonnet 4.6 in CC doesn’t behave the same way as Sonnet 4.6 in Antigravity.

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psoundy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

When using Claude Code, it's possible to opt out of having one's sessions be used for training. But is that opt out for everything? Or only message content, such that there could remain sufficient metadata to derive useful insight from?