Presumably because their flat rate pricing is based off their ability to manage token use via their first-party tools.

A third-party tool may be less efficient in saving costs (I have heard many of them don't hit Anthropic LLMs' caches as well).

Would you be willing to pay more for your plan, to subsidize the use of third-party tools by others?

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Note, afaik, Anthropic hasn't come out and said this is the reason, but it fits.

Or, it could also just be that the LLM companies view their agent tools as the real moat, since the models themselves aren't.

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DrammBA 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

But wouldn't a less efficient tool simply consume your 5-hour/weekly quota faster? There's gotta be something else, probably telemetry, maybe hoping people switch to API without fighting, or simply vendor lock-in.

	▲	KingMob 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> But wouldn't a less efficient tool simply consume your 5-hour/weekly quota faster? Maybe. First, Anthropic is also trying to manage user satisfaction as well as costs. If OpenCode or whatever burns through your limits faster, are you likely to place the blame on OpenCode? Maybe a good analogy was when DoorDash/GrubHub/Uber Eats/etc signed up restaurants to their system without their permission. When things didn't go well, the customers complained about the restaurants, even though it wasn't their fault, because they chose not to support delivery at scale. Second, flat-rate pricing, unlike API pricing, is the same for cached vs uncached iirc, so even if total token limits are the same, less caching means higher costs.

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croes 22 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

What if I'm only willing to pay if it support by tool of choice? Would you pay for a streaming service that enforces a certain TV brand?

Given the latest changes on Claude Code where they hide the actions

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47033622

it's likely more the other way around. They control how fast your subscription tokens are burned

	▲	kgwgk 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> What if I'm only willing to pay if it support by tool of choice? I don’t want to say that you won’t be missed but they will get over it.