You don't pay for capacity, you pay for an interface. Paying for capacity is what API keys are for.

Similarly, on a home internet connection you might pay for a given size of pipe, but most residential ISPs don't allow running publicly accessible servers on your connection because you'll typically use way more of the bandwidth.

That analogy fails. Anthropic sold a Claude Code subscription, then blocked OpenClaw and narrowed the practical use case after the sale, which reads more like an airline overbooking and then claiming you bought a seat, not a flight.

API and subscription are different products, sure. The vendor still sets the line between flat-rate access and rate limits, and that line looks slippery once your usage leaves the preferred path.

If that same internet provider has caps on how much bandwidth I can use every 5 hours and total on a weekly basis, then yes, I pay for capacity.

That argument would have been valid when the 5 hours blocks were unlimited in the beginning.