How would they know? Only if you use a coding harness, but one could write their own harness with less obvious system prompts.

I’m not encouraging one do this. I mostly route between the free models on OpenRouter and OpenCode free models, and I mostly write simple apps where I can casually oversee even a small model and get awesome results.

But if you are out there spending 200 dollars a month, consider a few hacks, because that’s just overpriced. We are developers after all, they aren’t supposed to be able to trick us :)

Edit:

Piracy, with the above , would look like a universal server that routes between all provider UIs. That means the end user doesn’t even give a shit which provider it goes to, serious token usage, serious theft.

Someone could make this , I suppose. In a way, commodification is a clean solution to the inevitable theft. It’s better it just be so darn cheap and ubiquitous.