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Comment by leobuskin | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people use LLM subscriptions, they don't use API keys. Why devtool devs continue to ignore this? I mean, ok, you have your "pricing" reselling an access to LLM models, that's the only, probably, simple way to monetize it, but it's a bad way in 2025, seriously. Allow me to bring my oauth with claude max, and/or offload whatever you do to my local claude code (or if there's some magic behind orchestration use SDK). And, oops, there's nothing to monetize and the entire thing can be recreated with vibe coding within a few weeks (it's not so much there, let's be honest).

I apologize for the writing style, don't take it personally, just every devtool product I see on HN nowadays fails for this particular reason.

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No it's all good and it's a fair point.

So from my vantage point we need some way to create revenue. We have tried to make as much of the tool free as we can. We do a 10% markup on tokens issued by us. That's better than cursor who does 25%. We support BYOK so you can use your own claude key, and vertex key. If you do that you are basically just paying us a flat troll tole of $16/month to use our entire frontend but you are free to be unbounded by a markup on your tokens. We actually prefer this because it's better unit economics for us. So please bring your own key!

But here's the thing: most of your real audience doesn't have API keys (except a few enterprise-ish folks or startups who got credits). They already pay subscription(s) (and will continue to pay the maximum, which will keep growing). The entire token resale model creates a weird economy and interdependency that shouldn't exist in the first place. In the end, all the deals with top-tier labs will be changing, most middlemen will start manipulating the token exchange rate at some point, and there's no transparency or single source of trust. What's the Endspiel here?

Well, I'm saying I'm happy to not be involved in the resale token trade in general. I don't think enterprises are the only folks with API keys. There are a lot of people who might not be savvy or motivated enough to setup an API key with Anthropic, OpenAI or Vertex and in those cases we want them to be able to use our key to reduce user friction.

It's not in our interest to resell tokens, it actually diminishes our margin but it's a must if you want to be accessible to folks who don't want to go sign up for an API key. We choose to delay launching by a couple of days so that people could bring their own keys because we don't want to be middle men if you don't want us to be.

If you want to just pay me $16 a month to be a good IDE and inspector, I love that. That's the value I think we provide to you. We cannot control whatever manipulation of token prices occurs with other providers. All we can do is give you enough context for your prompts that you don't need the latest bleeding edge models to make edits to your react code with confidence. We aren't an AI company, we are a devtool that helps with prompting.

Why per month though? What happened to installable products where you pay for a version and then you use that version. How is this a service?

I don't think I'm really the best person to defend the practice of recurring revenue but I would rather be transparent that we collect a monthly fee for some features than vanity launch as a one time fee product to hacker news only to pull the rug on my customers a year later.

To be clear, we are not charging you for up to 10 prompts a day with flash or any of our IDE or inspector stuff. We respect your offline privacy and never upload anything that you don't explicitly ask us to use. We open sourced the dev server so that other folks can build JSX inspectors to keep us in check.

> What happened to installable products where you pay for a version and then you use that version.

We're a two person company with a lot of bugs and important IDE features that still need to be built out. You want auto-version updates right now. When we are in a more stable place development-wise I would love to put out a hard cut that folks can pin to.

Thanks, that makes sense.

AFAIK, every tool out there that lets you do oauth with your Claude Max plan is doing so with the same copy-pasted client id/secret that are extracted from Claude Code. It's not clear at all that this is above board, and when I asked our Anthropic rep, they encouraged us not to do this.

If there's an official way for 3rd party devs to piggyback on Anthropic plans, someone please tell me how!

fyi sometimes its because anthropic may have disallowed it. oauthing with your plan to bring the anthropic subsidy to non anthropic products is understandably a tricky deal unless you're scaled enough to make it make sense for both sides.

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