To extend your all you can eat analogy. It’s similar to how all you can eat restaurants allow you to eat all you can within the bounds of the restaurant, but you aren’t allowed to bring the food out with you.
Another analogy is that it’s a restaurant that offers delivery and they’re insisting you use their own in house delivery service instead of placing a pickup order and asking your friendly neighbor to pick it up for you on their way back from the office.
You don't "get full" and "get hungry again" by switching UIs. You can consume the same amount whether you switch or you don't switch.
This is actually a compelling argument for Claude Code getting the discount but not extending it to other cases. Claude Code, being subsidized by the company, is incentivized to minimize token usage. Third parties that piggyback on the same flat rate subscription, are not. i.e. Claude code wants you to eat less.
Of course, I don’t believe at all that this is why Anthropic has blocked this use case. But it is a reasonable argument.
Not sure where that goes in the analogies here but maybe something about smaller plates.
Think about a web browser that respects cache lifetimes vs one that downloads everything everytime. As an ISP I'd be more likely to offer you unlimited bandwidth if I knew you were using a caching browser.
Likewise Claude code can optimize how it uses tokens and potentially provide the same benefit with less usage.
This is more like an all-you-can-eat restaurant requiring you to eat with their flimsy plastic forks, forbidding you to bring your own utensils.