IIUC to reliably use 3P tools you need to use API billing, right? Based on my limited experimentation this is an order of magnitude more expensive than consumer subscriptions like Claude Pro, do I have that right?

("Limited experimentation" = a few months ago I threw $10 into the Anthropic console and did a bit of vibe coding and found my $10 disappeared within a couple of hours).

If so, that would support your concern, it does kinda sound like they're selling marginal Claude Code / Gemini CLI tokens at a loss. Which definitely smells like an aggressive lockin strategy.