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Comment by jascha_eng | Hacker News Reader

I still kinda wish that the subscriptions would just allow you to use the tokens however you wish. I get that they rely on people not using all of their quota. But e.g. with open code it doesn't really matter if I use antigravity or gemini-cli the usage should be about the same.

What they are actually trying to force you to do is to pay for the tokens that you don't use in their applications to increase their revenue and/or give their in-house tools an "unfair" advantage. But this is bad for the consumer because it means that there is less competition between coding agents and unless I'm willing to pay per token I have to take one of the model labs agents.

Anticompetitive behaviour imo they could just ban reselling tokens or something like that instead of locking your subscription in like this.

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>I still kinda wish that the subscriptions would just allow you to use the tokens however you wish. I get that they rely on people not using all of their quota. But e.g. with open code it doesn't really matter if I use antigravity or gemini-cli the usage should be about the same.

This is almost as realistic as "I wish netflix or youtube allowed me to use VLC to watch their content".

Haha maybe that would reduce piracy.

The easiest way to watch a movie in the player of my choice - even if i have legal access to it because it's in my netflix subscription - is to download it off piratebay.

Add to that Netflix's shitty discovery system, I'm pretty sure I watched some downloaded movies in spite of actually having legal access to them.

Oh, remember when PC games used to come on disks? For the Netflix example I can only guess, but I'm 100% sure I downloaded isos for games I had actually bought and had the physical disc... somewhere.

i don't believe this is a significant driver of piracy tbh, normal people don't care about that kinda thing :P

especially considering most modern movie/tv piracy is free streaming websites - shitty quality and awkward player controls, definitely no choice of player here

This is almost as realistic as "I wish OpenAI supports using OpenCode with ChatGPT subscription account."

Oh, except they do[0].

[0]: https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2009742187484065881

Yea, there are the last to the party (have they even arrived?), so they are going to have to make some concessions. I wonder if they at rollout will have a third-party subscription token service in addition to their first-party one.

> there are the last to the party

Anecdotally, I'm having a very hard time imagining there are more Gemini Cli users than Codex users.

There are a lot of people who have access to Gemini for “free” through Google workspace.

That said, I am unimpressed by Gemini CLI overall and even though I have 2 workspace accounts with access, I use neither.

> This is almost as realistic as "I wish netflix or youtube allowed me to use VLC to watch their content".

This is exactly what should be happening. There's no reason to limit the client apps for things like _paid_ Netflix or Youtube Premium.

Except you can't prevent people stealing the videos then. And as much as I don't like how things work right now, I think people have a right to get paid for stuff they make and Netflix is one way of doing that.

"Stealing videos"?!? Are we back in 2005 again?

All the videos are _already_ available anyway, several minutes after they're available on Netflix. And on Youtube they are _literally_ free, with ads. People sign up for Netflix subscriptions to not bother with torrents and pirate forums, and for Youtube Premium to avoid ads.

That's why it makes no freaking sense to _not_ make your content available for paid subscribers using APIs.

Why is that unrealistic?

Think of it like the digital right-to-repair.

I pay for it, I get to use it with any client I want. Simple.

Except that is a false equivalent, when you clicked "agree" you did so for their ToS to get a discount or bulk deal with strings attached. It's pretty easy these days to have a LLM extract the unique parts into a summary.

I do wish that though. I have given up on streaming services, I am not paying for this bullshit experience. We used to have all the content unlimited on one service for like $10/mo. I can accept prices increasing with inflation but society should not accept such a backslide in service quality.

I would take things somewhat further: I'd be happy to pay the equivalent of $20 2015 dollars for this service if it were comprehensive. Unfortunately, that might allow for a consumer surplus to occur in the viewing experience and the motion picture industry ties with maybe nVidia for peak pathological hostility to retail consumer surplus.

> I get that they rely on people not using all of their quota

They have no problem with users using their quota on their own software. Because they get the signals. They do have a problem with users using the API in 3rd party software, because they don't get the signals.

Well ... the clear signal is that people want to use Google's models but not Google products

Most people have actually just been using Opus through antigravity

That's very different from what I'm seeing around me, but yes, I suppose that happens to. And I guess Google wouldn't have as much of an issue with that, right?

Ah, in my spaces (Involved in the proxy dev), most people have been using it for Opus. I suspect they may even have more of an issue with it, as they don't get the cost advantage of serving an in-house model

I don't really understand this reasoning actually:

if OpenClaw usage go up, and a service (OpenAI it looks like) gets lots of usage data for personal assistent usage, they can optimize to make it better for people who get a $200 subscription just because of that use case.

I turned off tracking on Antigravity. Do I deserve to get my account banned from a service I pay for now? Silly.

> But e.g. with open code it doesn't really matter if I use antigravity or gemini-cli the usage should be about the same.

This is not at all true. What is prompting this behavior from Google and Anthropic is that people are using their oauth creds/API keys to run OpenClaw bots that use orders of magnitude more tokens than the IDEs. The official clients also can use a lot more prompt caching because they have expected workflows.

And like, if you want to run OpenClaw, they’re not saying you can’t do that: use the API pricing, that’s what it’s for. But people are getting mad that they’re not allowed to roll their pickup truck up to the all-you-can-eat buffet table and fill it.

I think the deal is quite clear: subscription for personal usage in their products, API token for everything else. You get a rebate for subscription because they get the data. I would be quite sad if they removed the subscription option just to not be "anticompetitive".

I wrote this as a work around to use my subscriptions for claude, chatgpt pro, grok from codex cli but seems like gemini is already broken and will require another approach after this

https://github.com/agentify-sh/desktop

Nobody is forcing you to pay for tokens you don’t use. If you only want to pay for the tokens you use, switch to api billing and pay for tokens at api rates.

If you want the discounted rates they offer in their monthly plans, then expect to follow the terms that discount is offered under.

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