Because that could be easily resolved by factoring % cache hits into the usage limits.
> Literally everyone does this.
Never a strong justification, much as I like Anthropic in general.
Why is the 'Mercedes gas station' selling gas 85% cheaper but only to Mercedes drivers?
Why is the 'Apple electric company' selling cheaper electricity to households with Apple devices?
They're not the strongest analogies, I'll admit, but that's what it smells like to me.
Absolutely not, you are not thinking from a product perspective at all.
You might not want to capture cache % hits in usage limits because there may be some edge cases you want to support that have low hits even with an optimized client. Maybe your caching strategy isn't perfect yet, so you don't count hits to keep a good product experience going.
OSS clients that freeload on the subscription break your ability to support these use cases entirely. Now you have to count cache hits at the expense of everyone else. It is a classic case of some people ruining the experience for everyone.
> Why is the 'Apple electric company' selling cheaper electricity to households with Apple devices?
Why does Netflix not let you use your OSS hacked client of choice with your subscription?