Comment by dimmke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dimmke | Hacker News Reader

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If people are finding new ways to use AI, they should change how they bill. Banning third party harnesses is bad for a lot of reasons - it looks like they're trying to force people to use their software. Strategically it might make sense - gives them a tiny moat if their models ever slip - but it discourages the breakneck pace of innovation and the long term effect is that their customers (largely highly skilled with computers and building software) will look to decouple themselves. Claude is good but it's not so far better than anything else that they can pull shit like this and people will just deal with it.

They already have the regular subscription plans (Pro, Max) and a separate billing process for direct API usage. They could absolutely introduce another type of plan optimized toward this kind of usage or just accept that it's a dumb pipe that is being paid for and having these random arbitrary limitations is just making things more confusing and a bad plan for the future.

They already have the way that you're supposed to bill for usages like this, the API usage. The purpose of the subscription plan is strictly for the cases where you are using few enough tokens on average that it's not a money pit for them.

They have subscription plans for their software, and a seperate billing process for the API. There's nothing to change. 'Accepting that it's a dumb pipe' would just mean removing the Pro & Max plans as options.

Clawdbot was clearly against the Consumer Terms of Use the whole time, they’ve just started actively detecting and blocking it.

> Except when you are accessing our Services via an Anthropic API Key or where we otherwise explicitly permit it, [it is forbidden] to access the Services through automated or non-human means, whether through a bot, script, or otherwise.

Start paying by the token if you want to use these tools. Simple as.

Even better: switch to Codex plus get better rate limits. I’m not a captive audience as much Anthropic would like to believe otherwise.

They don’t need to change how they bill. Your subscription is for Claude app/code. Otherwise you pay per token. It’s always been this way.

Claude Code is a subscription tier explicitly designed for agentic, automated, heavy usage. So the 'subscriptions are for human use, API is for automation' line is already blurry by their own offerings.

If the actual concern is use pattern, enforce that directly. What we have instead is metered usage + behavioral restrictions + product fragmentation across three separate offerings.

That's not a clean billing philosophy, it's layers of control stacked on top of each other with no coherent logic tying them together.

If subscriptions are for humans and API is for automation, fine. But then don't meter the human product arbitrarily and don't sell a subscription tier for automation while also restricting automation. Pick a lane.

> Claude Code is a subscription tier explicitly designed for agentic, automated, heavy usage

Except it's not. It's a desktop, web, mobile, and CLI subscription product built on top of a usage-based API with a generous token allowance bundled with it. That generous allowance comes with the restriction that those tokens can only be spent through Claude product surfaces. Why would Anthropic offer their API at a loss and subsidize the profits and growth of other businesses?

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