If you don't want to get locked in to Claude Code, you can pay more. Just like you can pay more for an unlocked non-carrier subsidized phone. (Which I personally do.)
Looks like they actually walked this bit back
In other words, it is not like giving free nuts at bar to make you drink more beer but more like Nestle giving baby formula so that the babies get use to that instead of mothers milk
Also, not everyone uses their plan to the usage limits; the idea of a prepaid bundle being better value if you commit is not novel.
What does it matter which tool I use when I hit the limit?
And even if you pay-as-you-go Anthropic seems to prefer their own tools
A third party harness may have a misconfiguration of prompt caching, leading to more load on Anthropic's servers, they could also have wildly different usage patterns (Hermes, openclaw etc), also making it hard to predict the load. If you constrain everyone to use your own harness, at least you're in control of that.
The first point is sort of funny though, because their own harness had a misconfigured prompt caching for several months during the times where they were crying about third party harnesses (/resume was busting cache all the time).
The monthly plans are heavily subsidized by the API users - why should Anthropic subsidize your use of pi.dev?
What additional benefit do they get if I use their tools?
Every request goes to their LLM either way
Because if not that’s just normal market segmentation since enterprise users are willing to pay many times mores than private individuals.
Anthropic isn’t setting is’s price based on cost + fixed profit margin they are charging as much as each market is willing to bear..
>if you don't want to get locked in to Claude Code
All of these companies are built around eventually locking you in then selling to some other company. "Just pay more" is not a real solution. Once the competition dies down and there are only a handful of companies (if we are even lucky enough for that) with viable LLM products, your ability to jump ship is going to diminish. It always does. There is no way they aren't working on better lock in tactics.
The global LLM market seems trending towards fragmentation. And lock-in appears to be diminishing, not increasing, particularly for companies that set up a multi-model workflow.
Wait until investors stop giving out money out of FOMO. Google/Facebook/etc. gonna swoop in on anyone who is remotely viable and independent anyway
OpenRouter isn’t subsidizing much. No subsidy would mean the subscriptions go away in favor of API only. That doesn’t really speak at all to either of your points regarding consolidation or lock-in.
Except they themselves cannot afford it and as the article also mentioned, their level of service and uptime is atrocious for the price they are offering.
Their unpredictable pricing model is designed to make it easy for you to lose more money without you knowing. Unannounced model switching, nerfing old/new models, classifiers detecting 'unsafe' instructions to downgrade the selected model and overcharging API prices and locking subscriptions to a broken vibe-coded harness.
You don't get anything by defending Anthropic, given their past behavior.
Why don't you ask Microsoft [0], Tesla [1] and Alibaba [2] on why they believe it is not only expensive, but it also a security risk for them?
Like I said, You don't get anything for defending Anthropic and they are not going to hire you into their sales team.
> You simultaneously say they cannot afford the API pricing but also claim they are overcharging, it sounds like you just want to get mad ad Anthropic.
Read it again. "Except they themselves cannot afford it"
They is "Anthropic" given that I said "themselves". Who are the ones that cannot afford to subsidize tokens forever due to the even cheaper Chinese alternatives. They all know that the answer is open weight models and why Anthropic cannot raise prices and why the above companies are ditching them for open weight models.
[0] https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-cancels-c...
[1] https://letsdatascience.com/news/tesla-limits-employee-ai-sp...
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
It's totally reasonable for tech folks to be leery of a company using a strong market position from one system (Windows/Claude) to push mediocre complementary software (IE/CC).
On the other hand, Claude Code was the best coding agent when it was released, but there's no way Anthropic is going to let its cash cow stagnate. Like, I think pretty much all of Anthropic's revenue spike in the last few months was driven by the tokenmaxxing mania.
My take is most of Claude Code's problems originate from insufficient compute capacity and all kinds of workarounds they're doing to mitigate that fundamental limitation.
Dario took the tremendous goodwill his row with Hegseth gave him and blew it. The major problems are Anthropic’s back-end instability and front-end kludginess (Electron!) revealing the gap between Anthropic’s capability and marketing, and Dario bizarrely copying Altman’s 2023 fire-and-brimstone playbook that had already massively backfired.
And if the Electron app were flawless, that would be one thing. It isn’t. It’s buggy, feature light, constantly updating and slow.
Anthropic is primarily limited by how fast they can identify and onboard people who will be a good fit. Allocating that to ios would trade off against allocating that staffing growth elsewhere (ex: reliability, making the next generation model even better).
I’m only half joking here
Claude is a buggy mess because it's slop, not because it's electron. Heck, it runs a full Linux VM under the covers without asking.. it's insane.
Most Electron apps are crap because they transparently communicate the developer prioritizing their own efficiency over the trade-offs to UX choosing a cross-platform platform entails.
In most cases, I don’t care that an app looks crappy as long as it works. For Anthropic, however, the irony undermines its argument that Claude is ready to replicate developers.
I personally hate it due to various reasons but I don’t feel like the Electron part is the issue (Java based Jetbrains IDEs generally seem way more bloated)
After testing vs code for a bit everyone realized what hot shit Atom was and jumped ship.
From Claude Code being written in React (!!) to acquiring the Bun people so they they could have their very own bespoke JS/TS runtime (and then... rewriting the whole thing), to having the CC "native" app being Electron, etc.
It just seems like it comes down to a choice at the highest level to hire people from a "full stack" background, and build in and and prioritize TypeScript as their dev language, for better or for worse.
I personally think it's worse and that shows in the performance and quality of CC, but I'm biased.
Codex, FWIW, is written in Rust, and it is by far snappier and more reliable, though less featureful for now.
So it's interesting that Codex is written in Rust. Amongst other things it could mean OpenAI had more powerful models that could handle Rust, or their engineers had to handhold the agents a lot more up front, or Rust has structural advantages that could overcome being less represented in the training data.
IMHO building the agent harness at least partially by hand is kind of key? I think going hogwild with "vibe coding" the actual harness is partially why CC is a bit of a rats nest. I think it's genuinely gotten out of control in terms of their ability to reason about it. Just my opinion, I'm sure Boris disagrees.
Also Codex itself distributed via NPM same as Claude. But it distributes a compiled Rust binary. Which is compiled from open source.
I'm sure each lab is keenly aware of what the other is doing (how else could they time so many of their releases so close to each other?) so it's highly probable they started developing each app about the same time, and likely even knew the technical details involved. Which is why it's additionally interesting that OpenAI started off with Rust while CC used Electron.
1. https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/16/openai-debuts-codex-cli-an...
2. https://github.com/jqueryscript/anthropic-claude-timeline
Their super app is oversized, but that's the MS playbook with Teams, overusing resource to justify upgrade budget from IT dept, typical enterprise sales trick.
I've said this before, they always knew it was terrible marketing, but they just can't help themselves because they actually believe it.
From multiple accounts, the people working at these labs, who are most exposed to the latest models' capabilities and how they're being used out in the world, are simultaneously excited and terrified about what they're building.
In a way that's even scarier than the "Capitalist sociopaths marketing AI to other Capitalist sociopaths" rationale everybody assumes.
You're just upset that you don't get to use their VC money the way you want to use it lol. It either is a good deal or it isn't, if it is just say, thanks free VC money, if it isn't say fuck you.
If pricing below cost were illegal, it would essentially make starting up a business—any business—impossible.
You have to get into the weeds though on what exactly counts as a "product delivered". Like, Apple doesn't charge for new versions of macOS. But are "Macs" separate stacks together or are they the fusion of hardware and software, and if so on what levels? There are all sorts of products surrounding us that are running software that we still treat as unified objects after all, right down to smart light bulbs or a "plain" lithium battery pack which still requires controllers to manage charging and USB negotiation etc. Chips and software are in tons and tons of "basic" hardware stuff yet we just buy the object as a singular entity.
I'm not saying that dumping can't be a thing but the lines aren't always clear cut either. You also have to get into bog standard business scaling issues and profit vs investment. If you take on debt to invest in capital that you believe will lower per unit costs if you build enough volume and then turn a profit, you're "selling at a loss" but that's how tons of business works, that's why there is risk right? Doesn't seem good to discourage that.
It seems more fruitful to approach things from the perspective of monopolies, competition, corporate governance etc in general, granted not that a lot of governments have been great about that either in recent history.
> It seems more fruitful to approach things from the perspective of monopolies, competition, corporate governance etc in general
where to go to learn more about these topics?
> You're just upset that you don't get to use their VC money the way you want to use it lol.
I don't particularly care about Claude or harnesses.
Also, if other harnesses need to work without the literal SOTA then they need to be better than Claude Code. If their incentive is to reduce token usage then again, they will evolve to be better than CC
2.) Early bird specials, again, aren't loss leaders. They're a way to get sales on the left side of the bell curve. The restaurant food is still the product, not a subsidy.
3.) Free soda with large fry doesn't actually exist (though it sounds like it should, right?)
4.) Happy hour wings (again, see #2)
None of these are bundling so I don't really get why you bothered to comment
I just searched and found free medium fries with a large soda at McD if you order through the app. Seems like bundling to me, and you have to use their particular app.
But it's just hard to care too much about a commoditized product and an app with tons of competition. And McDonald's is not keeping any competitors away by locking their fries offer behind their app.
From my experience people who complain loudly about the price tend to be people who are either (1) working primarily on hobby projects so are unwilling to pay much for Claude Code or (2) using astronomical amount of tokens through elaborately orchestrated multi-agent setups that only make sense when someone else is paying the bill.
Of course LLMs are a commodity at this point but if someone is using Codex, Pi etc. at home it becomes more likely they won’t be picking Claude Code at their day job either.
I have worked in shops that made it difficult for me just to get a paid for RustRover or CLion license, and had to out of pocket it. The monthly sub for Claude or Codex is equivalent to the total license cost for that.
It's not entitled to expect your $200/month tooling expense to have a level of reliability and consistency.
If your employer is paying for it, fine. I am my own employer. I don't fancy becoming dependent on tooling that costs me as much as my family's whole monthly mobile plan and then having it degrade in unpredictable ways or rug pull me on quota. Or have geo-political drama as part of its release cycle.
lock in your customers to a closed system for maximum market gain put down the competition when they pose a risk to your product make hypocritical claims on how your product increases quality when your own software sucks artificially restrict one’s own product as a fear-mongering marketing stunt test dynamic pricing on your users to see how much more they’ll pay for less change the terms of your product after the sale without notifying your user base"
anthropic is not just a business operating in a market, they are "unethical" and "fear-mongering" and "hypocritical".