My theory is that for a large amount of people, “work are paying anyway so what do I care?”.

I lost my job recently, so gave myself an AI budget of $100 to help with search and applications.

If I put that in OpenAI or Anthropic, I’d hit limits quickly and lose whatever I didn’t use.

Or… I could put the same money in OpenRouter, use open models at 1/25th the price, and only need to pay more when I’ve spent what I put in.

Back in January when Claude Cowork was new and Claude Code was one of the only performant harnesses, it would have been a tougher decision.

But Hermes, dsh, agy, codex, opencode, pi… they make it so easy to achieve so much with such a low budget.

I know it’s a cliche nowadays to say “just use cheaper models” but the value they offer is SO much greater. And i can switch to GPT6, or Opus 5.5 in two clicks for tasks anyway.

My point is this: OpenAI and Anthropic are pulling stunts like this because they don’t care about you and your subscription. So stop caring about them.