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Comment by geek_at | Hacker News Reader

This is literally for you to get tangled in their api and when they stop giving you the allowance they hope you will just continue to pay

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Nah, it's pretty trivial to switch providers (especially with Claude's help, ha).

This is more to encourage people to try out adding AI into their product, which is a totally different flow and experience from using AI to build the product.

Or to discourage people from using cheap subscription tokens as part of automated workflows

That's an old tactic for an old world. You only need, what, half an hour with your agent of choice to write you out of that?

What does "tangled in their api" mean? Switching is pretty easy.

Not really, you have to fiddle with generating api keys and setting environment variables. Meanwhile with Anthropic it will just start charging you API prices for the tokens you are generating without even a single warning.

>> Not really, you have to fiddle with generating api keys and setting environment variables.

That's 5-15 minutes of work at most. Not exactly the type of lock-in the parent is implying.

The user could have always done that regardless of if the user has the option to be charged API rates on or off.

Of all the things I've had to deal with with migrating solutions and frameworks. Generating API keys and setting environment variables are the least time consuming of all of them.

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