alt Hacker NewsFor folks not following the drama: Anthropic's $200/month subscription for Claude Code is much cheaper than Anthropic's pay-as-you-go API. In a month of Claude Code, it's easy to use so many LLM tokens that it would have cost you more than $1,000 if you'd paid via the API.
Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscription, not the open-source OpenCode CLI. They want OpenCode users to pay API prices, which could be 5x or more.
So, of course, OpenCode has implemented a workaround, so that folks paying "only" $200/month can use their preferred OpenCode CLI at Anthropic's all-you-can-eat token buffet.
https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/7410#issuecomme...
Everything about this is ridiculous, and it's all Anthropic's fault. Anthropic shouldn't have an all-you-can-eat plan for $200 when their pay-as-you-go plan would cost more than $1,000+ for comparable usage. Their subscription plans should just sell you API credits at, like, 20% off.
More importantly, Anthropic should have open sourced their Claude Code CLI a year ago. (They can and should just open source it now.)
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What part of a TOS is ridiculous? Claude Code is obviously a loss leader to them, but developer momentum / market share is important to them and they consider it worth it.
What part of “OpenCode broke the TOS of something well defined” makes you think it’s all Anthropic’s fault?
I guess one issue is that you pay $200/month whether you use it or not. Potentially this could be better for Anthropic. What was not necessarily foreseeable (ok maybe it was) back when that started was that users have invented all kinds of ways to supervise their agents to be as efficient as possible. If they control the client, you can't do that.
To extend your all you can eat analogy. It’s similar to how all you can eat restaurants allow you to eat all you can within the bounds of the restaurant, but you aren’t allowed to bring the food out with you.
Aren't you happy that you can use claude code unlimited for only 200/month? I don't really get your point tbh
> Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscription, not the open-source OpenCode CLI.
Because they are harvesting all the data they can harvest through CLI to train further models. API access in contrast provides much more limited data
> Anthropic shouldn't have an all-you-can-eat plan for $200 when their pay-as-you-go plan would cost more than $1,000+ for comparable usage. Their subscription plans should just sell you API credits at, like, 20% off
I have the "all-you-can-eat" plan _because_ I know what I'm getting and how much it'll cost me.
I don't see anything wrong with this. It's just a big time-limited amount of tokens you can use. Of course it sucks that it's limited to Claude-Code and Claude.ai. But the other providers have very similar subscriptions. Even the original ChatGTP pro subscription gives you a lot more tokens for the $20 it costs compared to the API cost.
I always assumed tokens over the API cost that much, because that's just what people are willing to pay. And what people are willing to pay for small pay-as-you-go tasks vs large-scale agentic coding just doesn't line up.
And then there's the psychological factor: if Claude messed up and wasted a bunch of tokens, I'm going to be super pissed that those specific tokens will have cost me $30. But when it's just a little blip on my usage limit, I don't really mind.
> More importantly, Anthropic should have open sourced their Claude Code CLI a year ago. (They can and should just open source it now.)
Isn't the whole thesis behind LLM coding that you can easily clone the CLI using an LLM? Otherwise what are you paying $200/mo for?
It's hard to understand what Anthropic are getting from forcing more people to use Claude Code vs any other tools via the API. Why do they care? Do they somehow get better analytics or do they dream that there's a magical lock-in effect... from a buggy CLI?
> let's sell a loss leader
> oh no, people are actually buying the loss leader
I'm looking forward to the upcoming reckoning when all these AI companies start actually charging users what the services cost.
> They can and should just open source it now
Why you have this idea? why they should open source it now?
Why should anthropic open source Claude Code CLI? I understand you and some others want it, maybe it would be better for the community, but is it what’s best for anthropic?
Why should subscribers get your specific discount rather than what anthropic has calculated the discount should be?
What can we learn from this?
The model is not a moat
They need to own the point of interaction to drive company valuation. Users can more about tool switching costs that the particular model they use.
That's the entire reason I don't use Claude's models. I don't want to use Claude Code. I want to use their models, just not their crappy software.
I believe there are a number of cli tools which also use Anthropic's Max plan (subscription) - this isn't just an OpenCode issue.
I had the TaskMaster AI tool hooked up to my Anthropic sub, as well as a couple of other things - Kilo Code and and Roo Code iirc?
From discussions at the time (6 months ago) this "use your Anthropic sub" functionality was listed by at least one of the above projects as "thanks to the functionality of the Anthropic SDK you can now use your sub...." implying it was officially sanctioned rather than via a "workaround".
By this logic ChatGPT shouldn't exist either and should be charged by API pricing
They are subsidizing Claude code so they can use your data to train better coding models. You’re paying them to show their models how to code better.
I agree with the principle, but reality dictates that users and exposure is the real currency. So while annoying it is understandable that Anthropic subsidizes their own direct users.
I tend to think that their margins on API pricing are significantly higher. They likely gave up some of that margin to grow the Claude Code user base, though it probably still runs at a thin profit. Businesses are simply better customers than individuals and are willing to pay much more.
I guess we will find out on the updated TOCs very soon
Sorry, ClaudeCode is $200/mo? I’m not using it now, but was thinking about giving it a try. The website shows $200/year for Pro:
“$17 Per month with annual subscription discount ($200 billed up front). $20 if billed monthly.”
What are you referring to that’s 10x that price? (Conversely, I’m wondering why Pro costs 1/10 the value of whatever you’re referring to?!?)
> Anthropic shouldn't have an all-you-can-eat plan for $200 when their pay-as-you-go plan would cost more than $1,000+ for comparable usage. Their subscription plans should just sell you API credits at, like, 20% off.
Sorry, I don't understand this. Either you're saying
A) Everyone paying $200/mo should now pay $800/mo to match this 20% off figure you're theorizing... or B) Maybe you're implying that the $1,000+ costs are too high and they should be lowered, to like, what, $250/mo? (250 - 20% = $200)
Which confuses me, because neither option is feasible or ever gonna happen.
Anthropic want you to use claude code cli badly and are prepared to be very generous if you do. People want to take that generosity without the reciprocity.
I don't normally like to come down on the side of the megabigcorp but in this case anthropic aren't being evil. Not yet anyway.
It’s all about the data.
They want you to use their tool so they can collect data.
>But they really want you to use the Claude Code™
They definitely want their absolutely proprietary software with sudo privilege on your machine. I wonder why they would want that geeez
I wonder how are these pricings compared to running Claude over bedrock
Anthropic and all AI are playing chicken with each other. You need to win userbase and that is worth losing money for but if you sell discount tokens for Loveable clones to profit from that is not in your interest.
Anthropic is futher complicated by mission.
My problem with CC is that it is trying to be very creative. I am asking it to fix some test, or create a new test. What it is doing? It is running grep to find all tests in the code base and parses them. This eats a lot of tokens.
Then it runs the test, as if I could not do this myself, it reads the output, sometimes very long (so more and more tokens are burned) and so on.
If people had to pay for this cleverness and creativity an API price, they would be a bit shocked and give up quickly CC.
Using Aider with Claude Sonnet I am eating much less tokens than CC does.
> Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers?
Most subscribers dont use up all their allocated tokens. Theyre banning these third parties because they consistently do use all their allocated tokens.
> Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno
I do, it's called vendor lock-in. The product they're trying to sell is not the $200 subscription, it's the entire Claude Code ecosystem.
For the average person, the words "AI" and "ChatGPT" are synonims. OpenAI's competitors have long conceded this loss, and for the most part, they're not even trying to compete, because it's clear to everyone that there is no clear path to monetization in this market - the average joe isn't going to pay for a $100/mo subscription to ask a chatbot to do their homework or write a chocolate cake recipe, so good luck making money there.
The programming market is an entirely different story, though. It's clear that corporations are willing to pay decent money to replace human programmers with a service that does their work in a fraction of the time (and even the programmers themselves are willing to pay independently to do less work, even if it will ultimately make them obsolete), and they don't care enough about quality for that to be an issue. So everyone is currently racing to capture this potentially profitable market, and Claude Code is Anthropic's take on this.
Simply selling the subscription on its own without any lock-in isn't the goal, because it's clearly not profitable, nor is it currently meant to be, it's a loss leader. The actual goal is to get people invested long-term in the Claude Code ecosystem as a whole, so that when the financial reality catches up to the hype and prices have to go up 5x to start making real money, those people feel compelled to keep paying, instead of seeking out cheaper alternatives, or simply giving up on the whole idea. This is why using the subscription as an API for other apps isn't allowed, why Claude Code is closed source, why it doesn't support third party OpenAI-compatible APIs, and why it reads a file called CLAUDE.md instead of something more generic.
Claude Code is unusually efficient in the use if tokens in top of it all.
How is it different from what OpenAI and Codex, and Gemini offer?
I'm baffled that people, unknown to me, have apparently been considering Claude Code, the program, some kind of "secret sauce". It's a tool harness. Claude could one-shot write it for you, lol.
I guess it's another case of:
- effective moneytizeability of a lot of AI products seem questionable
- so AI cost strongly subsidized in all kinds of ways
- which is causing all kind of strange dynamics and is very much incompatible with "free market self regulation" (hence why a company long term running by investor money _and_ under-pricing any competition which isn't subsidized is theoretically not legal (in the US). Not that the US seem to care to actually run a functioning self regulating free market, even going back as far as Amazone. Turns out moving "state subsidized" to "subsidized by rich" somehow makes it no longer problematic / anti-free-market /non-liberal ... /s))
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> More importantly, Anthropic should have open sourced their Claude Code CLI a year ago. (They can and should just open source it now.)
I assume they're embarrassed by it. Didn't one of their devs recently say it's 100% vibe coded?
What an incredibly entitled message. If you know what anthropic should and shouldn't do, go start your own AI company.
What's ridiculous is that the subscription at 180€/month (excl. VAT) is already absurdly expensive for what you get. I doubt many would sign up for the per-API usage as it's just not sustainable pricing (as a user).
> More importantly, Anthropic should have open sourced their Claude Code CLI a year ago. (They can and should just open source it now.)
It's not like if it houses some top secret AI models inside of it, and it would make way more sense, and probably expand the capabilities of Claude Code itself. Do they lose out to having OpenAI or other competitors basically stealing their approach?
Update: Touché. The repo is just plugins and skills, not the meat.
In any case, another workaround would be using ACP that’s supported by Zed. Let’s editing tools access the power of CLI agents directly.
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> Anthropic should have open sourced their Claude Code CLI a year ago
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code
It has been open source for a while now. Probably 4-6 months.
> Anthropic shouldn't have an all-you-can-eat plan for $200 when their pay-as-you-go plan would cost more than $1,000+ for comparable usage. Their subscription plans should just sell you API credits at, like, 20% off.
That's a very odd thing to wish for. I love my subscriptions and wouldn't have it any other way.
> More importantly, Anthropic should have open sourced their Claude Code CLI a year ago. (They can and should just open source it now.)
"Should have" for what reason? I would be happy if they open sourced Claude Code, but the reality is that Claude Code is what makes Anthropic so relevant in the programming more, much more than the Claude models themselves. Asking them to give it away for free to their competitors seems a bit much.