Presumably because their flat rate pricing is based off their ability to manage token use via their first-party tools.
A third-party tool may be less efficient in saving costs (I have heard many of them don't hit Anthropic LLMs' caches as well).
Would you be willing to pay more for your plan, to subsidize the use of third-party tools by others?
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Note, afaik, Anthropic hasn't come out and said this is the reason, but it fits.
Or, it could also just be that the LLM companies view their agent tools as the real moat, since the models themselves aren't.
What if I'm only willing to pay if it support by tool of choice? Would you pay for a streaming service that enforces a certain TV brand?
Given the latest changes on Claude Code where they hide the actions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47033622
it's likely more the other way around. They control how fast your subscription tokens are burned
But wouldn't a less efficient tool simply consume your 5-hour/weekly quota faster? There's gotta be something else, probably telemetry, maybe hoping people switch to API without fighting, or simply vendor lock-in.