alt Hacker NewsThey don’t need to change how they bill. Your subscription is for Claude app/code. Otherwise you pay per token. It’s always been this way.
They don’t need to change how they bill. Your subscription is for Claude app/code. Otherwise you pay per token. It’s always been this way.
Claude Code is a subscription tier explicitly designed for agentic, automated, heavy usage. So the 'subscriptions are for human use, API is for automation' line is already blurry by their own offerings.
If the actual concern is use pattern, enforce that directly. What we have instead is metered usage + behavioral restrictions + product fragmentation across three separate offerings.
That's not a clean billing philosophy, it's layers of control stacked on top of each other with no coherent logic tying them together.
If subscriptions are for humans and API is for automation, fine. But then don't meter the human product arbitrarily and don't sell a subscription tier for automation while also restricting automation. Pick a lane.