200 points firloop 2 hours ago 193 comments
Hi,
Starting April 4 at 12pm PT / 8pm BST, you’ll no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw. You can still use them with your Claude account, but they will require extra usage, a pay-as-you-go option billed separately from your subscription.
Your subscription still covers all Claude products, including Claude Code and Claude Cowork. To keep using third-party harnesses with your Claude login, turn on extra usage for your account. This will be enforced April 4 starting with OpenClaw, but this policy applies to all third-party harnesses and will be rolled out to more shortly (read more).
To make the transition easier, we’re offering a one-time credit for extra usage equal to your monthly subscription price. Redeem your credit by April 17. We’re also introducing discounts when you pre-purchase bundles of extra usage (up to 30%).
We’ve been working to manage demand across the board, but these tools put an outsized strain on our systems. Capacity is a resource we manage carefully and we need to prioritize our customers using our core products. You will receive another email from us tomorrow where you’ll have the ability to refund your subscription if you prefer.
rvz 2 hours ago | parent
The Anthropic casino wants you to continue gambling tokens at their casino only on their machines (Claude Code) only by giving more promotional offers such as free spins, $20 bets and more free tokens at the roulette wheels and slot machines.
But you cannot repurpose your subscription on other slot machines that are not owned by Anthropic and if you want it badly, they charge you more for those credits.
The house (Anthropic) always wins.
sidrag22 1 hour ago | parent
0xy 1 hour ago | parent
alasano 2 hours ago | parent
AKA when you fully use the capacity you paid for, that's too much!
danpalmer 38 minutes ago | parent
Similarly, on a home internet connection you might pay for a given size of pipe, but most residential ISPs don't allow running publicly accessible servers on your connection because you'll typically use way more of the bandwidth.
eagleinparadise 2 hours ago | parent
We are paying for a certain amount of token consumption
Why then, is this an outsized strain on your system Anthropic?
It's like buying gasoline from Shell, and then Shell's terms of services forcing you to use that gas in a Hummer that does 5 MPG, while everyone else wants to drive any other vehicle.
bitpush 1 hour ago | parent
> We are paying for a certain amount of token consumption
I dont think you are. The specific arrangement you have is you pay for a subscription to be used with Claude Code. It isnt access to tokens, so you can do whatever you please.
---
An analogy would be a refillable cup for a soda at a restuarnt. They will allow you to refill how many ever times you want, but only using the store provided cup - and you cant bring your own 2L hydroflask or whatever. You're paying not just for the liquid, but for the entire setup.
stavros 1 hour ago | parent
It would be like the restaurant saying "you can buy the 2-liter soda pack" and then getting all uppity when you bring your own 2L hydroflask in.
SpicyLemonZest 1 hour ago | parent
To use your analogy, if Shell sold you a subscription to fill up your Hummer up to 30 times a month, they wouldn't let you use that subscription to fill gas cans with a GMC logo taped to the side. They couldn't, without overcharging the people who just want to average out their cost of driving.
fc417fc802 1 hour ago | parent
You don't get to sell a subscription described primarily as being for some quantity of X and then change the terms every time people find creative ways to use the stream of X they believe themselves to have purchased from you. People thought they were purchasing in bulk.
charcircuit 1 hour ago | parent
stavros 1 hour ago | parent
verdverm 1 hour ago | parent
They have a per-token payment option where you can use any tool you like
charcircuit 1 hour ago | parent
The plans do not say how many tokens you get. People are paying for access. Higher plans get more usage. The marketing and support material of the plans only use the word "usage" and never "tokens."
HellsMaddy 2 hours ago | parent
windexh8er 1 hour ago | parent
mh- 1 hour ago | parent
Interestingly, it looks like I haven't received a non-receipt email from them since August 2025.
FireBeyond 1 hour ago | parent
mh- 1 hour ago | parent
edit: see Boris' tweet about it https://x.com/bcherny/status/2040206443094446558
burnte 1 hour ago | parent
cat-turner 1 hour ago | parent
jasonlotito 1 hour ago | parent
How is what you are asking for different from what they are saying?
SkyPuncher 1 hour ago | parent
Im hitting rate limits within 1:45 during afternoons.
I can’t justify extra usage since it’s a variable cost, but I can justify a higher subscription tier.
bitpush 1 hour ago | parent
rvz 1 hour ago | parent
SkyPuncher 55 minutes ago | parent
muyuu 14 minutes ago | parent
charcircuit 1 hour ago | parent
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/12429409-manage-extra...
SkyPuncher 55 minutes ago | parent
groby_b 43 minutes ago | parent
CubsFan1060 14 minutes ago | parent
bleepblap 9 minutes ago | parent
It's like I was a graphic designer and my finance company said "photoshop is too expensive". I wouldn't be mad at Adobe for it
sarchertech 15 minutes ago | parent
My guess is a plan with double the limits would need to be 5-10x as expensive.
jasonlotito 1 hour ago | parent
You can use your Claude Code subscription with third-party tools, but you have to use the Claude Code harness. Or, you use the API. OpenClaw could use the Claude Code harness, but they don't.
firloop 1 hour ago | parent
jasonlotito 1 hour ago | parent
firloop 1 hour ago | parent
weird-eye-issue 25 minutes ago | parent
2001zhaozhao 1 hour ago | parent
For a good existing example developed by a known company, check Cline Kanban: https://cline.bot/kanban
They don't have the MCP-bundling idea that I'm experimenting with, however.
pxc 19 minutes ago | parent
I imagine how they treat these things will be contextual and maybe inconsistent. There aren't really hard lines between what they probably want editors that integrate with them to do and generic tools that try to sit a layer above the vendors' agent TUIs.
charcircuit 1 hour ago | parent
winterrx 1 hour ago | parent
jasonlotito 1 hour ago | parent
> you’ll no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw.
My understanding is that Conductor and others aren't using it.
zephyreon 1 hour ago | parent
kjuulh 1 hour ago | parent
Traubenfuchs 1 hour ago | parent
_pdp_ 1 hour ago | parent
For example...
We recently moved a very expensive sonnet 4.6 agent to step-3.5-flash and it works surprising well. Obviously step-3.5-flash is nowhere near the raw performance of sonnet but step works perfectly fine for this case.
Another personal observation is that we are most likely going to see a lot of micro coding agent architectures everywhere. We have several such cases. GPT and Claude are not needed if you focus the agent to work on specific parts of the code. I wrote something about this here: https://chatbotkit.com/reflections/the-rise-of-micro-coding-...
stavros 1 hour ago | parent
> Obviously step-3.5-flash is nowhere near the raw performance of sonnet
I feel like these two statements conflict with each other.
happyopossum 1 hour ago | parent
nothinkjustai 1 hour ago | parent
inb4 skill issue I could probably beat you coding by hand with you using Claude code
snarkyturtle 38 minutes ago | parent
loveparade 1 hour ago | parent
freedomben 1 hour ago | parent
loveparade 1 hour ago | parent
saltyoldman 1 hour ago | parent
I'm doing a side-by-side with GPT-5.4 for $20/mo and Sonnet for $20/mo and I can tell you that all my 5 hour tokens are eaten in 30 minutes with Claude. I still haven't used my tokens for OpenAI.
Code quality seems fine on both. Building an app in Go
freedomben 1 hour ago | parent
I think using it to write small documentation or small scripts would be a good use case for it, but serious development work you Hit the usage limits way too fast.
girvo 43 minutes ago | parent
Only thing now is that the cheaper (worse) chinese model coding plans have huge limits, so I lean on those now. Requires a lot more hand-holding though.
mogili1 1 hour ago | parent
Extra usage is very sneaky you don't get any notice that you are using extra usage and could end up with unnecessary costs in case you would have preferred to wait an hour or so.
scottcha 30 minutes ago | parent
stavros 1 hour ago | parent
No, Anthropic, just because you added a clause that says "we can change these terms whenever" doesn't make it right. I'm paying you a set amount of money a month for a set amount of tokens (that's what limits are), and I should be able to use these tokens however I want.
Luckily, there are alternatives.
benced 1 hour ago | parent
post-it 1 hour ago | parent
It's like if I buy a hot dog every month and they tell me they're raising the price next month, or discontinuing honey mustard. Inconvenient but they're not doing anything wrong.
Especially since, given my back of the napkin math, they're giving us a pretty decent discount on the subscription plans.
nrmitchi 1 hour ago | parent
Anthropic not allowing Claiude Code subscriptions to be used with other projects isn't "pulling the rug out"; you paid for an API subscription to use Claude Code, and now you're using it for a different purpose and a different product.
If Tesla offered $10/month charging for your Tesla, and then a bunch of people turned around and use their Tesla Charge subscription to charge all different electric vehicles, and battery packs, and also hooked up a crypto mining rig to it, would you be surprised if they said "Nope, we're cutting this off. You can only use your Tesla Charge subscription for your Tesla vehicle"?
stavros 1 hour ago | parent
> If Tesla offered $10/month charging for your Tesla
No, "if Tesla offered $10/month for 100 kWh of charging", and yes, I expect to use those 100 kWh with any vehicle I want, because there's a limit on the resource I'm paying for.
I can understand caps on unlimited, I can't understand caps when there are strict limits.
danpalmer 35 minutes ago | parent
stavros 22 minutes ago | parent
jakelazaroff 1 hour ago | parent
harha 58 minutes ago | parent
ChatGPT found it was a great idea and that I can use Claude for planning and gave me instructions on how to best hand off the building part. Claude told me it’s a horrible idea.
Claude also burns much more liberally through tokens, eg reading through entire irrelevant docs.
Openclaw is great for resolving this since I much more control which work goes where and also gives a much better user experience without all the back and forth to understand what context it has (my use case is to build things from my phone while I’m in senseless meetings in my day job).
Fully agree on the alternatives. In the end Claude’s experience is worse, while it still makes bad decisions if you let it. Better to get a good workflow on a less capable model.
Multiplayer 1 hour ago | parent
If you are not aware, ACP creates a persistent session for steering rather than using the models directly.
bontaq 1 hour ago | parent
firloop 1 hour ago | parent
OpenClaw was still using Claude Code as the harness (via claude -p)[0]. I understand why Anthropic is doing this (and they’ve made it clear that building products around claude -p is disallowed) but I fear Conductor will be next.
[0]: See “Option B: Claude CLI as the message provider” here https://docs.openclaw.ai/providers/anthropic#option-b-claude...
freedomben 1 hour ago | parent
When they shut down open code, I thought it was a lame move and was critical of them, but I could understand at least where they're coming from. With this though, it's ridiculous. Claude core tools are still being used in this case. Shelling out to it to use it there's no different than a normal user would do themselves.
If this continues, I'll be taking my $200 subscription over to open AI.
andai 1 hour ago | parent
Also what's the point of Claude -p if not integration with 3rd party code? (They have a whole agents SDK which does the same thing.. but I think that one requires per token pricing.) I guess they regret supporting subscription auth on the -p flag
randall 1 hour ago | parent
wild_egg 1 hour ago | parent
loveparade 1 hour ago | parent
userbinator 1 hour ago | parent
Imagine not being able to connect services together or compose building-blocks to do what you want. This is absolute insanity that runs counter to decades of computing progress and interoperability (including Unix philosophy); and I'm saying this as someone who doesn't even care for using AI.
colechristensen 58 minutes ago | parent
mccoyb 51 minutes ago | parent
The disrespect Anthropic has for their user base is constant and palpable.
colechristensen 18 minutes ago | parent
4b11b4 32 minutes ago | parent
sethherr 49 minutes ago | parent
When this happens I will have to look at other providers and downgrade my subscription. Conductor is just too powerful to give up. It’s the whole reason why I’m on a max plan.
8note 1 hour ago | parent
but couldn't i use this in off times only?
Seattle3503 1 hour ago | parent
ramoz 1 hour ago | parent
UPDATE:
reply on x Thariq @trq212 only flagged accounts, but you can still claim the credit
dboreham 17 minutes ago | parent
supliminal 1 hour ago | parent
password4321 1 hour ago | parent
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46936105 Billing can be bypassed using a combo of subagents with an agent definition
> "Even without hacks, Copilot is still a cheap way to use Claude models"
20260116 https://github.blog/changelog/2026-01-16-github-copilot-now-...
https://github.com/features/copilot/plans: $40/month for 1500 requests; $0.04/request after that
https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/billing/copilot-... Opus uses 3x requests
zem 1 hour ago | parent
arewethereyeta 1 hour ago | parent
1. Make a better product/alternative to Openclaw and start eating their userbase. They hold the advantage because the ones "using their servers too much" are already their clients so they could reach out and keep trying to convert. Openclaw literally brought them customers at the door.
2. Do everyone royally and get them off their platform - with a strong feeling of dislike or hatred towards Anthropic.
Let's see how 2 goes for them. This is not the space to be treating your clients this way.
mrbungie 1 hour ago | parent
airstrike 53 minutes ago | parent
nojito 48 minutes ago | parent
There's a good chance they do not have the infrastructure to do that.
dboreham 20 minutes ago | parent
benn67 1 hour ago | parent
Say goodbye to my 600$/ month Anthropic.
minimaxir 1 hour ago | parent
Zopieux 1 hour ago | parent
operatingthetan 50 minutes ago | parent
jesse_dot_id 1 hour ago | parent
nightski 1 hour ago | parent
asgraham 58 minutes ago | parent
techgnosis 57 minutes ago | parent
mil22 47 minutes ago | parent
tekacs 56 minutes ago | parent
Honestly, this just looks like what Dylan of SemiAnalysis suggested on Dwarkesh – that they've massively under-provisioned capacity / under-spent on infrastructure.
That would honestly be a comforting answer if true, because I would gladly take 'we can't afford to do this right now' over 'we are self-preferencing, and the FTC should really take a look at us, even if we're technically not a monopoly right now, since we're the only strongly-instruction-following model in town and we clearly know it'.
gjsman-1000 54 minutes ago | parent
Tell me you have zero clue what a monopoly is or what the law is, without telling me.
Monopoly law relies on broad categories, not narrow ones. You can’t call Microsoft a monopoly because they are the only company that makes Windows. You can’t call Amazon a monopoly because they are the only company that makes AmazonBasics. You can’t call Anthropic a monopoly because their product is 20% better for your use case, otherwise by definition no company has any incentive to do a good job at anything.
tekacs 50 minutes ago | parent
gjsman-1000 50 minutes ago | parent
Then don’t make BS up like implying Anthropic is a monopolist for the crime of competence.
> tell me you don't understand how a small quantitative gap can result in a step change in capability
The law does not give a darn about this. Being a good competitive option does not make you a league of your own. If I invent a new flavor of shake, the Emerald Slide, am I a monopolist in shakes because I’m the only one selling Emerald Slides? If you go and then start a local business reselling shakes and I’m your only supplier, am I a monopolist then? Absolutely not.
tekacs 46 minutes ago | parent
We have a similar situation in mobile where Apple may not be considered a monopoly, but people have walked around for a decade with a supercomputer in their pocket that is wildly underused.
Things have gotten faster; things are different than they were decades ago when a lot of this was devised.
The reality of the matter is that some of us just want to see innovation actually happen apace, and not see 5, 10, or 30 years of slowdown while we litigate whether or not such a company is holding all the cards, while everyone is collectively waiting at the spigot for a company to get its shit together because we're not allowed to fix the situation.
For what it's worth, I'm hopeful that the other model providers will catch up and put us in a situation where this conversation is irrelevant.
What I'm afraid of is a situation where we see continued divergence, and we end up with another Apple situation.
gjsman-1000 43 minutes ago | parent
That is not calling out that they are “absolutely not a monopoly by the law” in any way, shape, or form. You’re framing it as though they aren’t by a technicality, when they aren’t anywhere near discussion by even the most extreme of legal theories. You won’t find Lina Khan or Margarethe Vestager, both ousted for going too far, complaining about Anthropic.
> “We have a similar situation in mobile where Apple may not be considered a monopoly, but people have walked around for a decade with a supercomputer in their pocket that is wildly underused.”
In that we can’t run a Torrent client to download illegally redistributed media 99% of the time? Otherwise, in what way, are they underused? For the degrees of public addiction, a more underutilized phone would be a social benefit.
tekacs 39 minutes ago | parent
I'm looking forward. Things are moving very quickly. As I said above, I'm afraid of us diverging into another Apple situation in the future. If I suggest that they should be looked at and thought about, it's not for today, it's for tomorrow. If divergence continues. Because as with everything in AI, it might hit us a lot faster than people expect. Hell, given their approach to morality, I suspect that Anthropic folks have already thought deeply about these sorts of concerns. That's why it's actually a lot more in character for them to be doing this not due to self-preferencing, but due to unaffordability, which - if you look at my first post - is what I said seems to be happening.
Suffice to say that I have a graveyard of things that I think phones could have been, where unfortunately we've ended up with these - as you say - addicting consumerist messes.
Gonna stop here so I don't flood the thread. We're getting very off topic.
nandomrumber 36 minutes ago | parent
code_duck 5 minutes ago | parent
verdverm 42 minutes ago | parent
You can use these tools with most providers today, just no subscription plan. If you have enough spend, you can likely get bulk deals
verdverm 44 minutes ago | parent
goosejuice 29 minutes ago | parent
In other words this is about Anthropic subsidizing their own tools to keep people on their platform. OpenClaw is just a good cover story for that. You can maximize plans just as easily w/ /loop. I do it all the time on max 20x. The agent consuming those tokens is irrelevant.
For what it's worth I don't use OpenClaw and don't intend to, but I do use claude -p all the time.
CubsFan1060 17 minutes ago | parent
Do you have an example of how this is how they have advertised or sold the plan? I don’t recall ever seeing any advertisement that their plan is simply pre paying for tokens.
jmalicki 10 minutes ago | parent
You are paying to be using that limit some of the time. There are 5 hour windows when you are sleeping and can't use it. There are weekend limits.
Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that.
It's structured so users can have bursts of unlimited usage, and spend ~15% of the theoretical max cap, and that's still cheaper than a subscription for that user.
An OpenClaw user can use 6, 7, 8 times what a human subscriber is using.
goosejuice 9 minutes ago | parent
Then it's not priced correctly. As I said, you can do all of this without OpenClaw.. claude code ships with everything you need to maximize the limits.
hombre_fatal 5 minutes ago | parent
Instead, you want to prioritize people "earnestly" bursting to the usage limits, like the uses who are actually sitting at their computer using Claude Code over someone's 24/7 automated token usage burster.
cowlby 25 minutes ago | parent
Sucks to be pushed back to Claude Code with opaque system behavior and inconsistency. I bet many would rather pay more for stability than less for gambling on the model intelligence.
chatmasta 19 minutes ago | parent
Or maybe I’ll just get a Codex subscription instead. OpenAI has semi-officially blessed usage of third party harnesses, right?
mirashii 11 minutes ago | parent
g-mork 1 hour ago | parent
Dealing with Claude going into stupid mode 15 times a day, constant HTTP errors, etc. just isn't really worth it for all it does. I can't see myself justifying $200/mo. on any replacement tool either, the output just doesn't warrant it.
I think we all jumped on the AI mothership with our eyes closed and it's time to dial some nuance back into things. Most of the time I'm just using Opus as a bulk code autocomplete that really doesn't take much smarts comparatively speaking. But when I do lean on it for actual fiddly bug fixing or ideation, I'm regularly left disappointed and working by hand anyway. I'd prefer to set my expectations (and willingness to pay) a little lower just to get a consistent slightly dumb agent rather than an overpriced one that continually lets me down. I don't think that's a problem fixed by trying to swap in another heavily marketed cure-all like Gemini or Codex, it's solved by adjusting expectations.
In terms of pricing, $200 buys an absolute ton of GLM or Minimax, so much that I'd doubt my own usage is going to get anywhere close to $200 going by ccusage output. Minimax generating a single output stream at its max throughput 24/7 only comes to about $90/mo.
zdragnar 1 hour ago | parent
Oh no, there's plenty of us willing to say we told you so.
What's more interesting to me is what it's going to look like if big companies start removing "AI usage" from their performance metrics and cease compelling us to use it. More than anything else, that's been the dumbest thing to happen with this whole craze.
SkyPuncher 1 hour ago | parent
2 weeks ago, I had only hit my limit a single time and that was when I had multiple agents doing codebase audits.
estimator7292 34 minutes ago | parent
Aurornis 33 minutes ago | parent
They didn’t do a great job of explaining it. I wonder how many people got used to the 2X limits and now think Anthropic has done something bad by going back to normal
colechristensen 1 hour ago | parent
g-mork 56 minutes ago | parent
Would really love some path forward where the AI parts only poke out as single fields in traditional user interfaces and we can forget this whole episode
colechristensen 9 minutes ago | parent
And video calling did take off, plenty of people use facetime and almost everybody working in an office uses some form of video calls. Criticizing the early attempts at getting video calling working because they hadn't taken off yet (I remember them being advertised on "video phones" with 56k modems), of course someone was going to have the idea and implement before it was quite reasonable.
Aurornis 30 minutes ago | parent
I’m kind of confused by these takes from HN readers. I could see LinkedIn bros getting reality checked when they finally discover that LLMs aren’t magic, but I’m confused about how a developer could go all-in on AI and not immediately realize the limitations of the output.
bethekind 20 minutes ago | parent
codybontecou 18 minutes ago | parent
randall 1 hour ago | parent
skyberrys 1 hour ago | parent
minimaxir 1 hour ago | parent
skyberrys 1 hour ago | parent
yieldcrv 1 hour ago | parent
causal 59 minutes ago | parent
Claude Code seems designed to terminate quickly- mine always finds excuses to declare victory prematurely given a task that should take hours.
jonwinstanley 54 minutes ago | parent
entropoem 49 minutes ago | parent
Just look at how Sam Altman has led OpenAI step by step to dominate—and choke out—Anthropic, a company founded by the group of engineers who were once part of the turmoil at OpenAI.
Anthorpic's product thinking is terrible even though it is technically very good.
danpalmer 41 minutes ago | parent
OpenAI seems to mostly be chasing the consumer market, but not doing great at it.
dboreham 14 minutes ago | parent
datahack 49 minutes ago | parent
Is it infrastructure? Are they unable to control costs?
Everyone else is spending like money is water to try to get adoption. Claude has it and is dialing back utility so that its most passionate users will probably leave.
I don’t understand this move.
verdverm 38 minutes ago | parent
w10-1 33 minutes ago | parent
For SaaS, use the SaaS API. For product, use the product.
They subsidize the product with "don't care how much" pricing so they have users to build out features without users worrying about cost. If it's not actual users using the product, then features will be built in OpenClaw instead of Claude.
The earlier they draw this line, the better.
However, announcing it the day before it is effective is a huge unforced error, even if it were just a consequence of the TOS. They gain nothing by making people scramble.
Also better to announce at the same new ways to support plugging in to Claude Code - something to encourage integration/cooperation. No fences unless the field inside is flowering.
_pdp_ 18 minutes ago | parent
Despite their power, frontier models are threatened by open-source equivalents. If AGI is not on the horizon and model performance is likely not going to be enough of a differentiator to keep the momentum going, the only other way is to go horizontal - enterprise solutions, proprietary coding agent harnesses, market capture, etc.
If AGI is in sight, none of these short-term games really matter. You just need to race ahead.
Sinidir 48 minutes ago | parent
janalsncm 43 minutes ago | parent
Btw even at insane markups $200/mo means GPUs break even pretty fast.
mccoyb 41 minutes ago | parent
djhope99 36 minutes ago | parent
I switched OpenClaw to MiniMax 2.7. This combined with Claude over telegram does enough for me.
OpenClaw used to burn through all my Claude usage anyway.
Robdel12 34 minutes ago | parent
So, to me its a "we built it into our world use ours"
Edit: FWIW I am an avid hater of all claw things, they're security nightmare.
noritaka88 28 minutes ago | parent
Subscriptions assume “human usage” — bursty, limited, mostly interactive. Agent systems are closer to autonomous infrastructure load running continuously.
OpenClaw is a good example of this. Once agents operate freely, they don’t behave like users — they behave like infrastructure.
That’s why this kind of restriction isn’t too surprising.
Long term, it seems likely this pushes things toward: - API-first usage - or local / open models
rather than agents sitting on top of subscription-based UIs.
buremba 25 minutes ago | parent
It's simply identical to how people use Claude Code locally.
lrvick 25 minutes ago | parent
seamossfet 22 minutes ago | parent
gnabgib 19 minutes ago | parent
beanjuiceII 19 minutes ago | parent
Animats 11 minutes ago | parent
evbogue 10 minutes ago | parent
Forgive me if someone asked this already and I can't find it in the comments.