Comment by jrsj a day ago
It might make sense from Anthropics perspective but as a user of these tools I think it would be a huge mistake to build your workflow around Claude Code when they are pushing vendor lock in this aggressively.
Making this mistake could end up being the AI equivalent of choosing Oracle over Postgres
This sounds like a stop loss? Are they losing money per token even through the api?
Sure does.
I imagine a combination of stop loss and market share. If larger shops use up compute, you can't capture as many customers by headcount.
// There was a figure around o3, an astonishing model punching far above the weights (ahem) of models that came after, that suggested the thinkiest mode cost on the order of $3500 to do a deep research. Perhaps OpenAI can afford that, while Anthropic can't.
I'm pretty sure everyone is pricing their APIs to break-even, maybe profit if people use caching properly (like GPT-5 can do if you mark the prompts properly)
Sounds plausible they're not really making any. Arbitrary and inflexible pricing policies aren't unusual, but it sounds easy enough for a new rapidly-growing company to let the account managers decide which companies they might have a chance of upselling 150 seat enterprise licenses to and just bill overage for everyone else...
Their target is the Enterprise anyway. So they are apparently willing to enrage their non-CC user base over vendor-locking.
But this is not the equivalent of Oracle over Postgres, as these are different technology stacks that implement an independent relational database. Here were talking about Opencode which depends on Claude models to work "as a better Claude" (according to the enraged users in the webs). Of course, one can still use OC with a bazillion other models, but Anthropic is saying that if you want the Claude Code experience, you gotta use the CC agent period.
Now put yourself in the Anthropic support person shoes, and suppose you have to answer an issue of a Claude Max user who is mad that OC is throwing errors when calling a tool during a vibe session, probably because the multi-million dollar Sonnet model is telling OC to do something it can't because its not the claude agent. Claude models are fine-tuned for their agent! If the support person replies "OC is an unsupported agent for Claude Code Max" you get an enraged customer anyway, so you might as well cut the crap all together by the root.
If you’ve only got a CLAUDE.md and sub agent definitions in markdown it is pretty easy to do at the moment, although more of their feature set is moving in a direction that doesn’t have 1:1 equivalents in other tools.
The client is closed source for a reason and they issued DMCA takedowns against people who published sourcemaps for a reason.
As a user of Claude Code via API (the expensive way), Anthrophic's "huge mistake" is capping monthly spend (billed in advance and pay as you go some $500 - $1500 at a time, by credit card) at just $5,000 a month.
It's a supposedly professional tool with a value proposition that requires being in your work flow. Are you going to keep using a power drill on your construction site that bricks itself the last week or two of every month?
An error message says contact support. They then point you to an enterprise plan for 150 seats when you have only a couple dozen devs. Note that 5000 / 25 = 200 ... coincidence? Yeah, you are forbidden to give them more than Max-like $200/dev/month for the usage-based API that's "so expensive".
They are literally "please don't give us money any more this month, thanks".