Comment by jrsj a day ago
I’m starting to think you’re right but only because software engineers don’t seem to actually value or care about open source anymore. Apparently we have collectively forgotten how bad it can be to let your tools own you instead of the other way around.
Maybe another symptom of Silicon Valley hustle culture — nobody cares about the long term consequences if you can make a quick buck.
Is this a serious question? Why would they subsidize people when there is no benifet to them? Subsidization means they are LOSING money when people use it. If the customers that are using 3rd party clients are unwilling to pay a price that is profitable for them, that is a very positive, not negative, thing for Anthropic to lose them.
The reason to subsidize is the exact reason you are worried about. Lock in, network effects, economies of scale, etc.
Yes, why is there a discount when I buy a bundle? This is clearly sign of nefarious behaviour.
It's not a bundle discount. A bundle discount lets you buy both and still use only one.
It very obviously is, you'd have to be the most naive of the most naive to think there isn't a path for them to jack prices later. Maybe that's not nefarious depending on your definition, but the point is you will definitely be paying more in the future.
I mean, this is the playbook of every tech company for the past 30 years. You sell something at a huge loss to gain market share and force your competitors to exit, and then you begin value extraction from your, now captive, customer base. You lower quality, raise prices, and cut support, and you do it slowly enough that nobody is hit with enough friction at one time to walk.
If you expect anything else, I don't know what to tell you. This is very much the standard. In fact it's SO much the standard that companies don't even have a choice. If you choose not to do this, then the people who are doing this will just undercut you and run you out.
The key piece in this is that, once the value extraction begins, it can't just strive for profitability. No, it also has to make up for the past 10 or 15 years of losses on top of that. So it's not like the product will just get expensive enough to sustain itself like you'd expect with a typical product. It'll get much more expensive than that.
> software engineers don’t seem to actually value or care about open source anymore.
Hate to break it to you, but the vast majority never did. See any thread about Linux on HN. Maybe the Open Source wave was before my time, but ever since I came into the industry around 2015 "caring about open source" has been the minority view. It's Windows/Mac/Photo Shop/etc all the way up and down.
Quality, UX, DX first, second openness.
If all is equal, I pick the open option. In this case it's not equal, Claude Code + Opus 4.5 is better than Opencode + Opus 4.5.
We're going to learn that lesson again in a big hurry at this point.
> Apparently we have collectively forgotten how bad it can be to let your tools own you instead of the other way around.
We've collectively forgotten because a large enough number of professional developers have never experienced anything other than a thriving open source ecosystem.
As with everything else (finance and politics come to mind in particular), humans will have to learn the same lessons the hard way over and over. Unfortunately, I think we're at the beginning of that lesson and hope the experience doesn't negatively impact me too much.
There's nothing stopping you from using OpenCode with any other provider, including Anthropic: you just can't get the subsidised pricing while doing so. This is irritating, yes - it certainly disincentivises me from trying out OpenCode - but it's also, like, not unexpected?
In any case, the long-term solution for true openness is to be able to run open-weight models locally or through third-party inference providers.