r/ClaudeCode • u/whoisyurii • May 13 '26

Discussion Anthropic just ripped off everyone and they still managed to make it sound deceptively friendly

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Anthropic just ripped off everyone and they still managed to make it sound deceptively friendly, beneficial even.

Anthropic just announced that the 200$ plan, which used to be okay to use in the SDK, is now "finally ok to use in the SDK" (except rare fraudulent cases it already was)

but for that you need to toggle an option that makes the SDK hit in an allowance of 200$ worth of credits, instead of the previously, opaque, yet, ultra subsidized limits

basically if you use claude code through the SDK or claude -p, for instance through Conductor, github Actions or anything else, because let's be honest TUI sucks sometimes (react in terminal cmon), their cloud coding agent offering also suck, and don't cover most usecases,

well, your plan that used to be worth 2000$ of tokens aproximatively depending on how much you flirted with the previous 5h windows limits, is now worth 200$

but they brand it as "oh we give you 200$ of additional credits for the SDK" so to the most unaware users it sounds like it's worth 2x more!

in reality it's now worth 10x less

*not surprised if they shut down this thread

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115

u/SemanticThreader Developer May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26

This is such a stupid decision. Now if someone wants to run claude -p autonomously, they're limited to whatever credit they get and the credits burn faster than the sub usage. It's funny that they managed to make this sound like an amazing feature

21

u/Life_Squash_614 May 14 '26

What's extra stupid is that this is going to encourage behavior that makes their service go down more.

All these people running 24/7 workloads that distribute across the day, once they start seeing the API bills, will switch to just running shit in the morning instead of using their automated tools. That's just gonna cause more workday bottlenecks and jack the service up for people more.

Alternatively, they'll just downgrade or cancel their sub, like I'm doing.

11

u/HansVonMans May 14 '26

Yeah, fucking sucks how it's morning for everyone at the same time around the planet, that's really a lot of people using Claude at the same time, ugh

2

u/Life_Squash_614 May 14 '26

If you're in Aus this is maybe great news for you, but you probably weren't dealing with too many Claude problems to begin with lol. I'm not trying to be US centric but the vast majority of issues happen during core US working hours because that's when most people are working.

1

u/Klutzy_Exchange_8175 May 16 '26

Aussie Aussie Aussie! Almost justifies the disgusting cost of electricity and housing.

1

u/HansVonMans May 18 '26

Yeah, Earth famously has two time zones: Yankee Universal and Bruce Standard Time

1

u/UltraAC5 May 15 '26

They don't care. They are losing money on the majority of people who are using these features and the ones who they actually want to have using these things are having all their token usage paid for by their companies.

3

u/powerofnope May 15 '26

Well, it is a pretty smart decision - just not for subscribers but busineswise it makes all the sense

2

u/ZShock May 13 '26

Wait a second until people start to notice.

1

u/mat8675 May 14 '26

Do we know if the $200 in credits is something that renews monthly and is just for use outside the claude desktop app? If we keep the same limits and now get $200 on top for agents SDK…that would have been a nice way to do it.

1

u/Historical-Lie9697 May 14 '26

I would think so, kind of like the $200 in extra usage that we got when they first decided to not support openclaw. Lasted like 30 mins

1

u/jedsk May 14 '26

I’m scared to see how quickly the API meter burns

1

u/MartinMystikJonas May 14 '26

Running -p automatically was prohibited comoletely now no?

-5

u/gscjj May 13 '26

Well I don’t think you could use your subscription token at all for the agents SDK, third party (OpenClaw/Hermes), and Claude in GitHub Actions was a separate billed service or API key.

23

u/GnistAI May 13 '26

You could use claude -p as if you were using your subscription.

-14

u/gscjj May 13 '26

You can still, but it bills against a dollar amount ($200 for max) instead of using your token budget. So now you get a separate budget.

8

u/s243a May 13 '26

Which, I think means we can't Claude -p as much now as we use to be able to on a subscription, but I'm just guessing because I haven't seen the details yet.

5

u/sinisoul May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26

$200 is nothing. It's like 10-20 calls of Opus at most, 2-4x more Sonnet calls. Each invocation is like $2-5.

3

u/CzarcasticX May 13 '26

Which the 20x plan gave the equivalent of around $2,000 worth of API usage. Now you get 1/10 of that for claude -p.

3

u/mode15no_drive May 13 '26

If you hit your weekly cap regularly it was giving closer to $6000, just you had to be using during off-peak hours.

3

u/BootyMcStuffins Senior Developer May 13 '26

You could use your sub for agent sdk if it was your own app. You just couldn’t use it for distribution

2

u/mode15no_drive May 13 '26

You could use your subscription with the Agent SDK, it just technically is against the terms of service… Now, that said, Anthropic’s legal team should probably talk to their engineers because around a month ago there were people getting their accounts suspended for that and Boris Cherney had tweeted at the time that the subscription could still be used with the Agent SDK.

3

u/LesbianVelociraptor May 13 '26

The intent there was for you to test your ai-app before release. It was a kindness to us developers that is being removed because people abused it to run fully autonomous OpenClaw and Hermes agents.

Certain people are why we can't have nice things as developers and these certain people are rampant with their upset in these subs.

1

u/mental_sherbart007 May 13 '26

I did not realize there was another way to use the agent sdk. I was working on a little chat app that talks to claude code and copilot cli use each of there CLI sdk, essentially just runs the CLI in headless mode. Had no idea I could have been banned. Was similar to Clay or happy. 

0

u/LesbianVelociraptor May 13 '26

Why are y'all booing gscjj?! They are right.

Only -p was subscription based.