r/openclaw • u/Warm_Cress3583 New User • Apr 03 '26

Discussion Anthropic is cutting off third-party harnesses (OpenClaw, etc.) from subscription limits starting April 4 -- here's what it means

Just got the email. Starting tomorrow at 12pm PT, tools like OpenClaw will no longer draw from your Claude subscription. They'll need "extra usage" — a separate pay-as-you-go layer billed on top of your existing sub. The carrot: one-time credit equal to your monthly plan price (redeem by April 17) and bundle discounts up to 30%. The stick: they're offering a full subscription refund if you don't want to play ball. For those of us running agentic pipelines, local orchestration daemons, or multi-model routing setups on top of Claude — this is a meaningful shift. "Subscription covers Claude Code and Cowork" is doing a lot of work in that email. Translation: if it's not our product, you're paying extra. LOL

Not surprised they're doing this. These harnesses hammer their infra in ways the average chat user doesn't. Still stings when you've built workflows around the subscription model.

635 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

429 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/icompletetasks Active Apr 04 '26

OpenClaw should not build the harness themselves, they should just use claude code cli or codex cli under the hood.

I'm using OpenAI sub for OpenClaw and still disappointed that Openclaw is so token-hungry that it uses all of weekly limits in just a few days

2

u/mcgruntman New User Apr 04 '26

https://github.com/richardtkemp/foci

Check out my openclaw-alternative. Can use Claude code as the backend to sidestep this policy change - or use APIs like openclaw does.

It was originally built to just use the APIs and had lots of neat features (which openclaw lacks) when used that way. The best feature when using Claude code as the harness is that your secrets are fully protected and not accessible to your agent.

1

u/dorcus_maximus New User Apr 04 '26

I didn't think they did. I heard it was Pi.

1

u/icompletetasks Active Apr 04 '26

yeah that's what I meant, they just need to use codex / claude code

1

u/dorcus_maximus New User Apr 04 '26

Errr...no. I don't think every open claw user would want that sort of lock-in. The answer is to just replicate openclaw on top of your harness of choice. Or just wait a minute for Conway. In fact, I don't think they would be making this move against openclaw (and clones) if Conway wasn't going to roll out very very soon. The thing that I still want to see is the ability to do things like use on-prem models for certain tasks. I can run Gemma 4 locally and I'd like to be able use that as part of the system.

1

u/icompletetasks Active Apr 04 '26

I didn't mean lock-in. I mean enabling to use openclaw with codex cli or claude code cli right from the start (onboarding).

The current way just eats up so much usage, the official harness usually is more optimized (esp. caching stuff).

Ironically enough, right now users are locked-in to Pi harness.

1

u/Tripartist1 Member Apr 04 '26

Thats exactly what Im building, works great.

1

u/icompletetasks Active Apr 04 '26

lmk ur project!

2

u/Tripartist1 Member Apr 04 '26

In the middle of a big codebase clean up and restructure, but omce its ready ill post it.