Last night I got an email saying Claude Agent SDK won't move to separate billing for now. For now. Only for now 😏
I see a few reasons. The company really isn't ready to face the losses it would take after switching the Claude SDK to separate billing. Second - they want to polish the billing system, since people were warned in advance and most of them moved to plain Claude CLI, but in reality that didn't affect token usage much. Bringing in this restriction would scare off future users more than current ones
In theory, Claude Agent SDK won't move to separate billing because people were warned in advance and most of them moved to plain Claude CLI. It's more of a pause, time to think - to come back a bit later with a better thought-out mechanism for how the company can spend less money serving subscription users
The company has proven more than once that its focus is more on the business sector that actually pays for tokens via API - the money there is 30-40 times bigger than from subscription users. Although subscription users, of course, make up the bigger share overall, and catching hate from the audience means sawing off the branch you're sitting on 🪚, and taking a big hit to business and reputation
A month wasn't enough for the company to sort out its economic issues, and with this sly email they've bought themselves time to solve it, indefinitely. But that time will definitely come. Don't think we'll be able to use Claude at the same volume on just a subscription, like now. Over the last month I'd have spent around 45 thousand dollars building my projects if I were paying for tokens via API. Draw your own conclusions 🤷