* Subscriptions are oversubscribed. They know how much an “average” Claude Code user actually consumes to perform common tasks and price accordingly. This is how almost all subscription products work.
* There is some speculation that there is cooperative optimization between the harness and backend (cache related etc).
* Subscriptions are subsidized to build market share; to some extent the harnesses are “loss leader” halo products which drive the sales of tokens, which are much more profitable.
I don’t believe it’s exceptionally unique or new that companies will revoke access if you are using an unpublished API that the apps use. I don’t see anything wrong with it myself. If you want, pay for normal token use on the published APIs. There is no expectation that you can use APIs for an application, even if you are a paid user, that are not published explicitly for usage.
It's truly disgusting.
So then it's better to start obeying ROBOTS.txt as a ladder pull through a "nicely behaved" image advantage.
The alternative is to say that bugs shouldn’t be fixed because it’s a ladder pull or something. But that’s crazy. What’s the point of complaining if not to get people to fix things?
It’s because they want to study you.
They want the data!
Underscores the importance of sovereign models you can run on the edge, finetune yourself, and run offline. At State of Utopia, we're working on it!