You don't even need to start off with Fable. Give Opus 5.5 a try first and then then try Fable if you feel like you need to push it further

You can access Claude models through any number of providers - OpenRouter, AWS Bedrock, etc. and as far as I know, Claude Code can be used with any of them. The only real benefit to going direct through Anthropic is the subscriptions. It’s worth the risk for the discount, but if you get locked out, there’s other (pricy) options to get unblocked.

Just use a random gmail address, it works.

I would suggest that based on your current level of "trust" in these things (justifiably very low, I use zero openai or anthropic products myself) that you look into self hosting locally something reasonably capable and smart on your own hardware, on llama-server or something functionally equivalent to it. And running it in something like the opencode harness, using zero of the opencode API or online services. Qwen 3.8-flash-next will run on a lot of different hardware setups that are within the reach of normal people, or possibly deepseek v4 flash 1017, glm5.3-flash, things in that general category.