When you buy a subscription plan, you’re buying use of the harness, not the underlying compute / tokens. Buying those on their own is way more expensive. This is probably because:

* 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.

He wasn't using the regular paid api (ie per token pricing). He was using the endpoints for their subscribed customers (ie paid per month and heavily subsidized).

I assume he was using Gemini the same way as he was Claude when I make the following statement.

I don’t believe it’s exceptionally unique or new that companies will revoke access if you are using an unpublished API that the apps use.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.

Why does Google/Facebook et al arbitrarily enforce one human per account?

It’s because they want to study you.

They want the data!

>What was the point of Claude code or Gemini banning the OP? Why would they care about how IDEs use the underlying API?

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!