If you buy a 'Season's Pass' for Disneyland, you cant 'sublet' it to another kid to use on the days you don't; It's not really buying a 'daily access rate'.

Anthropic subs are not 'bulk tokens'.

It's not an unreasonable policy and it's entirely inevitable that they have to restrict.

They don't get as much visibility into your data, just the actual call to/from the api. There's so much more value to them in that, since you're basically running the reinforcement learning training for them.

Increasing the friction of switching providers as much as possible is part of their strategy to push users to higher subscription tiers and deny even scraps to their competitors.

Probably because the $20 plan is essentially a paid demo for the higher plans.

They're losing money on this $200 plan and they're essentially paying you to make you dependent on Claude Code so they can exploit this (somehow) in the future.

Any user who is using a third-party client is likely self-selected into being a power user who is less profitable.