alt Hacker NewsThere was no third choice if they didn't explicitly state that there was.
> If the "private API" was accessible via OAuth, then it's hardly "private".
If you invite people on your porch for a party, and someone finds that you left the house key under the mat and went off to restock, then it's hardly "private". It's perfectly fine for whomever feels like to take the party indoors without your permission. Pretty much what you're saying, reframed, but I seriously doubt you'd agree to random people entering parts of yours premises to which you didn't explicitly invite them.
Try not making it sound like the company is doing me a favor by letting me access the thing I was paying for. I wasn't "invited to a party", I was sold on an agreement that by paying a guaranteed monthly fee I could have access to the model at a rate that was lower than the pay-as-you-go rate from the API.
The primary offering is access to the models. That's what the subscription is about. They can try as hard as they want to market it as Claude being the product and access to the model being an ancillary service, but to me this is just marketing bs. No one is signing-up for Claude because their website is nicer, or because of Claude Code.