Saturday, January 10, 2026
Claude Code Pricing and Usage
Users are debating the cost structure of Claude Code, its availability through different platforms, and the potential for vendor lock-in based on its optimized environment.
Food from the tail why? You don't pay for Claude Code, you pay for the tokens used in the Sonnet, Opus, or Haiku model... Connecting GLM to Claude Code and them charging less isn't cheaper because it's cheaper. You're literally using a worse model and paying less for it.
So then why is opus and other models available in cursor etc? This is incorrect take I get what you want to say like claude code should be the best harness cow the prompts and other primitives are optimized but they api key for models are usable in other harnesses. Their take is
Vendor lockin. They’re anticipating OpenAI releasing a better model and if you are using opencode, you’ll switch providers easily but if your env is optimized for claude code, you won’t be able to switch as easily. They want the harness to keep you stuck