Anthropic changes subscription terms, OpenClaw users now billed separately for agent usage

What changed with Anthropic subscriptions

Anthropic has narrowed the scope of its Claude subscriptions. They now only apply to first-party surfaces: Claude.ai, Claude Code, and the mobile app. Everything else is treated as a "third-party harness" and billed separately on a per-token basis.

In practice, this means your Max plan no longer covers agent usage. If you're paying $200/month and running OpenClaw agents, you're now paying that subscription plus raw API costs for every token your agents consume.

Your options

• Stay on Max and pay extra: You're probably looking at $300-500/month total depending on how many agents you run. Makes sense if you also use Claude AI directly a lot. Otherwise the math doesn't add up.
• Switch to the Anthropic API: Drop the subscription and run your agents on a straight API key from console.anthropic.com. Here are the costs of some Claude models:
  Opus 4.6: $5 input / $25 output
  Sonnet 4.6: $3 input / $15 output
  Haiku 3: $0.25 input / $1.25 output
  Most people running a couple of agents will spend $200-400/month on API tokens, roughly the price of a Max plan.
• Switch providers: OpenClaw isn't tied to Claude. You can run it with OpenAI, Gemini, Kimi, or open-source models via Ollama. Claude is still strong, but Anthropic is tightening access. Others are more agent-friendly, especially OpenAI and players like Minimax already building for integrations.
• Use intelligent routing: Instead of picking one model and sending everything to it, Manifest routes each request to the right model automatically. Simple prompt goes to Haiku. Complex tasks goes to Sonnet. Each task gets the cheapest model that can handle it. In practice, if you're spending $200–400/month using API key, routing typically brings that down to around $60–120. Same idea on Max plan: instead of stacking usage on top of your subscription, you keep it under control.

What to do right now

Anthropic is offering free API credits to eligible subscription users. Between $20 and $200 depending on your account. You have until April 17th to claim them.

Here's how to grab them and start routing:

1. Go to app.manifest.build and set up your agent if you haven't already
2. Click on the Routers tab, then "Add a router"
3. Inside the router, click "Add a provider" and from the Subscription tab, select Anthropic
4. You'll see a button to claim your credits from Claude. Click it. It takes you to an Anthropic page where you can claim them. If you get a 404, your account isn't eligible
5. Come back to Manifest with the modal still open
6. Connect your Anthropic subscription by running claude setup-token in your terminal
7. It opens a Claude tab in your browser. Authorize it and close the tab.
8. A token appears in your terminal. Copy it, paste it into Manifest in the "Setup Token" field, click Connect
9. Manifest pre-selects the best models for each tier. You can adjust them if you want