Anthropic Just Made Claude 30x More Expensive for OpenClaw and 3rd Party Agents.

Anthropic just banned subscription OAuth tokens across every third-party agent tool, including OpenClaw and Hermes.

Using Claude via API instead? Expect 20-30x the cost.

Here are the best alternatives:

Subscription plans:

GLM 5.1 — 3x cheaper than Claude. Hugely respected in developer communities. Open-source release coming soon.

Minimax 2.7 — KiloCode benchmarked it against Claude Opus 4.6 on coding tasks and the results are impressive for the price. Sub also includes image, music, and speech tools.

OpenAI Codex (GPT 5.4) — Outperforms Opus 4.6 on backend/coding. Way more generous token limits. No middle-tier plan though ($20 or $200).

Free & local (run on your own hardware):

GLM 5

Minimax 2.5

Qwen 3.5

Kimi 2.5

GLM 5.1 and Minimax 2.7 are both expected to go open-source soon, making a solid local setup an increasingly smart investment.

Missing Claude's personality? The original thread also covers UI/UX skills and humanization prompts you can drop into OpenClaw's SOUL.md or Hermes to close the gap on conversational quality.

Full thread: @meta_alchemist