Gemini CLI

I love how fragmented Google's Gemini offerings are. I'm a Pro subscriber, but I now learn I should be a "Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise" user to get additional usage. I didn't even know that existed! As a run of the mill Google user I get a generous usage tier but paying them specifically for "Gemini" doesn't get me anything when it comes to "Gemini CLI". Delightful!

Anthropic is the same. Unless it has changed within the last few months, you can subscribe to Claude but if you want to use Claude Code it'll come out of your "API usage" bucket which is billed separately than the subscription.

Some jerk has learned that we prefer CLI things and has come to the conclusion that we should therefore pay extra for them.

Workaround is to use their GUI with some MCPs but I dislike it because window navigation is just clunky compared to terminal multiplexer navigation.

I think it is pretty clear that these $20/subs are loss leaders, and really only meant to get regular people to really start leaning on LLMs. Once they are hooked, we will see what the actual price of using so much compute is. I would imagine right now they are pricing their APIs either at cost or slightly below.