This week OpenAI added a new $100 plan to their GPT pro offering in response to the increased demand in codex (they have self-reported 70% growth). With this change I thought I’d give a brief overview of the subscription landscape since it has been changing constantly:
Hard to believe that the 70% growth for codex is not mainly due to the fact they allow OpenClaw usage with your subscription. Both companies are offering very close usage amounts at the same pricing tiers with that one major caveat.
Personally, I still have not moved off of my Claude subscription even though I was an OpenClaw user. I have heard GPT doesn’t offer quite the same experience that Opus did, which shows in the Price Per Token community rankings.
My plan is to switch to token based usage on a cheaper open source model. One that I am eyeing is the new Z-ai GLM 5.1. It has impressive benchmarks, similar to Anthropic and OpenAI frontier models, at a fraction of the cost and came online to OpenRouter this week (I think yesterday). Of course, benchmarks are not very helpful compared to actually using the models so it remains to be seen if it can provide a similar experience to Opus.
Anthropic’s restriction on subscription OpenClaw usage came with its release of their managed agent platform. I tried it and found the process pretty seamless, though I only made a very simple agent which converts strings to structured JSON. Agents created their are accessible my API right away and follow a similar architecture to OpenClaw with Skills and an external memory store (similar to the MEMORY.md in openclaw).
If you’re hoping to use your Anthropic subscription on agent system, though, you are out of luck because their own platform only supports token usage, so you’re basically limiting yourself to Anthropic models on a token-usage basis. Adoption will be interesting as it is asking developers to enter a closed ecosystem in exchange for less infrastructure management.