I Was Running OpenClaw With My Claude Max Subscription. Now What?
The Claude Code cutoff happened—here's how to keep your OpenClaw setup running.
You got the email. As of today, April 4th, your Claude Max subscription no longer works with OpenClaw or any other third-party agent.
The Hacker News thread is full of people in the same boat. Hundreds of comments ranging from angry to resigned to “I told you so.”
So what now? Your OpenClaw setup still works. You just need a different way to access models.
Why this happened
Every flat-fee AI subscription is built on the same bet: most people won’t use their full allocation. Gyms work this way. Netflix works this way. The quiet majority subsidizes the power users, and the company makes money in the middle.
The problem is that the power users are now agents that run 24/7.
As jmalicki put it on HN: “An OpenClaw user can use 6, 7, 8 times what a human subscriber is using.”
When you’re paying $200/month and your autonomous agent is burning through $1,000+ worth of tokens, someone’s losing money. And it’s not you.
We wrote about this exact pattern when Cursor started throttling users. The playbook is always the same: company offers flat fee betting on under-utilization, power users max it out, company raises prices or cuts people off. Claude Code chose to cut people off.
Your options
You have a few paths forward, depending on how much you want to change.
Bring your own API keys
The simplest option: get API keys directly from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or whoever you want to use. Point OpenClaw at them. Done. You pay per token, which sounds worse than a flat fee until you remember what that flat fee actually got you.
Use a gateway like Kilo Gateway bundled with a subscription like Kilo Pass
If you want access to multiple providers without juggling keys, the Kilo Gateway gives you a single endpoint that routes to 500+ models. We charge at cost with no markup. Your subscription converts 1:1 to credits that never expire. Bundled with the Kilo Pass, you earn free bonus credits on top—starting at 5% and climbing to 40% the longer you stay subscribed (or 50% if you go annual). First-time subscribers get a 50% welcome bonus.
The real benefit here is flexibility. You can still use Anthropic models for everything if you want. But you can also use cheaper models for routine tasks and save Opus for the stuff that actually needs it. Some people run Haiku for file operations and boilerplate, then switch to Opus for architecture decisions. Others mix in Gemini 3-Pro or GPT 5.4 depending on the task. OpenClaw doesn’t care which model answers, so you can experiment.
Try KiloClaw
If you want a managed setup instead of running your own OpenClaw instance, KiloClaw is the hosted version. Same incredible agent experience, same model flexibility, we handle the infrastructure.
The bigger picture
Peter Steinberger, who created OpenClaw, has always said the models are interchangeable brains. You plug in whichever one fits the task, swap them out as needed.
That philosophy is why this cutoff stings but doesn’t break anything. The interface is separate from the model. You built your workflows in OpenClaw, and those workflows still work. You just need to plug in a different brain.
This won’t be the last time a flat-fee AI tool changes the rules. Owning your setup means you’re not at the mercy of someone else’s business model.
Getting started:
The interesting part here isn’t Claude cutting people off, it’s why.
Flat pricing only works when users under-consume. Agents break that completely.
Once you have something running 24/7, the economics flips and someone has to eat the cost.
Feels like we’re moving toward a world where you don’t rely on a single model anymore, you route across multiple depending on the task.
That’s basically what we’ve been building around with KiloClaw, whether you’re bringing your own setup or starting fresh.
Optionality =loyalty in this cycle. good read IMO