But when you use gmail accounts as file storage, you're both a higher-cost user and also doing nothing to further Google's ecosystem (since the email address itself is probably not being used for genuine messaging at all).
As analogies go it's pretty close.
the difference is not like the difference between gmail and gmailfs like you seem to be misunderstanding. a more accurate comparison would be the difference between curl, or httpie vs postman.
An analogous situation would be if someone reverse engineered the Google Maps API and provided their own app that showed maps using the Google Maps data.
I get that it’s a ToS violation, but I’m saying it shouldn’t be. They’re trying to make the harness the moat because they all have no moat.
Yes. Why wouldn't it hold?
Anthropic has a pay-per-token API. You can use OpenCode with it.
Maybe my consistency comes from having worked with contracts and agreements in the real world, where the end user doesn't get to pick and choose which terms they want to abide by.
When you sign up to use a service, you're not signing up to use it however you would like, on your own terms. You're paying for a service that they offer. They are not obligated to continue offering it to you if you try to use it a different way.
They are basically a utility.
They offer a separate plan with discounts for use with their tools. You can also choose to take advantage of those discounts with the monthly fee, within the domain where that applies. You cannot, however, expect to demand that discount to apply to anything you want.
You can argue about what you want it to be all day long, but when you go to the subscription page and choose what to purchase it's very clear what you're getting.
> They are basically a utility
Utilities like my electric company also have different plans for different uses. I cannot, for example, sign up for a residential plan and then try to connect it to my commercial business, even though I'm consuming power from them either way.
Utilities do not work like that. They do have contractual agreements about how you can use the resources provided.
