What Anthropic's New Claude Billing Means for Zed Users

Yesterday Anthropic announced changes to how Claude subscriptions work when you use Claude Code through tools like Zed, rather than directly in the terminal. The details have been hard to parse, and we've been getting a lot of questions from Zed users about what it means in practice. So here's an overview of what's actually changing and what options you have moving forward.

What's Changing with Anthropic's Pricing

Starting June 15, Anthropic is splitting Claude subscription billing into two pools: one for using Claude through Anthropic's first-party tools (such as chat, or the official Claude Code CLI), and another for third-party agent and SDK usage (anything running through ACP, claude -p, or other third-party tools). If you use Claude Code through ACP (in Zed or anywhere else), that usage will no longer draw from your Claude Pro or Max subscription limits. Instead, it draws from a new monthly "Agent SDK credit" that Anthropic is adding to each plan: $20 for Pro, $100 for Max 5x, $200 for Max 20x.

Once the credit runs out, continued usage bills at standard API rates if you have extra usage enabled. If you don't, requests stop until your credit resets next billing cycle.

What this means in practice: For anyone using agents heavily, this is a major cost increase. Claude subscriptions previously subsidized agent usage at roughly 15-30x compared to API pricing, and the new credits are billed at full API rates.

Your Options in Zed

Zed supports lots of providers and multiple ways of working with agents. You're never locked into a single provider or billing arrangement.

Keep using Claude with your subscription. If you want to keep using Claude with your Claude Pro or Max plan at your existing subscription limits, you can run Anthropic's official claude CLI in a terminal inside Zed instead of through ACP. When the official claude CLI runs in the terminal, it uses your subscription's limits, not the new credit.

We're actively working on making TUI agents a first-class part of orchestrating agents in Zed. Stay tuned for next week's release of Terminal Threads.

Use Zed's built-in agent with the provider that works for you. You can use Zed-hosted models, bring your own API keys from any supported provider, connect to Copilot, run local models through Ollama, or use DeepSeek.

Bring your own agent. You can run any ACP compatible agent inside Zed. OpenCode, Codex, Factory, Cursor, and many more all work inside Zed. Several of these still offer rate-limited subscriptions that subsidize heavy usage.

ACP Remains Open

ACP is an open protocol. We're building it in collaboration with other agent partners and client makers such as JetBrains and the community, so that your editor is never locked into one provider's pricing decisions. We suspect this kind of change won't be the last. Providers will continue adjusting how they bill for agent usage as the economics evolve. Having the optionality to switch agents or providers without switching editors matters, and that's what ACP and Zed give you.

Zed is the fastest interface for agentic development, and you're not locked into one agent or billing model to use it. If you have questions about configuring providers or agents, check out our docs or come find us on Discord.

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