Claude API
Ranked 6 of 10 LLM APIs by recommenders
Developers build apps and automate work on pay-as-you-go billing with prompt caching and clear key setup; critics cite frequent outages and unannounced changes.
Developers build apps and automate work on pay-as-you-go billing with prompt caching and clear key setup; critics cite frequent outages and unannounced changes.
101 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 30
- criticize it
- 71
- approval share
- 30%
Recommended in 11 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 30 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 0.4 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 11 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Good output quality for coding and tasks
“Claude is weirdly good at generating functional game logic from vague prompts”
Comment from 7 Dec 2025 in “I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude” “Anthropic/OAI/Google "just work" and you get what it says on the tin”
Comment from 27 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: LLM-Gateway – Zero-Trust LLM Gateway” “Claude performed better on legal nuance”
Comment from 26 Jan 2026 in “Show HN: Lexray – 60 second contract screening for freelancers and SMBs” - Comment from 26 Jan 2026 in “After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand”
Pay-as-you-go billing with no usage caps
“It is the simple no hassle way to get around any issue you are having, pay the API cost and you will have no limitations!”
Comment from 12 Apr 2026 in “Anthropic silently downgraded cache TTL from 1h → 5M on March 6th” “Just move to API billing if not getting enough subsidized compute is that big a deal for you?”
Comment from 6 May 2026 in “Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX” “If subscriptions are for humans and API is for automation, fine.”
Comment from 4 Apr 2026 in “Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to be used with OpenClaw” Prompt caching lowers repeat costs
“prompt caching on fixed system prompts cut my Anthropic bill by ~60% overnight”
Comment from 8 May 2026 in “Ask HN: What will happen as AI costs increase?” “caching has to be specifically managed by the client with Anthropic”
Comment from 27 May 2026 in “Outsourcing plus LocalAI will soon become more economical vs. Frontier labs” Direct requests and full prompt control
“Requests go directly from your app to the Claude API; Apple is not in the request path and does not see prompts or responses.”
Comment from 15 Jun 2026 in “Apple Foundation Models” “you keep control over how and where you run your prompts”
Comment from 4 Apr 2026 in “Anthropic to limit Using third-party harnesses with Claude subscriptions”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
High costs and short cache limits
“If that was true, then getting equivalent usage of the API without claude.ai and Claude Code should cost less , not more .”
Comment from 19 Feb 2026 in “Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use” “Claude's stingy cache TTL of 5 minutes (unless you up it to 1h at a sizeable increase in token cost) for API billing”
Comment from 26 Oct 2026 in “The State of Context Engineering” “people don't want to pay the 10-50x price increase that Anthropic charges for credits”
Comment from 19 Sep 2026 in “Microsoft, OpenAI lose fight to hide internal docs admitting scraping is theft” Frequent outages and rising downtime
“without guardrails and good engineering practices the number of incidents, downtime is increasing”
Comment from 23 Jun 2026 in “Elevated error rate across multiple models” “Clearly they just want to be down all the time. They have the ability to throttle down traffic.”
Comment from 24 Aug 2026 in “Anthropic Claude and API service outages” Breaking changes and unannounced edits
“frequently makes undocumented changes and only publishes acknowledgement of change after users complain”
Comment from 23 Apr 2026 in “An update on recent Claude Code quality reports” “The breaking API changes are frustrating, especially the one that removes forced tool use.”
Comment from 1 Sep 2026 in “Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1” Account bans and refusals to engage
“they are banning for financial economic interests, not nominal alleged contractual violations, so Anthropic is not sympathetic”
Comment from 9 Jan 2026 in “Anthropic bans use of API in OpenCode CLI tool” “I am unable to access claude api at all and never used any of the banned bots on the account.”
Comment from 30 Apr 2026 in “Claude.ai and API Unavailable”
Other LLM APIs people recommend
The four most recommended other LLM APIs, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mistral | 314 | 245 | 56% | 13 | 6 mo9 owners | — |
| DeepSeek API | 171 | 56 | 75% | 11 | 1 mo9 owners | Approved |
| OpenAI API | 166 | 286 | 37% | 13 | 9 mo7 owners | — |
| Anthropic API | 58 | 126 | 32% | 12 | — | — |
| Claude APIThis page | 30 | 71 | 30% | 11 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 107 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Claude's stingy cache TTL of 5 minutes (unless you up it to 1h at a sizeable increase in token cost) for API billing”
“people don't want to pay the 10-50x price increase that Anthropic charges for credits”
“the commercial relationship is a lot more transparent than these subsidised relationships”
“The breaking API changes are frustrating, especially the one that removes forced tool use.”
“running its API in production was a constant headache”
“our Claude API calls started throwing 529s this morning”
“Clearly they just want to be down all the time. They have the ability to throttle down traffic.”
“if you want to spend $200, and get a guaranteed amount of tokens in return you should be using the API.”
“without guardrails and good engineering practices the number of incidents, downtime is increasing”
“Requests go directly from your app to the Claude API; Apple is not in the request path and does not see prompts or responses.”
“much finer tuned OpenCV to Claude API vision model”
“Will call Claude APIs when I get really stuck”
“caching has to be specifically managed by the client with Anthropic”
“I used the Claude API and $30 API credit to make a USB UAC 2 audio driver for Haiku”
“prompt caching on fixed system prompts cut my Anthropic bill by ~60% overnight”
“Just move to API billing if not getting enough subsidized compute is that big a deal for you?”
“I am unable to access claude api at all and never used any of the banned bots on the account.”
“the tokens in my experience are valuable”
“frequently makes undocumented changes and only publishes acknowledgement of change after users complain”
“It works really well and usually ends up costing $25/day if I use it all day.”
“The fact that it's impossible to get the actual thinking tokens anymore, but we have to do with a rewritten summary, is extremely off-putting.”
“It is the simple no hassle way to get around any issue you are having, pay the API cost and you will have no limitations!”
“the API felt faster to respond”
“as a surface area I can understand.”
“you keep control over how and where you run your prompts”
“If subscriptions are for humans and API is for automation, fine.”
“Anthropic/OAI/Google "just work" and you get what it says on the tin”
“I end up paying for you guys to parse your resumes so you know, it's annoying but try it.”
“Productivity has never been higher.”
“If that was true, then getting equivalent usage of the API without claude.ai and Claude Code should cost less , not more .”
“switching to the API with the same prompt immediately fixes it”
“I also think it's the top-level coder.”
“Claude performed better on legal nuance”
“I'm not sure "wasted work is cheap" really holds up when you look at the token unit economics for Claude”
“API should be the most honest way to monetize, right?”
“they are banning for financial economic interests, not nominal alleged contractual violations, so Anthropic is not sympathetic”
“I tried my API key for an hour once; it taught me to laugh at the $200 as quite a deal.”
“they at least have a sane interface for API keys and billing!”
“Claude is weirdly good at generating functional game logic from vague prompts”
“I prefer the occasional downtime here and there”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.