Why developers switch Claude Code to an API key
Subscription plans give you a fixed allowance per week. When you run out mid-task, you wait. With an API key there is no weekly allowance: you top up a balance and every request is deducted from it.
Paying Anthropic's API price directly gets expensive with long agent sessions. Apixo charges up to 95% below that price for the same models, and cached context (which Claude Code re-sends constantly) is billed at the cheap cache rate.