OmniRoute + Claude Code is INSANE (Why I Cancelled My Claude Code Subscription)

I canceled my Claude code subscription last month and not because Claude code got worse. I canceled it because one open source tool now lets me run Claude code for almost nothing. The gateway is called Omni route. It is a free router, one endpoint on your machine, over 200 providers sitting behind it. 50 of those

providers ship a free tier. 11 of them stay free forever. Wire it into Claude code and you get the exact same experience you already love. Model agnostic routing, no 5-hour timer, and a bill that trends towards zero. Let me be fair up front. Claude code is one of the best coding tools anyone has shipped.

Opus is still what I reach for on the hardest problems. So, this is not a takedown. This is about the subscription cost and the usage ceiling and why the thing I was paying to avoid finally has a workaround. So, here is the entire build, start to finish, plus the honest places where it still has limits. Start

with the part people skip past. Claude code itself is not the problem. The problem is the meter underneath it. The pro plan is $20 a month. Max runs $100 to $200. Your usage refills on a rolling 5-hour window with a weekly cap stacked on top of it. Hit the ceiling in the middle of a task and you either wait it

out or flip to pay as you go and watch the tokens tick past your budget. Anthropic even doubled those limits back in May, which tells you how often people were slamming into them. Add it all up and here is your position. A tool you genuinely love on a clock you do not control. For occasional work, that is

completely fine. For someone in the terminal all day, the ceiling shows up sooner than you would like. What I actually wanted was small. The exact same tight loop of read, edit, run, and fix. The same Claude code interface I already had muscle memory for, but with my own keys, my own routing, and no