The End of All-You-Can-Eat AI: How April 2026 Killed the Flat-Rate Era for Developers

If you blinked over the last four weeks, you missed the moment the AI coding industry quietly stopped pretending. On April 4, Anthropic banned third-party agent frameworks like OpenClaw from piping through Claude Pro and Max subscriptions. Five days later, OpenAI slid a brand-new $100 ChatGPT Pro tier into the gap between Plus and the original $200 Pro. Google had spent March quietly migrating Antigravity to a credits model with a free tier that keeps shrinking. And on April 27, GitHub dropped t