Conductor stopped using your Claude subscription. You probably didn't notice.

There was no error. That’s the trap.

Conductor still opens. Agents still run. Nothing throws a warning. But go look at your Anthropic usage, and you’ll see it: Conductor isn’t running on your Pro/Max subscription anymore. It’s spending a separate credit. The plan you already pay for sits there unused while a different meter ticks.

TL;DR: On June 15, 2026, Claude Agent SDK usage stopped drawing from subscriptions and moved to a separate monthly credit, then API rates past that. Conductor is built on the Agent SDK, so it’s in scope. The interactive claude CLI in your terminal was left alone. So the fix is to use a tool that runs that CLI instead of the SDK. That’s the whole reason I built Termic.

What actually changed on June 15

There are two ways to reach Claude programmatically, and Anthropic just split their billing.

The interactive CLI is the claude you type in your terminal. It runs on your Pro/Max subscription. Anthropic was explicit that this one, along with chat and Claude Cowork, is unaffected.

The Claude Agent SDK is the other way. As of June 15, SDK usage (plus claude -p, Claude Code GitHub Actions, and any third-party app that authenticates through the SDK) no longer counts against your subscription. It draws from a separate monthly credit instead: $20 on Pro, $100 on Max 5x, $200 on Max 20x, billed at standard API rates. Spend past the credit and you’re paying API rates per token. The credit doesn’t roll over.

No ban, no error, no email saying your tool is dead. They just moved the SDK to a different wallet.

Why Conductor is on the wrong side of it

Conductor is built on the Claude Agent SDK. That’s how it drives its parallel agents.

Which means it landed squarely in the group that moved to credits. Nothing in the app looks different. Same UI, same agents, same workflow. The only thing that changed is which pile of money it spends, and as of June 15 that’s the Agent SDK credit, then your API balance, not the subscription you’re already paying for.

That isn’t something Conductor can patch away. It’s built on the path Anthropic just repriced.

What it costs you

You’re already paying for Max. Now Conductor spends the SDK credit on top of it, and agentic coding burns through a credit fast. Every file read, every tool call, every retry. Once the monthly credit is gone, you’re on per-token API rates for the rest of the cycle.

I let mine run a day before I clocked what was happening. The usage graph told the story my terminal didn’t. You don’t get an alert for this. You get a number at the end of the month.

The fix: run the CLI, not the SDK

The interactive CLI still rides your subscription. So a tool that just runs that CLI rides it too. No SDK, no credit pool, no per-token meter.

That’s Termic. Here’s the actual mechanism, not a slogan.

Termic spawns the real claude, codex, gemini, grok and agy (Antigravity) binaries inside a PTY, the same ones you’d run in iTerm. From the README:

Termic spawns the real claude / codex / gemini / grok / agy CLIs inside PTYs, the same binaries you run in iTerm. It does NOT use the vendor SDKs (which bill against a separate credit pool as of June 2026); inference rides on your existing Pro / Max plan.

It finds the binary already on your PATH. It does not ship its own copy. It does not set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY behind your back. It inherits your environment as-is and lets the CLI use whatever auth it already has. There’s no Termic backend in the middle, because there isn’t a backend at all. The app is fully on-device.

So Claude sees exactly what it sees when you run claude in iTerm: your subscription. Same wallet, no markup, and it’s the interactive path Anthropic explicitly kept on subscriptions.

The header says it out loud: “Claude Max.” Same binary you run in iTerm, riding your subscription, not the SDK credit.

You don’t lose the Conductor part you liked

This isn’t a downgrade trade. Termic does the thing you came to Conductor for: parallel agents, each in its own git worktree, with a diff to review their work.

Then it adds what Conductor doesn’t have. A main checkout mode for work that doesn’t deserve a branch. Multi-repo tasks. A real sandbox on macOS. Inline review comments you fire straight back at the agent.

Moving over is small. There’s a migration guide, and your old $CONDUCTOR_PORT preview URLs still work unchanged. I didn’t have to find-and-replace a thing.

What to do right now

1. Check your Anthropic usage. If Conductor has been spending the SDK credit, you’ll see it there, not in the app.
2. Decide if you’re fine burning that credit, then API rates, on top of your plan. Some people are. If you’re not, keep reading.
3. Install Termic, add a repo, open a task. It runs the same claude you use in your terminal, so you’re back on your subscription with nothing metered.

FAQ

My Conductor agents still work. So what’s the problem? That’s the point. There’s no outage. Since June 15 it’s billing the Agent SDK credit instead of your subscription. You find it in your usage graph, not an error.

Wait, is this a ban? No. Anthropic didn’t block anything. They moved Agent SDK usage off subscriptions onto a separate credit, and kept interactive use (terminal Claude Code, chat, Cowork) on subscriptions. It’s a billing split, not a shutdown.

Does Termic need an API key? No. It runs the binary already on your machine with the auth that binary already has. If claude works in your terminal on your plan, it works in Termic on your plan. Termic never sets ANTHROPIC_API_KEY for you.

Will Termic start metering credits too? Not unless it switches to the Agent SDK, which it doesn’t. It runs the interactive CLI in a PTY, the path that stayed on subscriptions. As long as that holds, so does Termic.

I have a pile of Conductor config. Is switching painful? No. The concepts map almost one to one, and the old $CONDUCTOR_* variables still resolve, so most preview URLs and run scripts work as-is. See Migrating from Conductor.

Is Termic really free? Yes. Free, open source, AGPL-3.0. No account, no license key, no backend.