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. 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 why I built Termic.

What 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.

Nobody got banned, and nobody got an email saying their tool was dead.

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.

So it’s in the group that moved to credits. The app looks exactly the same. The only thing that changed is which pile of money it spends. As of June 15 that’s the Agent SDK credit, then your API balance. The subscription you’re already paying for doesn’t get touched.

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. 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 bills your subscription, and so does any tool that just runs that CLI. That’s Termic.

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

It spawns the real claude, codex, agy (Antigravity), copilot and grok binaries (not the vendor SDKs), so inference rides on the Pro / Max plan you already pay for.

It finds the binary already on your PATH. It doesn’t ship its own copy or 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. That’s the interactive path Anthropic explicitly kept on subscriptions, and Termic adds no markup.

The session header reads “Claude Max”. Same binary you run in iTerm, billed to your subscription.

You don’t lose the Conductor part you liked

Termic does what 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 macOS sandbox (Seatbelt plus a network allowlist). 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.

FAQ

My Conductor agents still work. So what’s the problem? There’s no outage. Since June 15 it’s billing the Agent SDK credit instead of your subscription. You’ll only see it in your usage graph.

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.

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. If Anthropic ever moves the interactive CLI to credits too, Termic gets billed the same way.

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. You don’t need an account or a license key, and there’s no backend.