dario

🗓️ 2026-06-15 — Anthropic splits Claude billing. Agent-SDK and claude -p (headless) traffic stops counting against your subscription pool and moves to a small separate monthly credit ($20 / $100 / $200 by plan), then metered per-token API rates. Most proxies forward your requests in exactly the shape that gets reclassified into that bucket. dario rewrites every request into interactive Claude Code wire-shape before it leaves your machine, so your traffic stays in the subscription pool you already pay for — same install, no config change for the cliff. What changes, and how to verify it on your own machine →

⛔ Claude Fable 5 / Mythos 5 — temporarily suspended for all Anthropic customers. On 2026-06-12 a US-government legal directive disabled Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for every Anthropic plan and tier — api.anthropic.com now returns not_found for them, and no account or proxy can route around it (details). As of v4.8.71, dario filters both families out of /v1/models and rejects any spelling (fable, fable1m, claude-fable-5, claude-fable-5[1m], claude:fable) up front with a clean 404 pointing at claude-opus-4-8 / claude-sonnet-4-6 — instead of forwarding into a confusing upstream error. Reversible without a code change once access is restored: set DARIO_SUSPENDED_MODELS= (empty) on the instance. npm install -g @askalf/dario@latest

⚠️ Still on a version before 4.8.39? Upgrade now — those could silently corrupt code/structured content routed through the proxy (the identifier scrub stripped tokens like the JS continue keyword). Details →

You're already paying $20, $100, or $200 a month for Claude. Then Cursor wants an API key. Aider wants an API key. Cline, Continue, Zed, your scripts — every one of them bills you again, per token, while the subscription you already bought sits idle in Claude Code.

dario is one local endpoint that routes all of them through the Claude subscription you already pay for. Point any Anthropic- or OpenAI-compatible tool at http://localhost:3456 and you're done. No per-tool config, no second bill.

# 1. Install
npm install -g @askalf/dario

# 2. Log in to your Claude subscription (Pro, Max 5x, or Max 20x)
dario login                 # or `dario login --manual` for SSH / headless

# 3. Start the local proxy
dario proxy                 # separate terminal or background

# 4. Point any Anthropic-compat tool at it
export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://localhost:3456
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=dario

That's the whole setup. Every tool that honors those env vars now runs on your subscription.

Works with: Claude Code, Cursor, Aider, Cline, Roo Code, Continue.dev, Zed, Windsurf, OpenHands, OpenClaw, Hermes, Codex CLI, the Claude Agent SDK, your own scripts.

Add other providers and reuse the same proxy:

dario backend add openai     --key=sk-proj-...
dario backend add groq       --key=gsk_...    --base-url=https://api.groq.com/openai/v1
dario backend add openrouter --key=sk-or-...  --base-url=https://openrouter.ai/api/v1
dario backend add local      --key=anything   --base-url=http://127.0.0.1:11434/v1

export OPENAI_BASE_URL=http://localhost:3456/v1
export OPENAI_API_KEY=dario

Force a specific backend with a model prefix: openai:gpt-4o, claude:opus, groq:llama-3.3-70b, local:qwen-coder. Prefer Docker? ghcr.io/askalf/dario:latest — multi-arch (amd64+arm64), published every release (guide). Something off? dario doctor prints one paste-ready health report.

The interactive TUI

Type dario with no args (in another terminal) to open a full-screen control panel — live request stream, per-model burn-rate, rate-limit utilization, billing-bucket breakdown, and an in-place config editor that writes to ~/.dario/config.json. It turns subscription accounting from "log files" into "watch it happen." Pure ANSI, zero new runtime deps. Migrating from v3? See MIGRATION.md.

┌─ dario ─────────────────────────────[ q quit · Tab next · ? help ]──┐
│  Status   Config   ▎Analytics▎   Hits   Accounts   Backends         │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  ANALYTICS — last 60 min                                            │
│                                                                     │
│  Requests:       247  (4.1/min)        Tokens in:    142,830        │
│  Tokens out:      38,200               Subscription %:  98%         │
│                                                                     │
│  Per-model:                                                         │
│   opus-4-8      ████████████░░░░░░░░  60%  (148 req)               │
│   sonnet-4-6    █████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  26%  ( 64 req)               │
│   haiku-4-5     ███░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  14%  ( 35 req)               │
│                                                                     │
│  Rate-limit:                                                        │
│   5h  ████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  18%                             │
│   7d  ██░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░   8%                             │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

The deadline: 2026-06-15

On 2026-06-15, Anthropic splits Claude billing in two. Agentic traffic — Agent SDK, claude -p headless — stops counting against your subscription pool and gets a separate small monthly credit. Announced 2026-05-13 via Claude's Help Center and a @ClaudeDevs X post — no anthropic.com blog post, no email to most subscribers, no mention in CC release notes.

A sustained Cline or Aider session burns $100 of API-rate tokens in an evening. Any proxy that forwards requests in their original claude -p / Agent-SDK shape — which is most of them — dumps your agentic traffic into that small credit bucket, then onto metered pricing.

dario doesn't. Every outbound request is rebuilt into interactive Claude Code wire-shape before it leaves your machine — headers, body key order, TLS stack, session-id lifecycle, and (--stealth) the temporal axis: response-correlated think-time and session-start latency. Anthropic's billing classifier sees an interactive Claude Code session. Your traffic stays in the subscription pool you already pay for.

Same install, same localhost:3456, no config change for the cliff. Verify on your own machine: dario doctor --usage fires one request and surfaces the rate-limit headers — representative-claim should read five_hour or seven_day (subscription buckets). Full breakdown: docs/why-now-2026-06.md.

The money

Switching providers is a model-name change, not a reconfigure. Add a backend once and the same localhost:3456 speaks OpenAI, Groq, OpenRouter, or a local Ollama too.

The principle dario operates on

Two layers, separated:

1. Tiered pricing is fine. Anthropic can charge differently for first-party use vs. third-party use. Every SaaS does this.
2. Hiding the tier from the customer is not. When the public docs say "1M context available on Sonnet/Opus" but the auth layer rejects every attempt to access it on the OAuth path most subscribers use — when the billing classifier silently flips your request to overage without saying which signal trigge