Why Does Warp Stay Out of Token Reselling?

Zach Lloyd says paying by the API is 5 to 50 times more expensive than buying a pile of subscriptions. Small companies he talks with want the factory but stay on a rotating collection of $200 subscriptions, and that rotation is the cheapest way. They are probably not running anything like 17 different subscriptions. He does not know whether the terms allow the rotation. The other benefits disappear, it does not scale, and past a certain company size it will not be allowed.

Shawn Wang adds that a $200 plan includes $8,000 of API usage, and Lloyd agrees that is not money to ignore. Lloyd does not want Warp in the pure coding-agent business, because a competitive coding agent cannot be built on something that costs so much more. Cursor was brilliant and did it. He thinks Cursor then had a perfect exit and became a model lab once it fully saw the economics.

Warp Factories is pitched as a coding-agent optimization platform and a coding-agent productivity platform, not a token-reselling product. Staying out of token reselling is a strength. Lloyd does not know how the remaining independent coding agents will keep going. Lloyd names Cognition, OpenCode, and Factory.