The cli subscription actually actively cannibalizes the API business in my experience. I think this is a product decision: if you use it to code, they want to control the user experience.

If you use it to back up 100,000 MAUs, then they want you to use the API.

I was originally an API user but the cli subscription is so much cheaper that I switched over. This is a combination of th CLI getting much more useful and reasoning models using many more tokens.