Claude Desktop runs on an official subscription and third-party APIs together

A developer who pays for a Claude subscription and also calls a cheaper third-party API through Claude Desktop has had to pick one at a time, closing the window on whichever one they are not using. A Windows tool published five days ago by GitHub user TonF1917 opens as many Claude Desktop windows as you want and points each one at a different API, so an official subscription window and a third-party API window run together with separate taskbar buttons and separate colored icons.

The repository is called claude-desktop-multiple-windows-different-api, is MIT-licensed, and has 225 stars from the GitHub API stargazers_count field. It ships as a PowerShell script and a small GUI, requires Windows 11 or 10, PowerShell 5.1 and Claude Desktop from the Microsoft Store, and drives its API routing through cc-switch, a separate project by farion1231 that handles multi-provider configuration for Claude Desktop. The project calls itself an unofficial community tool with no affiliation with Anthropic or cc-switch.

How the windows differ

Each window gets its own tinted icon on the desktop, on the taskbar, inside the window and in the system tray, built locally from the icon of the installed Claude app, so no Anthropic artwork ships with the project. The README lists preset palettes named after other providers (Gemini, GPT, Perplexity, DeepSeek, WorkBuddy), and you can pass any #RRGGBB. One window can be fixed to a specific cc-switch provider and talk to that provider's upstream directly, in Anthropic format, with the real upstream model ids. Another window can follow whatever cc-switch is set to at the moment. The default third-party icon is the official purple-black with a white star, which keeps an official window visually distinct from a third-party one.

What mirrors between windows

The README's own table lists what mirrors across windows. New sessions, session titles, pinned and starred sessions, pin order and MCP servers all mirror, through the shared config file and a silent background restart; conversation transcripts under ~/.claude/projects are shared natively by every window. Login, provider, model list and window size stay per window on purpose. The author records one limit they could not work around: Claude Desktop keeps its pinned list in memory and rewrites it itself, so a running window does not pick up new pins until it restarts, and a tested run of 17 pins written while the window was closed came back as 12 within 8 seconds. That drop comes from Claude Desktop's own pin behaviour.

The macOS port is untested on real hardware

The macOS folder exists, but the README says out loud that it was written without access to a Mac. The author ran the configuration, palette, icon recolouring and session mirroring code on Windows, and left the macOS-only steps following the documented behaviour of each Apple tool. On macOS the port does not yet carry pin or MCP sync, claude:// deep links, a tray icon or official-window isolation. Bug reports are invited.

For a team mixing an official Anthropic subscription with a third-party API, this is the first short answer to running both without closing one. Three caveats: it is community software only five days old, it depends on cc-switch continuing to work the way the README expects, and none of the Mac code has run on real hardware yet.

Source

• Primary: TonF1917/claude-desktop-multiple-windows-different-api, MIT licence, 225 stars from the GitHub API stargazers_count field.
• Related: cc-switch, the Claude Desktop provider switcher this tool drives.