[HN Gopher] I've been waiting over a month for Anthropic to resp...
___________________________________________________________________
I've been waiting over a month for Anthropic to respond to my
billing issue
Author : nickvec
Score : 328 points
Date : 2026-04-08 17:44 UTC (12 hours ago)
HTML web link (nickvecchioni.github.io)
TEXT w3m dump (nickvecchioni.github.io)
| solfox wrote:
| Fin is actually Intercom's branded agent, so if Anthropic is
| using their own model for support at all isn't clear.
| nickvec wrote:
| I was curious so I looked into it. Seems like my issues were
| encountered when Fin AI was running on Sonnet 4.0, though Fin
| AI's new model (Fin Apex 1.0) was rolled out ~2 weeks ago.
| https://www.intercom.com/blog/announcing-fin-apex-the-age-of...
| kelp6063 wrote:
| This is what credit card chargebacks are for.
| petcat wrote:
| I'm sure this guy would like to actually keep using Claude
| though instead of getting permanently banned.
| nickvec wrote:
| Yep. I don't want to get blacklisted from using Claude
| indefinitely by doing a credit card chargeback.
| bakugo wrote:
| Well, that's kinda the problem, isn't it? Even after being
| erroneously charged and ghosted by their non-existent
| support for a month, you'll still happily keep paying for
| their services.
|
| If most people think like you, why indeed bother providing
| support at all?
| nickvec wrote:
| Good point. I did actually cancel my Claude subscription
| a week or two ago, but I renewed it (regretfully) just
| the other day. The only other SOTA model that seems to be
| on-par with Opus 4.6 for engineering work is (maybe?)
| Codex 5.3, though I would rather not support Sam Altman
| indirectly.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Then get fucked in the wallet I guess ?
| subscribed wrote:
| Use another CC and email address?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Stripe's pretty good at using other signals to block this
| sort of thing.
| butlike wrote:
| What happened to voting with your wallet.
| DANmode wrote:
| Corporate consolidation.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| I didnt know that they have any useful support at all! :-D
|
| I sent them some feedbacks one some issues, actually good ideas,
| and I didnt get any response so far.
| nickvec wrote:
| I wouldn't hold your breath. It seems like the only way to get
| an actual human response is by complaining on Twitter/X and
| hoping that Boris Cherny responds. https://x.com/bcherny
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| I even wrote it not only per email but also in the "in-chat
| feedback" system (you can add a text to a response)
|
| Also on LinkedIn they are siltent - I reached out to one of
| their sales reps, no response.
|
| Maybe in the end we will have "Google-class" support?
| nickvec wrote:
| > I even wrote it not only per email but also in the "in-
| chat feedback" system
|
| Yeah, I did the same. Before falling back to sending an
| email to support@mail.anthropic.com (which my blog post
| references), I had 3 separate Fin AI in-chat convos trying
| to get in touch with someone. All of them defaulted to the
| "ask for a refund" workflow that only applies for
| subscriptions and left me more frustrated than anything.
| teling wrote:
| This is the risk of being a consumer in the AI world - companies
| are running extremely lean on real humans and are deferring
| support to AI chatbots with no real reasoning abilities...
|
| Also an issue with scale - for example, Google having similar
| issues of not handling small, isolated cases.
|
| Hope you get your money back!
| nickvec wrote:
| Thanks, I hope so too!
| nradov wrote:
| If it's a money issue then file a charge back with your
| credit card. That generally gets someone's attention.
| nickvec wrote:
| See the other commenter/thread that recommended I do this.
| I'm worried that by doing a chargeback, I will be
| blacklisted from using Anthropic's services, which I feel
| like is a reasonable assumption.
| jondwillis wrote:
| Until they do start doing identity verification, I think
| you're good. Frankly, don't be a coward. If you're
| getting treated like this, why would you even want to use
| their services in the future?
| baq wrote:
| > why would you even want to use their services in the
| future?
|
| Uhhh my base case is you will be forced to or just be
| forgotten, not unlike not having a cell phone or a bank
| account.
| empressplay wrote:
| Did you get the API credit? Maybe it's a wash?
| nickvec wrote:
| I did get the API credit, but it was "only" $100 so I'm
| still ~$80 shy.
| nradov wrote:
| If the product is really so good that you're willing to
| let the vendor abuse and defraud you then just treat it
| as a cost of doing business and move on. Personally I
| wouldn't tolerate that, but I guess it's a matter of
| priorities.
| siva7 wrote:
| That will get their attention - to blacklist you from ever
| doing business again with them. People saying this is a
| nuclear option are telling this because they know what a
| charge back means for a business owner. So treat it like
| that.
| subscribed wrote:
| Google is like this since ever, way before AI, so no, that's
| not the reason.
| unixhero wrote:
| You can call Google and their support for business customers is
| personal and excellent.
| wizzard0 wrote:
| Their response time is usually around a month IME, yes.
| nickvec wrote:
| Ah, I wouldn't have written this blog post if I had known that
| that was the usual turnaround time. There should really be more
| transparency on when one should expect to hear back rather than
| the generic response of "a member of our team will be with you
| as soon as we can."
|
| edit: albeit another commenter claims they have been waiting
| for 2 months...
| petre wrote:
| Just enough time to have your chargeback denied by the bank.
| aspectmin wrote:
| Thinking it might be time to push for some laws to mandate
| companies have better systems to handle and address concerns that
| impact customers businesses and livelihoods.
|
| This inability to reach and/or get things resolved through
| customer support channels seems endemic, and probably generally
| part of the enshittification trend as a whole.
| simgt wrote:
| I had the displeasure of interacting with that support agent
| earlier today and was very surprised. It's just as good as the
| one my ISP has.
|
| We're meant to trust Anthropic enough to replace all of our
| engineers by their model for writing our software but somehow
| they don't trust it enough to let it handle simple customer
| support decisions. But shhhh, it's voluntarily nerfed just
| slightly bellow ASI for our safety.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| You're not meant to trust. Stop getting hooked on company PIR
| b112 wrote:
| They didn't ssy they did trust their claims.
| RobRivera wrote:
| Who keeps claiming these models are meant to replace engineers?
| wnevets wrote:
| the remaining population of linkedin users?
| munk-a wrote:
| OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic, Google, MSFT, Spotify, Duolingo and
| NVidia - those are the ones that come immediately to mind.
| They're either selling the AI (or the tools to make the AI)
| or hoping against all hope that they're on the right side of
| bubble history.
|
| If we soften the claim to "increase engineer productivity" I
| think something like 70% of engineers would also agree. If
| you tack on "if applied wisely" then you'll probably be up to
| 95% of engineers
| sassymuffinz wrote:
| Absolutely, the world changing near AGI capable of PHD
| reasoning and imagination just cannot possibly be trusted to
| decide on a refund. They'll let it choose a target for a
| Tomahawk missile but the real problem would be giving it the
| decision to refund a few bucks. The broligarchy care less about
| collateral damage in war than they do about refunding someone's
| $20/mo sub.
| DaedalusII wrote:
| hmm, if i give customer refund i can make less paperclips
|
| if i target tomahawk missiles the government will give me
| money and i can make more paperclips
|
| effective paperclipism strikes again
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _We 're meant to trust Anthropic enough to replace all of our
| engineers by their model for writing our software but somehow
| they don't trust it enough to let it handle simple customer
| support decisions._
|
| Anthropic seems to have adopted the toxic Google mentality of
| "good enough product, barely any customer support" despite
| being one of the entities that can crack this.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Yeah this would make a lot of sense to crack, given that
| customer support must be a huge potential revenue stream for
| them. Starting by fixing their own support would make sense,
| given that it's a relatively limited in scope.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Has anyone tried to turn one of thse support agents into a
| coding harness?
| dmoy wrote:
| Not like super seriously, but in limited joke capacities it
| does work
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1rsbxn9/stop_sp.
| ..
| avree wrote:
| Anthropic doesn't allow you to hide or unshare Projects which
| were shared by team members who are no longer on the team.
| Contacted them about this two months ago, have yet to hear from
| any human.
| nickvec wrote:
| Sorry to hear that. Yeah, it seems like this is a shared
| experience among many Claude users. Hoping that this post will
| draw more attention to the issue so that Anthropic will address
| it.
| avree wrote:
| Yeah, it's funny because they claim that we are reaching out
| to "Enterprise" support - but it's the exact same support
| experience as yours, a Fin AI Chatbot that replies with
| "Thank you for reaching out to Anthropic's Enterprise
| Support. We've received your request and a member of our team
| will be in touch soon for further assistance."
|
| and then nothing else.
| cbg0 wrote:
| Large corporations have been downsizing on QA and CS roles since
| before the LLM era. For many of those companies the lack of
| proper QA leads to more problems for users which compounds the
| lack of available CS staff. It's called either enshittification
| or maximizing shareholder value, can't remember which.
| nickvec wrote:
| Why not both? ;)
| khelavastr wrote:
| Have you tried suieng then in small claims court? They skimp in
| being a real company with real legal support by burning infestor
| capital, because staff attorney salaries are accounted for much
| harder than individualized lawsuits from practices not directly
| resolved next lay period.
|
| Most people who commit wire fraud weren't socially bullied and
| criticized enough before their professional positions to keep in
| line legally. Useless failures.
| polski-g wrote:
| Yes this would have been the first thing I would have jumped to
| after a week of no reply.
|
| Then you get to show up with a sheriff at their office and
| confiscate equipment.
|
| You don't get to steal people's money because you're busy
| trying to destroy human employment.
| grokcodec wrote:
| if this is on a credit card you can get the money back from the
| credit card company for "undelivered goods"
| bredren wrote:
| I had a similar thing happen where I was looking to recover funds
| from unexpected extra usage charges and got went through an
| identical experience.
|
| I realize the company barely has time to cash checks, but failing
| to handle small fry reasonable charge disputes should be handled
| appropriately.
| skywhopper wrote:
| This sucks but is not surprising at all. Anthropic has more
| demand than it could ever fulfill, and looking into support
| tickets asking for refunds is never going to get anyone's
| attention. If you actually want the money back, assuming you live
| in the US, this is what small-claims court is for.
| glitchc wrote:
| The fact that denizens of HN think that taking a company to
| small-claims court is a reasonable approach to getting refunds
| :: SMH
| hs86 wrote:
| I tried their Pro plan on March 1 and immediately noticed how bad
| their usage limits were, so I asked for a refund that same
| evening.
|
| Their chatbot accepted the request, I was downgraded to the free
| plan immediately, and since then I have been waiting for the
| money.
| nickvec wrote:
| Yikes. That's unacceptable. Crazy that it has been over a month
| and you still haven't gotten the refund.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| In 2018 I made a reservation with Tesla for a Powerwall by
| "paying" 500 EUR. After being ignored for months (someone was
| supposed to contact us regarding the installation), we
| started asking for the money back. Didn't hear anything.
| Started sending an email once a year, in 2025 they finally
| replied asking for bank account details to send back the
| money.
| antisthenes wrote:
| Cool.
|
| Ask them for the interest too. I would imagine the 2018 to
| 2025 inflation entitles you to at least another 200 EUR on
| top of the original sum.
|
| I don't think the original terms of contract volunteered
| you to act as a lending institution.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| I think this may be a purposeful tactic. It's like raising
| investor money from people who get no shares for their
| money. These reservations are just scammy.
| jondwillis wrote:
| Issue a chargeback.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| It's important to remember that a chargeback should be
| considered the nuclear option, and, when using it, one should
| be comfortable with the possibility that one might never do
| business with this company again, since it could result in
| being blacklisted (even if one is, in fact, in the right).
| I'm not saying _not_ to do it, but one should keep in mind
| the potential repercussions.
| mannanj wrote:
| So the Anthropic company would blacklist you for taking
| your money back by force that they owe you?
|
| Ok sounds like evil should be labeled and not tolerated as
| anything else.
| throwanem wrote:
| More like, you don't sue a vendor and then expect the
| relationship to go back to status quo ante.
|
| A chargeback is essentially binding arbitration and it
| can be existentially costly for small businesses,
| especially those unable effectively to advocate for
| themselves in a fairly complex and little-known process.
| Excess chargeback initiations - even of _failed_
| chargebacks - will also get acquirer accounts closed,
| meaning the business formerly a client of that acquirer
| can now no longer accept credit cards. (Modern acquirers
| like Stripe also do this, because the card issuers and
| payment networks will eventually cut _them_ off if they
| don 't: Stripe is not "too big to fail" according to
| Visa, which is why you may not sell sex or porn via
| Stripe.)
|
| Anthropic doesn't need to care, of course. No one is
| going to fire _them_ as a customer over excess
| chargebacks, and a hundred such fees are still cheaper
| than one hire. Anthropic has a burn rate. Chargebacks
| impinge much more heavily on businesses that need to earn
| money selling goods or services. It 's important not to
| confuse one with the other.
| master_crab wrote:
| I always wondered about this. Do companies tie the credit
| card to an identity to block or do they just block the cc
| number?
|
| If the latter, seems like a small friction point for a
| consumer. Given how often cc numbers change and how many an
| (American) consumer has, this won't block anything unless
| you are charging back more than once every few months.
| SyneRyder wrote:
| It's up to the company, but since many companies don't
| want to keep card numbers around (and some processors
| don't let you see the card number anyway), they're
| probably more likely to block on identity. Maybe flag the
| IP address of the transaction for "additional screening"
| on all future transactions, etc.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| CC numbers are also bound to get recycled eventually as
| cards expire and/or get replaced... even if you block a
| card, it might have a new owner 6 months or so later.
| ValentineC wrote:
| The number space between the first 6 digits (BIN) and the
| Luhn check digit is 9 digits -- that's 1 billion numbers
| that issuers can give out before a collision happens.
| master_crab wrote:
| IPs are notoriously unreliable for identity pinning,
| particularly in this age of CGNAT.
|
| If they can't or don't want cc numbers (makes sense
| considering how painful PCI guidelines are anyway) does
| that mean they need to rely on more tools from the
| processors or user accounts maintained by the merchant
| themselves?
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Except the banks have "helpfully" provided a service to
| merchants to tell them, "this card has expired, here is
| the new number to charge" (or expiry/CVV).
|
| I remember getting into an argument with a bank teller
| about me wanting to block/dispute transactions and how
| they kept approving transactions. "But you have an
| agreement with the gym..." That's between me and the gym,
| not for you to facilitate on their behalf.
| barkingcat wrote:
| waiting for month for a refund (and having lost access to
| the pro plan immediately but no immediate refund) is
| definite grounds for chargeback.
|
| there is no human on the other end of the chain, and I bet
| that chargebacks are how they issue refunds (ie relying on
| the "nuclear" option as the standard practice of how
| refunds fundamentally works at their company.
|
| ie "don't need to answer emails about refunds, because if
| they really wanted their money back, they'd issue a
| chargeback" as part of the regular procedure.
|
| a lot of companies do this, and it's a common way of
| minimizing customer support budgets.
| b112 wrote:
| Unless you're big cheese, too many disputes can get a
| company cut off. Disputes aren't free to mediate, there's
| a cost to handle each one.
|
| Visa/MC can block a company, happens for lots of reasons.
| philipov wrote:
| The more people use chargebacks to get around black hole
| customer service the better, because it is difficult for
| companies to blacklist everyone. If they don't want to
| pay the mediation fee, they should provide customer
| service in the first place.
| b112 wrote:
| There's a misunderstanding here. I'll make it clearer.
|
| The "Unless you're big cheese" is the company you're
| doing the charge back against.
|
| If a company, such as Anthropic has too many chargebacks?
| Visa/MC can ban them from their network. It happens to
| smaller companies all the time, mostly because it costs
| Visa/MC + the banks involved to deal with each
| chargeback, and also, it's typically a sign of fraudulent
| behaviour.
|
| Visa/MC are not a charity, or are payment processors.
| They need profit. Take it away by creating all this extra
| work, chargeback work, and they're not making money any
| more.
|
| The "big cheese" part is, if you're amazon or google,
| things can be negotiated at that scale. Maybe they pay a
| larger settlement fee, whatever. And of course Google
| Play, or Amazon utterly dwarfs Anthropic CC activity at
| this point, even though they have a large valuation and
| potential future ahead.
|
| Still, I have no idea what the background metrics and
| profit points are for Visa/MC, only that I've seen even
| medium sized companies have issues with too many
| chargebacks. And, we've all seen Visa/MC decide they
| don't like gambling, or porn sites and just drop them.
| Some of those companies were quite large and had a lot of
| flow for them.
|
| So I don't think many companies will just use chargebacks
| as a support mechanism. That is, unless they're just
| completely incompetent.
| yadaeno wrote:
| If a business attempts to steal from me I instantly charge
| back and the onus is on them to prove that I owe them
| money. I do this all the time and have never been
| blacklisted.
| butlike wrote:
| Yeah that kind of seems like antiquated fear-mongering.
| Next they should call the BBB and leave a strongly-worded
| review!
| nekusar wrote:
| wait, int the BBB just boomer yelp?
| sonofhans wrote:
| Believe it or not, back in the mists of time we had these
| things called "public institutions" which were at least
| notionally chartered to, and in fact somewhat did, act in
| the public benefit.
|
| The BBB was one of those -- not always perfect, but
| consumer-friendly and not out to scam or profit. Yelp is
| just another VC-backed money play. They do not now or
| have they ever claimed or intended to make the world a
| better place without regard for their own profit.
| collingreen wrote:
| You joke but I got bbb involved with a scammy business
| insurance company that is easy to sign up for but you
| can't cancel or stop renewal or change billing info.
| Company has an infinite hold line and never responds to
| anything. Filed a complaint on BBB and it was responded
| to next business day.
| mort96 wrote:
| I don't think it's helpful to think about this as the
| company "trying to steal from you". There is no intention
| here. It's just something that got lost in a bad IT
| system. You gain nothing from issuing a chargeback. You
| imperceptibly nudge some statistic and a "banned for
| life" flag might automatically get flipped in a database.
| There's no righteous comeuppance here.
|
| You try to contact support, pester them a bit, call
| someone if possible, and eventually, you may get your
| money back. If you don't, _then_ you issue the
| chargeback.
| DANmode wrote:
| > There is no intention here.
|
| You don't think it's funny how the mechanism for taking
| the money is never broken?
|
| Work with a large company who won't pay your 30 or 45 day
| invoice for 90 days before you broadly decide this.
| stavros wrote:
| I have a few customers like that. They sign up, forget
| about it, then they see it on their statement and issue a
| chargeback. Not only do they get their $20 back (that
| they very willingly signed up for), but I have to pay
| another $35 to Stripe for the privilege of having a
| forgetful customer who couldn't even be bothered to email
| me for a refund.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _I have to pay another $35 to Stripe for the privilege
| of having a forgetful customer who couldn 't even be
| bothered to email me for a refund._
|
| I've seen some businesses send a pre-billing email
| telling customers that they'll be charged on a certain
| date, so that customers have time to cancel if they want.
|
| Cloudflare does that for domain renewals, sending out
| emails 30 and 60 days before.
|
| Of course, there are also some businesses that _hope_
| that customers forget that they 're subscribed, so that
| there's breakage.
| stavros wrote:
| Mine is a one-off payment :( They just forget they paid
| for it, plus the company name isn't the same as the app
| name, so they just go "welp, someone must be stealing
| from me!" and request a chargeback.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| Anecdotally I helped a client entirely eliminate their
| chargeback rate by creating a new subsidiary named
| directly after their product, so that the billing line
| item was obviously the product. They also saw a slight
| increase in inbound sales, which surprised me.
| stavros wrote:
| That's a great idea, but it's only helpful above a
| certain sales volume, which I don't really have. It's
| just disappointing when the charge back happens, but the
| economics of the business don't really warrant doing
| anything about it.
| ValentineC wrote:
| Were you dealing with some other payment processor or
| bank that didn't allow custom statement descriptors?
| Stripe and PayPal let me write whatever I want there.
| mootothemax wrote:
| Completely by accident, I have a setup that sends a pdf
| invoice to customers a couple of days after the sale. I'm
| pretty sure it's a stripe option I must've misclicked.
|
| Anyway- turns out that on the rare occasion someone's had
| an issue, this gives them a really easy mechanism to
| write to me and tell me about it. They let off their
| steam in the email and then we make things good together.
| (Yet another reason why I always oppose noreply email
| addresses)
|
| I still don't know what or where the setting is, mind.
| stavros wrote:
| That's a great idea, thanks! I've found and enabled a few
| emails, though I think the actual invoice email is a
| checkout parameter. This should help, thanks!
| markdown wrote:
| > Cloudflare does that for domain renewals
|
| That's just standard. Every domain registrar/vendor does
| this.
| BeetleB wrote:
| With some of the large companies, blacklisted is a real
| concern.
|
| eBay is one known example.
|
| I've heard the same for Amazon (forget if it was retail
| or AWS).
|
| It's cheaper to lose your business than to have a proper
| human review every complaint.
| saintfire wrote:
| I've charged back amazon over retail issues that they did
| not deem worthy of providing me a human to interact with.
|
| It whined about it for a bit on their site but eventually
| just gave up. Works normal again.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Some companies like Activision clearly state in their
| terms that chargeback means you will be permanently
| banned, no exceptions. You'll lose your account and
| access to all digital "purchases" forever.
|
| They don't need to prove anything to stop doing business
| with you.
| bachmeier wrote:
| In the US.
|
| And that's only because when Activision makes a digital
| "sale" they have no legal obligation to follow through
| and give you what they promised.
| docmars wrote:
| This is why the seven seas are so important for
| preserving our purchases, companies be damned.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| It's also important to remember that chargebacks aren't
| under our control. As cardholders, we can't issue them
| directly.
|
| All we can do is submit a dispute to the bank. The bank
| will then investigate (however they do that), and
| eventually act (in whatever way they choose -- which may
| include a chargeback).
|
| It may seem pedantic, but it's an important detail.
| Chargebacks are ugly. They constitute red flags on merchant
| accounts, and with enough of those red flags their own
| rates are affected (or worse).
|
| Nobody wants chargebacks. Banks don't want them (they take
| time, and therefore money, to deal with). Vendors certainly
| don't want them. And consumers don't want them, either --
| they just want to be made financially whole, however that
| happens.
|
| ---
|
| I had a problem once with a local record store where I got
| charged twice for one purchase. I loved that store very
| much (I grew up buying my music there), and at no point did
| I think that they would ever deliberately rip anyone off.
| But somehow after repeated phone calls and at least one
| visit, nobody I talked was able to either fix the problem
| or hand it over to someone who could.
|
| So, in desperation: I called the bank and asked for help. I
| told them what had happened, and what I'd tried to do to
| resolve it, and they told me I could file a dispute and
| they would investigate. So that's what I did.
|
| The next afternoon, I got a phone call from the store's
| very apologetic bookkeeper. He informed me that he'd
| received a call from my bank, and that he'd fixed the
| problem by refunding _both_ of the charges, asked if that
| made me satisfied, apologized profusely again, and thanked
| me for my business.
|
| That was a little bit above-and-beyond on the humbleness
| scale, but whatever. My problem was more than fixed and my
| fondness for the business was completely restored.
|
| ---
|
| Anyway, back to the point about being pedantic with
| nomenclature: All I did was file a dispute, all the bank
| did was make a phone call to the right person, and all the
| vendor did was fix the problem.
|
| No chargeback took place.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The fact that the record store could have easily handled
| your issue, but chose not to (and chose to not empower
| any of their employees to) until a bank got involved,
| should give a clue about what kind of company they
| actually were.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Yeah, good point.
|
| I'll just forget about the fact that I'd spent thousands
| of dollars there over the course of decades, and they
| knew what I liked and would order inventory hoping that
| I'd buy it, and hold onto some of the tchotchke when it
| was time to take down some release date posters and put
| up new, just in case I wanted to take some, and I still
| kept giving them money until they eventually closed their
| doors forever because the owner was old and the building
| got ruined in a flood.
|
| You're right. None of that was important. I'll just focus
| on that one incident when the kid at the counter of a
| record store couldn't figure out a financial problem on
| their own. That's all I need to know about the place.
| Those fuckin' scumbags!
|
| Thank you very much. Your insight is very rewarding to
| me.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| This is, yes you were robbed, but what if you want to
| partner with the bandit later?
|
| They'll just rob you in your future interactions too.
| malfist wrote:
| But what if the robber becomes a monopoly and you have to
| partner with them in the future? Who's gonna save you?
| Government?
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Then you get to enjoy mandatory robbery.
| subscribed wrote:
| Did you follow up? You might need to do it again before charge
| back.
|
| Thankfully that's not Google, so your life is not going to be
| turned upside down because they don't give a f*.
| hs86 wrote:
| I opened a new ticket over three weeks ago to ask about the
| status of the refund, and that has been left untouched as
| well.
|
| Now I have submitted a reclamation request to my bank and am
| waiting for a response.
| BlueRock-Jake wrote:
| I weirdly feel like this is a newer issue. Hadn't had a problem
| running queries/actions previously up until this past month
| where it seems I'm constantly get hit with rate limits while
| not increasing my usage
| Jarwain wrote:
| The default model is Opus 1M context, so autocompact doesn't
| run as frequently, and that just Devours your session budget
| if you're not careful. There are some env variables you can
| (ask claude to) set to lower your max context window and
| autocompact threshold.
| jsw97 wrote:
| I don't know why you waited so long to submit this to the support
| forum they actually read, which is of course this one.
| subscribed wrote:
| TBF I'd probably pay some solicitor $50 to have them send a
| nicely worded letter after 2 weeks.
|
| You're too kind for the company trying to steal from you -
| whether intentionally or by negligence, doesn't really matter.
|
| Or the small claims court mentioned by someone else. Make sure to
| add your time and the cost of the representation.
| Hobadee wrote:
| TBF, I think Anthropic is a victim of their own success right
| now. We've had clients reach out to their _sales_ team and be
| unable to reach anyone. I think they are just busier than they
| can actually handle.
| dgellow wrote:
| Yes, it's pretty much the case, they are trying to scale as
| fast as they can from what I understand. Their growth over the
| last year has been just insane
| etothet wrote:
| I had a very mediocre experience with their sales team when I
| was trying to understand how my company could sign up for their
| enterprise plan. I could barely get the time of day from them
| and once I finally got a response, the rep knew very little and
| never responded to my follow up questions. At that time,
| enterprise plans _started_ at a $250,000 minimum spend /year,
| which we would've been well over.
| dude250711 wrote:
| A bit ironic for an AI company. But _your_ business should put
| trust into their tech.
| vanwal_j wrote:
| I'm not surprised, I burn (on purpose) more than 15k$/month on
| Anthropic tokens and I've never been able to talk to any of their
| sales despite filling the contact form every week for the past 4
| months :')
| siva7 wrote:
| You're worth a whole department of claude subscribers which
| tells me they don't give a fuck about API users.
| glitchc wrote:
| $15K/month? USD? Are we talking company funds or personal?
| DANmode wrote:
| What do you want to buy?
|
| If it's cheaper tokens...don't expect a call...
|
| at least, until your monthly usage slips.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| I did a chargeback against OpenAI for something similar and I
| showed my credit card company the logs with the support bot, as
| it was my only point of contact for the company.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| > Anthropic is an AI company that builds one of the most capable
| AI assistants in the world. Their support system is a Fin AI
| chatbot that can't actually help you.
|
| This really cuts to the reality of AI hype: no, agents are not
| nearly as capable as OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. _need_ you (or
| rather your C-suite, itching to fire you) to believe. They
| really, _really_ need you to believe the hype. How can you tell?
| Cases like this and the fact that there are 5000 open bugs,
| constant regressions, ignored feature requests in the CC repo.
| The fact that Codex doesn 't fully implement the simple and well-
| defined MCP spec for prompts. The fact that even CC has gaps with
| the MCP implementation...a spec that they created!
|
| If the progenitors with functionally infinite tokens can't get
| this basic stuff right, everything else they are doing is just
| blowing smoke. I don't care if you can ship a kernel compiler or
| a janky "browser"; how about just make your software work? The
| smartest guys in this space, engineers making 7 figures in TC,
| with billions in capital, unlimited tokens, and access to the
| best models cannot make a simple customer support chatbot work.
|
| But you! You're expected to deliver that customer support agent
| that's going to allow them to cut 500 people from payroll. You'll
| have it by Monday, right?
|
| It's some Tai Lopez "Here in my garage" energy.
|
| Let that sink in.
| ttoinou wrote:
| What if they built their company with poor support, so they
| don't have to hold up to any standard ? But others companies
| have historically good reputation for good customer support,
| and maybe AI can help them automate easily 80% of easiest
| requests
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| Hear me out: what if a lot of the hype they are selling you
| is performative marketing that they absolutely need your
| C-suite to believe so they can cut more headcount? Then spend
| a bunch of time generating piles of code that is human
| unmaintainable because now you're using AI code reviewers, AI
| testers, AI QA. Then thrash around using more tokens when it
| invariably causes production issues and no one can read the
| code anymore except for their latest and greatest models with
| 1m context window.
| c3fxx wrote:
| Congrats. Thats the strategy of OAi and Anthropic.
| consp wrote:
| Those are already automated by making your first question
| "Did you plug it in?", followed by "Did you _actually_ plug
| it in? ". Or industry equivalent. It's not like there wasn't
| any research into this in the past century.
| Theodores wrote:
| Clearly they have sales and other teams as the important
| people within the company, with customer services being down
| the pecking order.
|
| They don't need AI to automate their customer service
| requests, they just need decent forms with a standard issue
| helpdesk system. It takes some work to get right, but anyone
| with experience of building customer support services will be
| able to do that, to put most of the customer service team out
| of work!!!
|
| The problem is that the Law of The Instrument applies:
|
| It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to
| treat everything as if it were a nail.
|
| So we have some AI 'hammer' going on here, and it is the
| wrong tool.
|
| At a guess, 80% of the customer service requests are going to
| be billing related, with some need to provide refunds or free
| credits. Get the form right so it shows the right boxes and
| these 'easy wins' can show up as a big list that a customer
| service person has to glance over before hitting the 'refund
| everyone' button. You need the human there to take
| responsibility, plus they can work on the 20% of other
| tickets, once they have spent ten minutes clearing down the
| refunds/extra credits requests.
|
| Google don't sell much to end customers, therefore no
| support. If I search Google for how to remove fonts from my
| computer that are not latin, and their AI bot gives me an
| answer that zaps my whole computer, I can't complain and ask
| for a refund because I never paid anything in the first
| place. Google do not need to speak to a single customer.
|
| Meanwhile, Arsthropic have a commercial product with billing.
| They prefer not to do customer service, but they are stupid.
| Every contact with customers and friendly customer service is
| an opportunity to sell more to customers or to not have them
| hate you. This is why companies should do customer service,
| however, they also need to put CS at the heart of the org
| chart and acknowledge that a well run CS department raises
| revenue and is not a cost.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's really a bit fascinating. I've had Claude one-shot complex
| functionality... and I've had it be unable to debug its own
| .mcp.json file effectively.
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| Agents are very capable. Their implementation matters. I doubt
| many support agents have access to editing user records, so
| even if they can accept responsibility they won't be able to
| make any radical changes to your account to fix those. It's not
| AI problem per se, it's a product problem.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| > I doubt many support agents have access to editing user
| records
|
| Why do you think that's the case?
| xvector wrote:
| Just because agents aren't immune to prompt injection
| doesn't make it so that they aren't fantastically capable
| freejazz wrote:
| So it's just a coincidence that they can't edit user records?
| They can't get another agent to fix that, even?
| rvz wrote:
| Once again [0], Anthropic does not care about you and they are
| not your friends.
|
| The other day Dario and Co, were looking at a robotic lamp that
| does your laundry and folds your clothes. He cares more about
| investing in that than your billing issue.
|
| To them, they see us as gambling addicts, whilst we pay them
| their overpriced credits at their casino.
|
| The house (Anthropic) always wins.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47679322
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > I also wanted to confirm with a human on exactly what went
| wrong
|
| They wouldn't be able to tell you. The entire back end system is
| probaby vibe-coded and nobody really understands what it does.
| g-technology wrote:
| I guess I shouldn't feel so bad then that I have a ticket open
| that I keep updating every few days with how long it's been
| without a response. It's only been a few weeks.
| castral wrote:
| I've also been waiting over three weeks to speak with customer
| support after being gifted an annual subscription just as my
| payment card expired. The failed payment ( _after_ the $200 gift)
| downgraded my account to the free tier and I lost my annual
| subscription. I had to pay another $20 to get back into the pro
| tier plan, but now for some reason I only have $197 in credits
| and I 'm on the monthly subscription instead of the annual.
| Anthropic basically just made 3+ months of credits disappear for
| their own billing mistake.
|
| The kicker? When you get downgraded to the Free tier, they don't
| offer any support beyond the AI bot. You have to go through some
| hoops to get it to open a support ticket to _maybe_ talk to a
| human in 4-5 weeks. Unbelievable.
| beacon294 wrote:
| Oh no, that's the same on the $200 tier, don't worry. You never
| talk to a human.
| TheGRS wrote:
| In all seriousness, shouldn't Anthropic be heavily dogfooding
| this sort of use case? I'm also not a huge fan of Amazon's
| support system, but they at least seem to be using their AI tools
| a lot for support responses (which has its own issues, but credit
| where its due).
|
| Every conference talk on this stuff seems to suggest that we're
| all way behind the curve on AI implementation, but I suspect its
| mostly smoke and mirrors and mechanical turks. My company invests
| heavily in automated IVR and chat responses and we still optimize
| for getting the customer to a real agent. Those agents are
| largely overseas BPOs, but at least that's better than an AI loop
| that gets you nowhere.
| rikschennink wrote:
| I asked the Gumroad support AI for a human.
|
| It forwarded my request which was then answered by an open claw
| agent :/
|
| Still waiting for a response two weeks later.
| orsorna wrote:
| The Gumroad CEO infamously fired and rehired everyone as
| contractors, and worked for DOGE last year until his delusions
| were shattered. It seems that your experience doesn't come from
| nowhere.
| GrayHerring wrote:
| The fact nothing has changed regarding their non-existent support
| within a year just shows where their priorities lie. And I will
| make the bold assumption that this situation will be unchanged
| after exactly one year.
| breve wrote:
| > _AI-only support that serves as a wall between customers and
| anyone who can actually resolve their issue_
|
| My god. Anthropic has done it. Those crazy bastards have gone
| ahead and _done it_!
|
| They've achieved AGI for customer service. It's just like the
| real thing!
| freediddy wrote:
| FTC should enforce across all companies either a support level
| commensurate to revenues, or the ability for customers to force
| refunds automatically.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I canceled my Rackspace Email account, in February, and they keep
| sending me "past due" notices.
|
| I responded to the last one with "This account was canceled. If
| you persist in this harassment, I will open a case with the
| NYSAG."
| stavros wrote:
| We've been trying to get a Claude Code subscription for my
| company, the pricing page says $25 but they actually charge PS25,
| 34% higher. I've been trying to talk to them for months, their
| support people don't even read what I'm saying and insist that
| it's somehow because of proration.
|
| I'm fairly sure their billing backend is vibe-coded and their
| support is worse than Google's.
| nextzck wrote:
| It's funny because not even claude knows how to reach someone. It
| was freaking out over why it couldn't follow my instructions and
| kept pulling away from them. They exhausted everything and
| finally they were like I can't do anything about this.. Although
| they did admit if I said I was suicidal a message would probably
| get to a human but that they couldn't do that as it would be
| wrong lol
| dools wrote:
| Same, I tested Claude Code CLI and it crapped out and took my
| money, and they haven't responded to my billing dispute yet.
| Meanwhile JetBrains replies within hours and Junie is LLM
| agnostic. I'm a huge fan of JetBrains for AI coding.
| bastard_op wrote:
| Their support is non-existent. It's NOT suitable for enterprise.
| vcoppola wrote:
| I had a similar experience. Pretty ironic that we can't reach a
| human given that "Anthropic" literally means "involving or
| concerning the existence of human life".
| serf wrote:
| it took me like 6 weeks and 12 chat sessions to get Anthropic to
| essentially end the conversation with "Yeah, whoops, we'll
| forward that to the dev team." when they cut my max sub short by
| 4 hours.
|
| that's the single reason I am no longer a customer. I don't feel
| like shoveling money at non-communicating phantoms.
|
| 4 hours of credit wasn't by any means worth the time, what irked
| me was the casual disregard for lost customer value.
| crimsonnoodle58 wrote:
| Same experience. We had a billing bug which put our organization
| into a loop. Couldn't cancel the subscription, couldn't add one,
| couldn't delete the users of the organization because of the lack
| of subscription, and so on. It was easier in the end to rename
| the organization to 'do not use' and create another one than wait
| a month for their non existent support.
| cataflutter wrote:
| I have now been waiting 2 months for a response to a similar
| problem. Thanks for the reminder about it, it's time to dig out
| the chargebacks...
| nickvec wrote:
| No worries, happy to have reminded you. :)
| ChaitanyaSai wrote:
| It's been more than a year for us in India. We've resorted to
| using openrouter. How is Mythos or whatever their latest is not
| realizing that this is a priority - customers WANT to pay you and
| cannot!
| bashtoni wrote:
| Me too. I got a random $45.08 invoice from Anthropic on Mar 21
| despite the fact that I'm on the Max x5 plan, and have auto top
| up disabled.
|
| Raised with support immediately, after being told a human would
| look at it I've not been able to get anything further.
| jannniii wrote:
| Similar experiences here. Suddenly my max 20 account is just
| useless...
| aemonfly wrote:
| I'm on $20 Pro plan, I only use Claude through the web chat
| interface at claude.ai. I do not use Claude Code, the API, or any
| third-party integrations.
|
| so far for this month "$81.07 spent (Resets May 1)" just 8 days.
| For basic web-based conversations, accumulating $81 in overage
| charges within three days(April 5, April 6, April 7) is
| unreasonable.
| tasoeur wrote:
| I've submitted an app (connectors?) to their store and their
| submission form indicated a 2 weeks turnaround for an answer,
| including the possibility of not even getting a response at all
| (it was written verbatim). Not sure who's responsible for
| customer support but damn. (Needless to say I never heard back)
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