Not to mention their 1 9s availability (I am not joking, check for yourself).
Insert victims of their own success cliche here.
It took like 40 minutes and worked like this:
1. Sign in to the site, get the onboarding screen, download clients.
2. Run a client, it triggers an email with a link to open on the site so i can authenticate it.
3. Instead of authenticating the client, the site sends me to the onboarding screen again.
4-20: repeat the above loop
21. finally get a code I can paste into the client.
I'm sure someone at Anthropic posted a blog entry with how fast they vibe coded the authentication code. Back before they claimed to have vibe coded a compiler that can do a linux kernel.
Raised with support immediately, after being told a human would look at it I've not been able to get anything further.
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.
So they're clearly playing some tricks here when they give you rebates - it turns on the overusage again.
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.
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.
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.
if i target tomahawk missiles the government will give me money and i can make more paperclips
effective paperclipism strikes again
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
https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/ai-ceo-says-softw...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1rsbxn9/stop_sp...
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.
Companies that operate this way figure their customers are either so entrenched they’ll never leave or that it’s cheaper to get a new customer than expend a human’s time fixing a customer’s issue.
I hope OP either files a chargeback with their card or files a small claims court suit. Either way, they should take their money elsewhere.
But they probably won’t, because Claude is the best coding agent. Just like Google is the best search engine/free email/etc.
I realize the company barely has time to cash checks, but failing to handle small fry reasonable charge disputes should be handled appropriately.
> 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.
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.
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.
> I doubt many support agents have access to editing user records
It only has a ~1 in 20,000 chance of working but at scale it'll go through!
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!
Their chatbot accepted the request, I was downgraded to the free plan immediately, and since then I have been waiting for the money.
Thankfully that's not Google, so your life is not going to be turned upside down because they don't give a f*.
They don't need to prove anything to stop doing business with you.
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.
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.
That's just standard. Every domain registrar/vendor does this.
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.
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.
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.
I dunno, sometimes it is.
The most broken I've seen in my favour was a ~$600 purchase where the order flow broke partway through. Customer support was a major pain to get in contact with in order to figure out how to give them my money. When I eventually managed to talk to someone, they advised that maybe their third-party fraud algorithms didn't like my email. I changed my email, the order worked when I placed it again, and I received my product a week later.
Several months later, without any communication from the company, I received a second product in the mail, presumably from the first order that I didn't pay for. Based on how much of a pain it was to contact support the first time, I wasn't about to do so again based on their mistake. To be charitable, I kept the package in my garage for a couple months in case the company contacted me to arrange return shipping. Not hearing from them, I just sold it off.
I have had this experience. I don't see how a chargeback would've helped. Typically, you would invoice someone for time you've worked for them, or sometimes you buy a product from one company and invoice another for the expense.
Chargebacks don't help you get a company to pay your invoice. Debt collectors do.
In any case, this is something different from refunding a purchase as a customer, which was the topic at hand.
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.
They'll just rob you in your future interactions too.
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.
Visa/MC can block a company, happens for lots of reasons.
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.
It's all fake venture capital money, but they are the big cheese.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Ok sounds like evil should be labeled and not tolerated as anything else.
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.
Depends on the specific relationship between the parties and the nature of the lawsuit.
If I sue Walmart, the only grocer in my town, for mislabelling the weight of their ground beef, we (as a society/government) probably shouldn't allow Walmart to retaliate by banning me from their stores.
As with any tenant (owner or domicilee) of a private property in the US, the management of a store has broad privilege over lawful access to the premises, the legal theory at basis being that of trespass. Stores frequently use this power to exclude known shoplifters, check kiters, etc.
Not you, though, not after having prevailed in Marsymars v. Wally World - congratulations! Absent some novel obnoxious behavior on your part, the terms of the judgment are such that treating you as a trespasser would almost certainly result in a further finding of contempt of court, with penalties condign upon the franchise. (The general property right is not abrogated, but the specific judgment takes precedence where it applies.)
That relationship is materially different from the one which predeceased it, and the change was a direct consequence of your suit. Granted, Wal-Mart was not to you a "vendor" in the sense we mean it here but a retail store serving the general public, and you are not a "client" but a customer, and the parallel fails of establishment in several other obvious ways besides. I'm impressed it still goes so well to my point despite those flaws. Good work!
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.
They wouldn't be able to tell you. The entire back end system is probaby vibe-coded and nobody really understands what it does.
and then nothing else.
If most people think like you, why indeed bother providing support at all?
I sent them some feedbacks one some issues, actually good ideas, and I didnt get any response so far.
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?
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.
Most people who commit wire fraud weren't socially bullied and criticized enough before their professional positions to keep in line legally. Useless failures.
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.
Also an issue with scale - for example, Google having similar issues of not handling small, isolated cases.
Hope you get your money back!
It forwarded my request which was then answered by an open claw agent :/
Still waiting for a response two weeks later.
edit: albeit another commenter claims they have been waiting for 2 months...
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.
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.
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."
I'm fairly sure their billing backend is vibe-coded and their support is worse than Google's.
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.
I used a Visa card to buy monthly Pro subscription. One day I ran out of credits so I go to buy extra credit. But my card got declined. I recheck my card limit and try again. Still declined.
I try extending the Pro subscription. It works. Turns out my card had a "Secure by Visa" feature. To complete transaction I needed to submit OTP on a Visa page. This page appears when I pay for Pro but not while buying extra credits.
I open a ticket and mention all the details to Claude support. Even these details they come back with "We have no way of knowing why your card was declined. You need to check with your bank".
Later I get hold of a Mastercard with similar protection. OTP triggers on both subscription and extra usage page.
I share the finding and response is still - "We checked with our engineering team and we have no way of knowing why the other Visa card was declined. You have to check with your bank".
I gave up trying to buy extra usage.
My experience with Replicate has also similarly absurd. For testing I loaded $10 to my balance. But I keep getting rate limited with error that my balance should be above $5. Responses have been absurd. AI bot responded that my balance had to be above $10. On asking why the message said $5 the "human" support responded that it might be a "temporary hiccup". Later they came back that my balance had to be above $20 for full rate limits. I asked again - why was their rate limit error message not clear enough? No response for past 10 days.
Its like all these AI companies want to replace developers but their own systems is built using super glue.
For some reason I really don't understand, it's a different payment process in the on the Developer Platform page. When I tried to update there with 3 different credit cards (MC, Visa, AmEx) and using Stripe Link, they all got the same rejection. It's clearly some bug / issue on their side.
Their chat bot is honestly an embarrassment for a frontier AI company like Anthropic, generic, not helpful and trying to lecture me on what MFA/OTP implicating "it's you being to stupid to use a credit card".
I'm also waiting already for 2 weeks for a human support on my 2 messages.
This whole thread shows I am (and you are) not alone with this issue, so it's hard to understand how the "engineering team checked" and didn't find anything.
I've been building payments systems for over a decade and just projecting from this thread their support should be blowing up from such an issue - I know in my companies it would have.
So they certainly have a problem with their flow with Visa. I wonder if the payment flow was vibecoded from scratch, never experienced that with any other site.