[hs86]

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.

[subscribed]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[jondwillis]

Issue a chargeback.

[MostlyStable]

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.

[yadaeno]

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.

[alpaca128]

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]

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.

[alpaca128]

I live in the EU and have read this in the terms for my region.

> they have no legal obligation to follow through and give you what they promised

Yes, they do. Contracts are contracts. They just don't promise you ownership of anything but a revocable license. Like every platform offering DRM protected content.

[docmars]

This is why the seven seas are so important for preserving our purchases, companies be damned.

[stavros]

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]

> 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.

[markdown]

> Cloudflare does that for domain renewals

That's just standard. Every domain registrar/vendor does this.

[stavros]

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.

[BeetleB]

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]

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.

[butlike]

Yeah that kind of seems like antiquated fear-mongering. Next they should call the BBB and leave a strongly-worded review!

[collingreen]

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.

[nekusar]

wait, int the BBB just boomer yelp?

[sonofhans]

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.

[mort96]

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]

> 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.

[Marsymars]

> You don’t think it’s funny how the mechanism for taking the money is never broken?

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.

[mort96]

> Work with a large company who won’t pay your 30 or 45 day invoice for 90 days before you broadly decide this.

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.

[barkingcat]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[nitwit005]

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]

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]

Then you get to enjoy mandatory robbery.

[mannanj]

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]

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.

[Marsymars]

> More like, you don't sue a vendor and then expect the relationship to go back to status quo ante.

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.

[throwanem]

I wasn't talking about what 'should be allowed,' rather what presently is. But your example goes rather more to my point, don't you think?

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!

[master_crab]

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]

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.

[master_crab]

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?

[nubinetwork]

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]

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.

[FireBeyond]

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.

[Marsymars]

Obnoxiously that doesn't cover all the edge cases for consumers. Payments from my watch recently started failing with a generic "declined" error. After calling my bank I worked out that my credit card had been replaced some months ago in advance of a recent expiry - I updated my phone wallet at the time, but my watch's wallet didn't give any indication that it was trying to use an expired card.

[ssl-3]

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]

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]

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.

[nickvec]

Yikes. That's unacceptable. Crazy that it has been over a month and you still haven't gotten the refund.

[embedding-shape]

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.

[SilverElfin]

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.

[antisthenes]

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.

[Schiendelman]

Usually those contracts do exempt the company from paying you interest.