Tell HN: Our paid Claude AI subscription unavailable >1 week and no support

[KellyCriterion]

Dear all,

our team is using a Claude AI Team plan for more than 1 year already:

- we are a normal company, doing normal business, nothing critical

- all our bills are paid and we can see them as paid

- nontheless, the service is not available for more than one week to us

Question:

- any other idea to reach out to them than their "Fin AI Chatbot" at [e-mail]?

- did anybody else had the same experience? If yes, what helped to solve it?

Its really frustrating :-(

(especially since some people built their interal workflow around Claude, now they are somehow stuck)

[shelled]

My account was wrongly billed as I had cancelled the subscription in time. So I reached out to support to get it rectified. It’s a bot called Fin. Fin became judge, jury, and executioner and closed my attempts to raise the issue with an automated response that the charge was good and I couldn’t escalate (tried multiple times). Wrote to two of their support emails, both attempts met the same fate, those were also handled by bots. Absolutely no way of reaching a human being at the paper trillion dollar company.

When I discussed this with a friend he suggested I should try AI coding plans via third party vendors (who at least offer bare minimum human support even with considerable delay) and also shared his personal grandfathered GLM API key (he’s not using that; and the plan is good for few more months; already paid). I really can’t complain. I have noticed zero quality or productivity dip. Even response time is very close to Claude, but less. I can live with that.

Anyone suggesting we should ask the AI to dig deeper, they haven’t met Fin.

[throwawayffffas]

I don't understand, were you charged after cancelling your subscription or can't subscribe? If you were charged after cancelling your subscription stop faffing about with their ai bots, and dispute it with your bank.

If you can't subscribe, there are other providers.

[KellyCriterion]

Thanks for the idea with going through a token-reseller, that maybe a better option for SME like us

[OutOfHere]

Or go with a competitor like OpenAI or Kimi.

[ofjcihen]

This is the experience quite a few of my bigger clients are running into and let me tell you they aren’t small. It’s quickly becoming a very oft-repeated reason in meetings that they want to move away from Anthropic.

To be fair, being who they are, they can get a human if they try long enough. But that human is also unhelpful so it’s just not worth it.

And I agree with the other comment here saying to just perform a charge back. You don’t get to keep my money because you created a firewall of incompetence.

[blitzar]

Have sex with an/multiple Anthropic employee(s) to get your account unlocked.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/onlyfans-i...

[digikata]

I would be cautious about relying on proprietary platform features from any AI vendor right now. They all have scaling headaches, and also are in the middle of mass feature churn.

For must work company services, I'd require multi-vendor/multi-model routing if it's any sort of automation, and if its more SaaS, lean towards a service with selectable backend provider/model for misc office work. Self hosted is nice for some situations too.

[throwawayffffas]

I can't add prepaid credits to my account, because whenever I try, they try to authorise a zero balance transaction, I approve it but my bank then rejects the real value. This happens across two banks.

But that's a good thing, I have come to rely less on their agent and use the competition more.

[KellyCriterion]

For whatever reasons we cant also add credits with any of our payment methods (all are full charge-card CCs)

[kay_o]

Help to solve; subscribe to Enterprise and pay for support contract.

[KellyCriterion]

Haha, good one! :-D

Actually, this was what we already discussing this morning, because this was our assumption, too :-))

[r_lee]

It's either that (pay $1 million or something) or find an Anthropic employee here or post on X

you might also want to try calling sales and asking if this is how their product is intended to work, they might be able to escalate

[kay_o]

This was serious post sadly !

All self serve tiers Claude Team, OpenAI Business, ... all are considered the same as personal plan. The only differentiated tier is [self service] || [enterprise support contract with guarantees]

[KellyCriterion]

Thats an interesting perspective, I never thought about it that way, because I expect at least some support when being a paying customer, even a small one. (aprt from that, we have around 10 seats, so we may be smaller, bot its not "nothing"?)

[kay_o]

It is nothing. There are many individuals that run 10 seats, not even business, and unless you are paying API per token rates you are a loss already without answering a support ticket ! Unfortunately ...

[novia]

I asked Fin to escalate my issue to a real human once I realized it was a chatbot. The real human helped me with my issue.

[jumpalongjim]

My goto approach would be to ask an AI to investigate. They can get a surprisingly long way in troubleshooting networking, doing web research, etc. and will even decompile Claude Code to work out what the issue is. It's easy to underestimate what AI agents can do. If you can't use Claude to do this then pick OpenAI or Grok, etc.

[ofjcihen]

From the post I think his issue is server-side, no?

[KellyCriterion]

yes, it is a server/provider issue.

[blikdak]

while trying to recover massive debt switch to OpenAI they seem.

[OutOfHere]

Anthropic has always been hostile to users. I had better luck with a competitor.