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.

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.

if i target tomahawk missiles the government will give me money and i can make more paperclips

effective paperclipism strikes again

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1rsbxn9/stop_sp...

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

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.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/ai-ceo-says-softw...

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.

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.

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.

They'll just rob you in your future interactions too.

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.

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.

Ok sounds like evil should be labeled and not tolerated as anything else.

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.

If most people think like you, why indeed bother providing support at all?

Well, at least they're dogfooding support.

It only has a ~1 in 20,000 chance of working but at scale it'll go through!

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.

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.

Visa/MC can block a company, happens for lots of reasons.

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.

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.

It whined about it for a bit on their site but eventually just gave up. Works normal again.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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!

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.

It's all fake venture capital money, but they are the big cheese.

Visa and Mastercard each have 14 digits worth of permutations to play with, excluding the first and last digits. That's one hundred trillion numbers.

Assuming 8 billion people in the world, each person can hold 12,500 of either Visa or Mastercard before a collision happens. (As above, the number space is smaller because of how BINs are issued, but that's still plenty.)

was giving the benefit of the doubt on the intention of big companies putting no effort in to fix their workflows if it makes them more money to work with you improperly.

It's unclear how large their retail business is, which is why I mentioned that, and that's where you see most CC payments. Companies with any serious usage are going to pay via wire or bill payment via banks directly. McDonalds, for example, likely has a larger daily spend on cards.