I emailed their support a few days ago with details, concerns, a link to the twitter thread from one of their employees, and a concrete support request, which had an AI agent ('Fin') tell me:
> While our Support team is unable to manually reset or work around usage limits, you can learn about best practices here. If you’ve hit a message limit, you’ll need to wait until the reset time, or you can consider purchasing an upgraded plan (if applicable).
I replied saying that was not an appropriate answer.
You're absolutely right re the lack of transparency and accountability. On one hand, Anthropic generates good will by appearing to have a more ethical stance then OpenAI, and a better product. On the other hand, they kill it fast through extremely poor treatment of their customers.
If they have a bug, they need to resolve it: and in the meantime refund quotas. 'Unable to' - that's shocking. This is simple and reasonable. It's basic customer service. I don't know if they realise the damage their attitude is doing.
This does mean ultimately no loyalty. I can't stay loyal to a brand that doesn't actually respond to inquiries, bug reports or down reports at all.
I do understand that Anthropic is operating at a tremendous scale and can't have enough humans in the loop. This sounds like a good use for ai classification and triage, really!
Amen to this.
Being in business means having to respond to customer enquiries at some point.
Given the amount of billions being pumped into Anthropic's pockets and given the millions their senior-leadership no doubt pay themselves, I'm sure they could spare a bit of cash to get off their backsides and sort out the Customer Service.
I simply do not buy the "poor Antropic, they are operating at scale, they are too busy winning to deal with customer service" argument that comes up time and time again.
The fact is there are many large businesses, many large governments that are able to deal with customers "at scale".
Scale means you respond a bit slower, maybe a few days or at most a couple of weeks AT MOST. But complete silence for months or years is inexcusable.
All of my experiences with "Fin" matches that of my friends and colleagues .... namely that "Fin" is a synonym for "black hole". I've got "tickets" opened with "Fin" months ago that have not had a modicum of reply.
My organization has the concept of "premium models" where our limits reset every month. I hit my limit pretty quickly last month because I was burning tokens doing things that would have been a simple bash loop in the past - all because I was used to interfacing with Claude at the chat layer for all my automation needs and not thinking any more about it.
Completely outside of the productivity debate, offloading cognitive tasks to LLMs leaves you less practiced in them and less ready to do them when the LLM isn't available. When you have to delegate only certain tasks to the LLM for financial reasons, you may find yourself very frustrated.
Google's TurboQuant might help address this, but it also might just widen the gap even further.
I am far on the skeptic edge when it comes to the generative AI side of ML tools though, so do take my opinion with that weight.
What makes it worse is the lack of transparency. If there were clear, hard limits, people could plan around it. Instead it’s this moving target that makes it impossible to trust for real work.
At some point it stops feeling like a bug and starts feeling like a pricing experiment on users.
The only way out is government regulation which means we are screwed in the US (our government is too far gone to represent average citizen interests in any meaningful way) but Europeans maybe have a chance if they get it together and demand change.
Could just be that usage has gone up.