Enough people have gone over the economics - you're costing OpenAI/Anthropic money, potentially a lot of money, so it's inevitable that sooner or later that particular party will come to an end.
Having said that, doing it by running a regex on your prompts to look for keywords is a bit loose
But the simple fact is, if you're paying $20/mo and using $200/mo of tokens, that is not going to last forever.
The only way to make it last a bit longer for the people with relatively sane usage patterns is to try and stop people absolutely taking the piss
I'm tired of this startup-adjacent mindset that promotes endless adversarial scamming. I absolutely think people should be able to run OpenClaw or whatever harnesses they want, but I also think they should pay in some proportion to usage rather than trying to exploit an all-you-can-eat buffet offer to stock their own catering business.
If you choose to not be able to get work done without Claude you're at the mercy of whatever they want.
The company ending part is when they have to cut the $20 a month plan and take things away. They are creating a massive group of coders that can't code - soon to have no way to code. This cohort will rampage through all social forums.
Do you have a source? I would be interested to read more about any hard figures that have been posted like this.
That's par the course for Anthropic. I added some money to my account before I really had a use case for product. A year later they said my money had expired and when I contacted support they basically told me to pound sand.
This while they have the audacity to list one of their corporate values as 'Be good to our users'. They'll never get another dollar from me.
I think my Zalando gift cards expire after 4 years.
It's pretty much a universal API credit policy at this point. I'm not sure if this legitimately escapes the prepaid gift card requirements or if the providers see nuance where there might not be any.
Where I live (in Canada) it's actually illegal for gift cards to ever expire, and there's lots available from US companies, so if it's an accounting issue other companies have figured it out.
I'm sure both people left at that trade authority will get right on with investigating.
The Purpose of a System is What it Does[1].
Whether malicious or not, the system does what it does. If people wanted it to do something else they would change the system. The reality is that when corporations make mistakes that benefit them those mistakes rarely get fixed without some sort of public outcry, turning the "mistake" into a "feature".
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
More about where I think Stafford Beer goes wrong here: https://gemini.google.com/share/9a14f90f096e
If it is adequately explained by stupidity then you should be able to get it to display the same behavior without mentioning OpenClaw? Do you have any theory as to what stupid thing they have done to make this happen, non-maliciously? Because, Hanlon's razor doesn't just work by saying Hanlon's razor - you have to actually explain how the stupidity happened.
How about we turn down the heat, everyone?
Yes, it's reasonable to turn down the heat. But it's also reasonable for people to be upset when their money is taken from them, and when the company that does so is effectively beyond persecution for doing so.
So maybe not malice, but certainly a level of ineptitude I don’t expect from a crucial vendor from a tool that’s become essential for many developers.
(I don’t care, I do just fine when Claude is down or refuses to help me (it has happened) though)
Yolo ship it! Move fast and break things. Reviewing just slows everybody down. Nobody can keep up with those coding agents output any longer.
/s
Anywhere inside your bubble. The world is a big place.
Through some amount of carelessness that ended up costing people money? 0.
Maybe 1 if you want to count the automated monthly charging system that did over charge (extra erroneous charges for the same month) a handful of clients too many times. I noticed before anyone else did, and all of those 1am charges were reversed before 4am. So I don't think that one counts because it was a boring bug that would have been very bad if I wasn't paying attention.
Incompetence to the point of negligence can reasonably be considered malicious. If you're an engineer by trade, you have an ethical and professional responsibility to make sure things like this can't happen. And then, when bugs introduce said complications, fixing them, and remediating the damage.
How about Anthropic turn down the heat and refunds money to everyone for every bug it created with its LLM?
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53262#issue...
I'm sure they will proactively reach out to everyone who was affected without any need on the users part and make everyone whole....
"You may not use our service if you mention OpenClaw" is a harsh line but hardly illegal or forbidden any more than any other service restriction (i.e. no use allowed for high-stakes financial modeling). Don't like it, cancel your plan.
But that's the thing -- there is no line! Where is this specified? How can we know what service restrictions there are? For all I know, my plan could be exhausted at any point during the workday just because I happened to touch on some keyword Anthropic has decided to ban.
> Don't like it, cancel your plan.
Ah, but I thought these models were supposed to have been trained for the sake of humanity? That the arbitrary enclosure of the collective intelligence was for our own good? These concepts are not compatible.
Tbh blocking OpenClaw might just be for the betterment of humanity. It's yet to be proven either way.
This is, by the way, the same legal principle that the website you are posting on, right now, uses. Some uses are prohibited. Not every line need be explicit. You aren't allowed to smack talk Y Combinator or the moderators without possibly being banned for life, and you certainly do not have a legal case if they do.
People spend large sums of money for this tool. They can't just delete your balance because they feel like it.
> People spend large sums of money for this tool. They can't just delete your balance because they feel like it.
Unfortunately, in the US, they can. I'm not a lawyer working in this area, but my understanding is that companies are in general free to stop doing business with any customer at any time (other than reasons like the race of the customer). And in this type of transaction, there is no obligation to give a refund when they cut off the business relationship. This is different from a business-to-business contract or other types of contracts. This type of sale you're generally out of luck if the business cuts you off. That's why Amazon can delete the music library they sold you and give you no compensation.
It's possible that Anthropic also structured its EULA such that we're buying Claude Fun-Bucks with no value and that they can obliterate at any time with no recourse. I haven't read the EULA so who knows. But if they did this and it went to court, they'd still need to get a jury to agree to this interpretation and that's a huge unknown.
You could have just stopped there. The rest of what you wrote just re-demonstrates that you don't know what you're talking about.
Intentionally (or negligently) anti-competitive behavior is illegal in the US.
> Don't like it, cancel your plan.
Don't like being abused by a company? Just pretend it's not happening! Anyone else exactly as smart as you were, they deserve to be cheated out of their money too!
The heat is coming, in part, from the lack of a proper support channel.
But there is a clear pattern emerging. There's no reason to turn down the heat when a company of this size and influence is allowed this level of absurdity time and time again.
My personal story is that I bought $50 of credit into their system, didn't use it all that much, and then after a year had gone by they kept the leftovers. I consider that a kind of theft.
Why should we coddle a corporations when they screw over customers?
It matters very little if they did this out of incompetence or malice.