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Comment by evo_9 | Hacker News Reader

I recently had my automatic reload double charge me $100. I tried reaching out to Anthropic, but my only option (of course) was a chat agent. After going through a conversation with it, I was told someone would reach out to help with the matter. Never happened. I eventually reached out to my credit-card company and did a dispute, which they just ruled in my favor.

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Same.

Back in December the iOS app had a bug ( https://status.claude.com/incidents/6rrnsb1y0kbn) in which buying a subscription thru the Apple App Store would not register with the backend, so you’d be charged but not receive the plan entitlement.

I discovered this because I wanted to upgrade from free plan to the regular plan. I was charged, but remained in the free tier. Thinking it was a temporary bug, I tried buying the max plan. Same result.

I tried cancelling the plan and restarting but I when I went to buy the regular plan again, I was forever tagged as an “Apple” user and so could only manage the billing plan on the iOS app. I tried one more time, same result.

I tried interacting with the support bot and although it agreed that there was a bug and that it should be fixed and I should get a refund, my account never was able to get unstuck nor refunded. I lodged a refund request with Apple, which was relatively quickly refunded. The Bot never did escalate to a human as promised.

Even though the bug was ostensibly fixed, my account (personal email) remains in permanent limbo, unable to upgrade from Free to anything else (I tried again recently and same result - paid but stuck on free plan). I had to create a new gmail just to pay for Anthropic / Claude.

There was also a bug where you could cancel the subscription via the iOS app store and if you never opened the iOS claude app again, you'd keep the subscription forever and could use claude via the web, without paying.

Also when they added extra credits to everyone as an apology I was able to click the claim button multiple times and I got up to $400 in credits. Eventually a day later this dropped to $200 and then a few days later, $100 where it sits today.

I once had PayPal refuse to give me my money back (for a delivery) for months even though the postal service status clearly stated: "Address unknown, returning to sender."

I should have denied the PayPal charge on my bank account, that always gets a real human to look into it. Lesson learned.

Just a warning, that could get your PayPal account banned. But maybe okay for you.

I got given a gift card with around 6 months credit on it. I used up 1 or 2, and last week suddenly the credit disappeared. I reached out through their chat bot, raised a ticket and have been emailing them daily. Nothing. Absolutely not a word. Unfortunately I dont have the option for a charge back.

Once the dispute was resolved on the card side did anthropic claw back the $100? Was your account penalized in anyway?

That's the thing, right? I would not be surprised if they have an agent that bans accounts that do chargebacks on them even when they're wrong. So you either accept it if you have to use it for work or you risk and deal with the possible consequences.

Nothing so far, but I'm keeping an eye on it and debating just canceling entirely.

If a merchant tries to claw back a disputed charge they are going to get a big fee at the least.

Apparently 200B isn't enough for proper support. Nice to know

somehow it's always the expensive path that works fine.

No bigsies just got a little trippy hallucination while vibing in the billing code bro. The spiritual support guru was walking the lonely wastelands and couldn't get back to you on this plane. Just wasn't meant to be

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