Claude Onboarding Unnecessarily Painful

So I'm on day 2-3 at Claudes onboarding stage. Why does everyone insist on SMS verification? It really is a bridge too far. Is the argument that it's purely there to stop abuse, not identify you, got any legs?

I said a few choice words and put my mobile number in to what can only be described as a terribly ambiguous text box that you can't tell if the country code prefix has been populated for you or not: https://i.ibb.co/mFNHgL6N/Screenshot-2026-05-20-162000.png

After all this the text never comes through and two tries later I get another ambiguous message saying to "Try later" - Like, ok... how much later Claude?

I then spent five minutes wrangling a chat bot that told me to "Something has gone wrong, try again later" halfway through two separate chats trying to find an agent or lodge a ticket.

I somehow managed to lodge a ticket through a chat bot now I'm here 2-3 days later. #101766398 https://i.ibb.co/FLkQtQ0X/Screenshot-2026-05-20-162704.png

Is on boarding for Claude actually this bad or am I just special?

These kinds of automated onboarding pipelines are unnecessarily exclusionary to the tech illiterate and ostensibly there to help but I can't see it.

I guess this is a question, rant and appeal for help all in one. Any decent alternatives? Deepseek isn't cutting it for me for general use/search