Tell HN: Dont use Claude Design, lost access to my projects after unsubscribing
This is a first. I never lost access to any of my past sessions because I unsubscribed in any of the LLM apps.
I actually wanted to try out codex previously, but had similar experience with my credits. They gave extra credits equivalent to my montly subscription price, with some time limit because claude has so many issues that month. And as soon as plan ended. I lost access to the credits. Even after resubscribing, I still don't have access to those credits.
I have sympathies towards the engineers, especially the ones that are putting themselves on X. But only when someone with large following has some issue, they sort it out.
Having worked at a billing company, I can see how complex contracts sound good for the growth/sales folks but are also horrible for engineers actually implementing those contracts. Their complex rate limiting which is now a norm, identifying other harnesses to count them against extra usage are all probably not easy to implement without very rough edge cases. But all the "bugs" are just where the user gets screwed is what is problematic.
I just wanted to post this here, after tagging them multiple times on X to alert other users.
39 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 66.3 ms ] threadAnthropic may be a bunch of skids but it sounds like they did the right thing here. Pretty much all SaaS applications, especially in B2B, are required by compliance to remove customer data within X amount of time at the end of the contractual relationship.
To add something else to the discussion however, I'd encourage people to skip out on Claude Design for other reasons, and that is the inherent restrictions of LLMs for visual design. LLMs are blind, and spatial relativity is tremendously hard across layers of nested html / css.
If you're early on, I'd recommend starting with diffusion first. GPT-Image-2 is phenominal at UI design, and especially if you're just starting out will let you align on a direction more rapidly than an LLM can. The difficulty will be converting from image->html, but you'll be able to explore different directions more cheaply/faster than you could with Claude Design.
I will note a bias disclaimer here - I quit Figma to work on my own diffusion-based UI design tool. Not promoting that here, but wanted to at least share my findings in this space.
It's an extreme example of slop code since while normally LLMs can produce code that ranges from some-what-okay to utter garbage, the web code claude makes is awful. On the other hand: you get a single file (even if it is full of 20+ embedded SVGs, javascripts, and other such things.)
I've been on product launches many times, so can drive the design side appropriately and keep things focused. Has been a wonderful addition to my workflow.
As usual with any agent-driven tool - GIGO. If the human driving has no product experience and is blindly accepting designs, well, that's... a choice.
If you export your data [0] all your Claude Design chats are in a design_chats directory along with the code, even if your account currently has no access to Claude Design. It is .json, but converting that into usable code is easily done, either manually or by asking any fairly modern LLM via OpenCode. Just did it myself, it works. I will say that I'd still prefer if they allowed API use of Claude Design, it does have some niceties regarding the way follow up questions have been implemented that I feel make it worth it for very narrow UX experimentation but can't justify a whole sub at the moment, given I for the first time started experiencing regressions up to making Opus unusable via Claude Code with the Max subscription for the first time and the new pretrain in GPT-5.5 is very strong for very specific coding use cases. In fairness though, compaction and task adherence can be inferior compared to GPT-5.4 which did both better than any other model ever, so using both for their specific use cases is my go to.
Not feeling like commenting on every statement regarding SaaS and expectations, but I will say that some are mistaken/not considering the law and your rights by just telling you it is your fault and (at least) implying the data is lost. It can't be, think about it. Any temporary subscription cancellation/payment processing issue/bug on Anthropics part/etc. would mean permanent data loss. That'd be less than ideal, not least because Anthropic has in the past had trouble processing payments from verifiably covered accounts.
Users in consumer friendly area have the right to export and access their data, including data not exposed via any frontend or API if associated with their account. Doesn't matter whether they pay or not. Course, manual backups are always preferable. A provider could still have a data loss, but as long as they have the data, at least in my neck of the woods they have to give it to you. As it should be.
To end, I generally try not to comment on others comments or down outside of actual spam and bad faith, but if more than one comment already was helpful enough to tell OP that they should have exported/backed up, do we really need it repeated?
[0] https://claude.ai/settings/data-privacy-controls
It's not entirely unprecedented - seen these tactics in the google ecosystem. Google music. Unsubscribe killed(kills?) access to see you playlists which of course you only learn once it's done. Give them a credit card again and you can see and export them again. Magic!
Resubscribed for 1 month, exported it, unsubscribed, and swore to never trust google music again. idk why they implement patterns like that because sure you extorted $10 in cash out of me but it makes the brand toxic. There is no way that decision has a net positive future value. Hell it even got them a pissed hn post years later
It's funny because sometimes it will remember stuff that is lost and not be able to reference stuff that is clearly visible.
One area where I find ChatGPT superior (and this is just my own experience) is not losing things and also respecting project boundaries. Claude projects just seem to be a way to lose things faster, the model seems to be entirely unaware of projects as a concept.
We don't want anyone to feel locked into the tool. Claude's designs are HTML/CSS/JS that any editor can handle; we'll make sure it's possible to download them even after you unsubscribe.
Happy to see you on here and great to hear that you'll address this. As mentioned in my comment, data export let's users get access as it stands, but any improvement in UX is always welcome. Maybe making Design accessible via API credits for occasional use might be something you could bring up too.
Thanks for your efforts as an in between the user base and Anthropic. Based on prior personal experience and purely looking in from the outside, I wouldn't be surprising if it can be very challenging and stressful to be in such a position, especially when one may not directly state or say what they think is best in a given situation, so thank you for dealing with a not always very pleasant position where the situation and information you are provided with can change without your say, yet you may be the one to that will be considered responsible in the eyes of the public for a decision you neither made nor could prevent.