Anthropic banned my thirteen 20x accounts, what now?
I was using 13 Claude Code 20x subscriptions. Fable on ultra code.
First, yes it was excessive. Yes I was using ultra code for everything unnecessarily, just because I cbf and the cost/month was low for my business.
With that out of the way, Anthropic rejected my ban appeal.
It was all personal use, just me, doing stuff for my business, I have no employees.
Regardless, appeal rejected, no reason given, and any account I create now gets instantly banned.
I’ve tried using a VPN, and different credit cards, but my accounts get banned really quickly.
The thing that’s unclear, is what exactly is banned? My company? Me personally? My billing address?
Am I not allowed to create any new accounts? And what is it that makes them able to detect any new accounts.
I suspect it’s my chrome profile or something like that, that’s the last thing I’ve been unwilling to change just due to the amount of effort in converting.
Anyway, just looking for advice, I’m just wanting one working account.
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If you’re curious why I was using so many, it was just doing analysis of multiple Shopify stores, Google ads, meta ads, seo… Just a lot of iterations of statistical analysis for ecommerce stuff (stock forecasting, freight routing optimisation, freight aggregation, container load planning, accounting blah blah blah) many of these tasks were overkill, but running 10-15 Claude code terminals at one time, it was just easier to put everything on ultra so I didn’t have to hold Claude’s hand. Set a goal, define it really clearly, and let it run overnight.)
17 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 28.3 ms ] thread(Also, before people say “just pay API pricing” - it’s not worth it for how much money I am earning. $2600usd/month I know seems like a lot, but if I switched to API usage, it would be 10x that.
I do build a lot of automations though that don’t require AI. By that, I mean using AI to create python scripts or dashboards that can do the same task over and over.
It’s just convenient and easy to type stupid stuff like “find my email with Jake that has packing list for order XYZ, print it on my downstairs printer”
I know that’s lazy and way overkill for fable or even opus… I would run stupid prompts similar to that all throughout the day when I didn’t want to get sidetracked from whatever my main focus was.
But you’re right, and I have been handling just fine with 2 x codex subscriptions.
I actually just need to build a router too, that uses cheaper models for my basic requests. My token usage could do with a lot of optimisation.
Also, I was just using 3 accounts, but when Fable was released for a short time, I just figured I’d spam it while it was cheap with a lot of projects opus was struggling with.
your usage patterns may have been similar to usage patterns of other customers that are often problematic, so some automated anti-abuse system made some statistical decision & banned you. you're a false positive, it's not worth their time reviewing the decision as most people they ban are problematic customers, and they've estimated that you're probably problematic.
Perhaps the cost of providing a 20x subscription exceeds the monthly subscription revenue, if a customer uses it heavily. Perhaps most heavy users only have a single subscription, and they can account for running at a small loss as a marketing expense & hoping you may convert to a profitable tier in future. But if you have 13 subscriptions of their 20x consumer plan at once, maybe they lose so much money from it that they decide it's not worth continuing to doing business with you -- purely commercially -- so at their discretion they ban you.
In both cases, they've decided it isn't worth doing business with you, for different reasons, so if they estimate that a new customer signing up is in fact the same person as someone they previously decided to ban, they'll keep banning your attempts to open new accounts. They're not going to explain how they figure out you're the same person as that undermines the effectiveness of their banning process.
If you were banned purely because you're costing them too much money vs what you are paying, in theory that's fixable if you are willing to pay enough money to sign up for a proper business plan & can find some salesperson to negotiate with. but in practice they presumably they have all the salesfolk pointed at enterprise customers because that is where the money is.
If not, just ask someone else to create a account and you pay for it and use the login
p.s. 13 is a unlucky number as you have found out.