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Ask HN: What Did Anthropic Bill Me For?

1 points by OhMeadhbh ↗ HN
I gave Anthropic my credit card number thinking I was signing up for the pro plan and they charged me about $21. But a day later when I log in they say I have a free account. Further research shows they bill the Pro plan a year at a time for about $200.

So... since I didn't pay for a pro plan, what did I just pay money to Anthropic for? support@anthropic.com is completely dead. They haven't responded to any of the messages I've sent over the last week. My next step is a credit reversal, I suppose.

As a humorous aside... I asked claude why I wasn't showing up under a Pro plan and it gave me an extensive description of how to click on various parts of the anthropic web site to find more information. None of the pages or links the response referenced existed on the current site. I'm guessing it's hallucinating or referring to a previous site.

Copilot is a sh*t-show compared to Claude, but at least Microsoft usually gets billing correct and I can eventually get to a human to process a refund.

Anyone have any ideas?

6 comments

[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 19.9 ms ] thread
Jeremy1026
I'm guessing you bought $20 of API credits, plus tax.
OhMeadhbh
I checked with a friend. When they bought credits, they got an email receipt. Seems like credits would show up in the UI somewhere. But I did ask claude how to talk to a human at anthropic and it gave me an answer, so maybe it applied the payment to credits and the UI just doesn't show they're there.
OhMeadhbh
Sure, but the free plan doesn't require the use of API credits. Why would it bill me for that when I hit the "upgrade" button. And, of course, there's no way to check what Anthropic thinks I bought, the support page offers no insight as to how to figure this out and the support@anthropic.com email alias is unstaffed.
chvarunteja
The bill opacity is the receipt problem. The company problem is the former.

A perfectly detailed line item Anthropic bill merely informs you of what has already been done. It will not tell you who has permission to make the next promise and what cap existed at the time they said yes.

Wondering about how folks around here solve the issue - is the new Claude/API/agent a named approval with a limit or merely pops up on the card?

OhMeadhbh
Sure enough... When I follow the instructions from Anthropic about how to upgrade from free to pro, it keeps applying the purchase to API Credits (and doesn't send me an invoice.) I now have $39.95 of API credits because I paid for the pro upgrade twice and used $0.05 of credits through the dashboard / playground to ask claude how I pay for claude code.