1–10 of 144 posts
>
> To ensure uninterrupted service, we recommend enabling auto-reload for your organization. When enabled, we’ll automatically add credits when your balance reaches a specified minimum. You can enable auto-reload in the Anthropic Console.
The only hope is that "the market / invisible hand" forces actors to implement more forgiving billing mechanisms and rules via competition or eventual diminished demand. I wouldn't hold my breath though.
Anyways, a very good reason to not depend that much on these tools. Especially on a personal level (i.e. if your programming/moat/skill depends on these tools and you go broke for a time, you can get seriously fucked).
Unfortunately they basically can do whatever they want with credits.
“Oops, we burned through your money, please give us more by this date” - are you serious? Unfortunately they basically can do whatever they want with credits. https://www.anthropic.com/legal/credit-terms
Accounting rules. If the credits last indefinitely, any unused credits cannot be counted as revenue. Ran into this at my last company when we signed a big contract and gave them hundreds of thousands of dollars in non-expiring credits. Our accountant went nuts when we told him.
What they could do is automatically refund the credits to the original account as soon as they expire, but that would mean it’s not the deposit but every API request that would be counted as revenue, which creates a whole lot of other complications. Let alone the fact that refunding after a year is problematic as the original payment methods may have expired, changed, and that you’re still the holder of someone else’s money until the credits are used.
Bottom line: this is industry practice, but given how much flack Anthropic has been getting about the lack of transparency lately, this just adds more fuel to the fire and could be defused by some additional explanation from Anthropic’s side.
I switched to openrouter but will find out if they do the same
So does OpenAI (last I checked) which I sadly learned the hard way.
Unfortunately that's what one gets for offloading intelligence into a XaaS (Intelligence as a Service?, we already got IaaS though). The only hope is that "the market / invisible hand" forces actors to implement more forgiving billing mechanisms and rules via competition or eventual diminished demand. I wouldn't hold my breath though. Anyways, a very good reason to not depend that much on these tools. Especially on a…