Tell HN: Dont use Claude Design, lost access to my projects after unsubscribing

#1

Post by pycassa » Wed, May 13, 2026, 9:40 PM UTC

I wanted to try codex after 5 months of claude code max subscription. And then I went back to my previous projects on claude design only to realize I don't have access to them anymore.

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.

Re: Tell HN: Dont use Claude Design, lost access to my projects after unsubscribing

#2

Post by goekjclo » Wed, May 13, 2026, 10:28 PM UTC

Cannot help but think Claude team are busy adding gimmicky side features instead of doing 'real' RSI and bugfixing.

Re: Tell HN: Dont use Claude Design, lost access to my projects after unsubscribing

#3

Post by wiseowise » Wed, May 13, 2026, 10:29 PM UTC

And AI hypers suggest to build your whole career/identity on this shit. Already foresee "skill issue", "well you should've x, y, z, obviously", etc.

Re: Tell HN: Dont use Claude Design, lost access to my projects after unsubscribing

#4

Post by parliament32 » Wed, May 13, 2026, 10:32 PM UTC

So.. you unsubscribed from a SaaS and expected them not to purge your data? Why would that make sense?

Anthropic 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.

Re: Tell HN: Dont use Claude Design, lost access to my projects after unsubscribing

#5

Post by conception » Wed, May 13, 2026, 10:37 PM UTC

Backup data that’s important to you.

Re: Tell HN: Dont use Claude Design, lost access to my projects after unsubscribing

#6

Post by willsmith72 » Wed, May 13, 2026, 10:41 PM UTC

wiseowise wrote: post #3

And AI hypers suggest to build your whole career/identity on this shit. Already foresee "skill issue", "well you should've x, y, z, obviously", etc.

People often build their career skills on proprietary tech. Photoshop, Figma, Java, AWS architects

Re: Tell HN: Dont use Claude Design, lost access to my projects after unsubscribing

#7

Post by zuzululu » Wed, May 13, 2026, 10:41 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Tell HN: Dont use Claude Design, lost access to my projects after unsubscribing

#8

Post by jjcm » Wed, May 13, 2026, 10:42 PM UTC

A lot of these things are made fast and loose, and unfortunately this is the reality of using the bleeding edge. Even Figma went through this kind of thing very early on.

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.

Re: Tell HN: Dont use Claude Design, lost access to my projects after unsubscribing

#9

Post by Animats » Wed, May 13, 2026, 10:43 PM UTC

When you lose access to your projects, does Anthropic acquire the intellectual property? It's a real issue when it's in a machine learning system, not passive storage like Github.

Re: Tell HN: Dont use Claude Design, lost access to my projects after unsubscribing

#10

Post by Uptrenda » Wed, May 13, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

Aside from OP's post there's another issue with claude design worth mentioning. Yes, it makes absolutely beautiful designs, stunningly so, but the actual code is not something a human could ever maintain. So its like ending up with an opaque blob. Write-once, read-never, or almost disposal code. This is kind of bad because code people aren't going to bother to read might contain vulnerabilities.

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.)