The meter that disappeared

Claude! they’re the man or woman!

The best research assistant one could wish for. They have been a force multiplier in terms of my content output, my ability to perform complex website migrations, really anything at all. I went from being moderately, bumbling, and vaguely effective to Socrates on steroids.

A professional technical session: Ghost migration, SMTP configuration, newsletter setup, editorial work, Reddit strategy, two published essays, delivered in one day. That’s consultancy work. Agency rates for that day would be €500 minimum.

And, I know all about that value; I was sold by my employer for £1,500 per day to external clients to deliver complex IT solutions to strategic and tactical challenges faced by global multinational corporations. And this was back at the turn of the 21st century.

Now, going back to the Claude VFM (value for money) proposition. I pay the minimum subscription of €22 per month, which comes with significant bandwidth restrictions on both daily limits as well as weekly limits, which is thoroughly annoying; on a par with confiscating your child’s charger, NOT their phone and then watch them panic as the battery level descends to 0.

I kept encountering the bandwidth ceiling on my use and there was a meter on my interface which showed the daily and weekly limits. There was also a little ‘I’ thingy which introduced me to their innovative way of adding to a fixed subscription in small or large, capped limits. This as opposed to taking the next level subscription which jumps alarmingly to 100 for the month and unlimited bandwidth.

Apart from asking me if I understood that from now on it would automatically sting my card whenever they felt whatever threshold, however calculated or measured had been exceeded and all this without once sharing with me what it covered; 1 question, 10, 2 short ones, one long one! What?

And, they removed the little meters per day and week so you really could not tell when or how much they might think it was appropriate to appropriate. Oh! And the little ‘I’ thingy, that also disappeared so you could not find your way back and turn the little fucker off.

No, no, instead, any attempt to turn it off, or down, or find out wtf they’re doing with your bank account entails an exhausting search through what they laughingly call a support database, deliberately constructed to be as opaque and as useless as possible. Worth its weight in fucking feathers! How come it isn’t mediated by an AI chat bot; could it be that one would actually be able to challenge this despicable disingenuousness with the gold standard of source acknowledged data.

Claude suddenly freezing, taking a sabbatical in the middle of an operation, returning to the conversation with all the mental clarity of an Alzheimer’s victim, were the only warning of perhaps another of the 1,000 cuts of financial death.

€22 + €78 = €100 in two days versus €100 for five months unlimited.

In two days I have paid the equivalent of five months of the unlimited plan. This is not a usage charge: it is a trap, conducted in the most opaque manner. At no point did Anthropic’s system inform me of what I’m getting each time it randomly chose to sting me again and again and again.

The irony is exquisite: the best AI assistant I have ever used, hobbled by the most dishonest billing mechanism I have encountered in 30 years of technology consulting.