Anthropic also doesn't provide any way to remove your credit card once you add it to your account, which tells it's a very greedy company.
Here's an idea, bill me for usage and let me set limits, instead of this pay upfront and if you don't use it we keep it model
Anthropic tried to charge my card a few weeks back, but fortunately it was declined by my card. I haven't used their service in 6+ months, but they still want to try and take my money
So does OpenAI (last I checked) which I sadly learned the hard way.
Accounting rules: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakage_(accounting)
Happenned the same for me recently with anthropic and before with openai. It's yearly inflation is infinity which is crazy
I switched to openrouter but will find out if they do the same
This doesn’t sound legal in California at least.
I know gift certificates are not allowed to expire in California and I would hazard a guess that prepaid credits probably wouldn’t be allowed to expire either.
To be fair, this is prominently displayed in the console, so they aren't trying to hide it. I personally hate the idea of expiring, but as other commenters have mentioned there are pretty good reasons for this (accounting, banking laws, etc).
I suppose this is the same reason that they quietly expire Audible credits after a year. Drives me absolutely bonkers.
They sign post that everywhere when you buy said credits.
When I first ordered credits and saw that, I moved the amount from 25$ to 10$ and top up 10 whenever I need. Worst case, I lose 10$, which is still bad. But understandable.
I got a notice like this about my credits. It was only $30, so it was a good reason to try out claude code for the first time. I probably would have kept putting it off if I hadn't run into the threat of expiring credits. I know that isn't why they do it, but it had that effect on me.
Same with OpenAI / ChatGPT. Thieves.
Genuine question: is this an issue with auto-reload? Why not just keep a smaller amount in there at a time and let it auto-reload?
I think this is common.
I use Shutterstock, and their credits do the same thing (but I have the cheapest plan).
This is not unique to Anthropic: most LLM providers (including OpenAI and Perplexity) do this, and it is explicitly mentioned before you buy the credits that they will expire within a year.
Guys, crypto solves this.
(sarcasm)
But it kinda does I think.
Pirates.
I got the same email. This is theft and not only will this not make me buy more credits, it will make sure I will never buy credits on anthropic ever again. I was using haiku to run a small free webapp and the llm provider can be changed. There is nothing special about anthropic.
That's the exact day my credits expire. Weird coincidence?
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 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).
“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.
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.