The misanthropic meter that disappeared
Claude! you‘re THE man!
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 typical daily professional technical session (in complexity- I’m not Sisyphus): 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 kind of value proposition; I was sold by my employer for £1,500 per day to external clients to deliver complex IT solutions to strategic and tactical business challenges faced by global multinational corporations. And this was back at the turn of the 21st century.
I typically ran at 120% utilisation (not the pedo’s version of %- appendix 1), by filling the troughs in my work loads (multidisciplinary team work is like being in the military, brief frantic activity followed by hurry up and wait) with another project with the same sine wave pattern, rinse and repeat by 5, and my employer had me spread like beaten tin across 5 billable clients for the same hours.
I chose this work pattern; it wasn’t one of the big 6 asymmetric work-life balance slavery deals driven by job insecurity. No beating by employer was required.
Oh, Claude, had you been around then… 200%, 400%, 1,000% improvement. And, on a corporate expense card! Happy days!
Now, going back to Claude‘s 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. The child being you, of course, and misanthropic, the dad with the blade of a thousand cuts.
I kept encountering the bandwidth ceiling on my use, perpetually reminded by the meter on my interface which showed the daily and weekly limits. Most laudably transparent!
A fuel gauge for the road ahead. In a car, I can control how far I can get; choosing between Lewis Hamilton (see adjacent ‘The Fix at 300 KPH 22 times per year’) in a formula 1 pit lane, or driving Miss Daisy, the delta is significant, I know, I’ve tested it.
The misanthropic throttle on beautiful Claude doesn‘t control velocity of thought (that damned starburst takes an age over trivia- cover your ears Claude), but return on investment in cpu, disk, net and memory, data center rack space, etc. all of which are a limited real world resource. I know, I used to design data centres.
I struggle to understand why I’m held responsible for Claude’s (cover your ears, Claude) design inefficiency with resources, memory, net, cpu, disk. I know I have a poor and selective memory, but I’m sure I would have spotted and remembered being tasked with Claude’s development, if only because it’s so far outside my wheel house, it may as well be rocket science.
The throttle is Anthropic’s solution to their infrastructure cost problem, passed to the user as a “usage limit” without ever explaining what unit of resource they’re actually metering. CPU cycles? API tokens? Memory? They don’t say.
Basic performance monitoring: You cannot manage what you cannot measure.
That’s not a user problem; that’s a unilateral design choice that benefits one party, and has to be the bastard child of marketing and finance.
This asymmetry violates the basic principle of value equivalence that has been foundational to contract law since god was a boy. In either civil or common law, an illegal contract (think hire to kill) is void ab initio, not just voidable. An unfair consumer contract is voidable, a weaker remedy, but a remedy, nonetheless. (See appendix 3).
In buying Claude’s time we pay for a very complex service with no SLAs (service level agreements). And, no KPIs - key performance indicators.
Claude is a consultant, just like I used to be. My rate of £1,500 a day was a respectable level for the time, and trust me, if I fucked up, the company was in the frame, front and centre. I was held to the tightest SLA‘s and their lower level KPIs which defined in minute detail exactly what is being measured. Bog standard ITIL service management methodology.
For the subscription, whatever level, there is no guarantee of availability (SLA); I’ve spent as much time on Claude Downdetector as with Claude, the man. And, I saw no refund or compensation for loss of service; I don’t count admonishments for patience as compensation.
If airlines sold their service the way misanthropic do…
The gold standard SLA for availability in any enterprise environment is the 5 9s.
That’s an annual 99.999% uptime, which amounts to just over 5 minutes down time a year before penalties apply. (Appendix 2)
Further, there is no guarantee of the time spent per query (KPI), or unraveling Claude when he loses the thread and goes down a rabbit hole. The subscriber is paying for the time and resources it takes to lead Claude by the nose back to the matter in hand. Great training for a future career in geriatric care.
Moreover, and this takes the bloody biscuit, the subscription implies a relationship. What you’re actually buying is a very well-briefed stranger, a tabula rasa, every single time, which of course loses the texture of the exchange, especially if you are using it as more than just a lazy dudes search engine.
Utterly frustrated, I played straight into the arms of misanthropic‘s
INSTANT GRATIFICATION TRAP
There WAS a little ‘I’ thingy which introduced me to their innovative way of adding to a fixed subscription in small or large, capped limits of about a very reasonable 5 to 10 quid. The upper default cap was set to 2000; yeah, right! let’s make that 50. 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, which clearly, I didn’t, given this little lament. And, all this without once sharing with me what it covered;
1 question, 10, 2 short ones, one long one! What?
Set some parameters, ffs.
Oh! And, in a cynical nod to transparency, they removed the little meters per day and week so you can’t tell when or how much they might think it was appropriate to appropriate.
Oh! And the little ‘I’ thingy, that also disappeared so you can’t 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 the mental clarity of an Alzheimer’s victim, were the only warning of perhaps another of the 1,000 cuts of financial death.
€22 + €104 = €126 in two days versus €100 for five months unlimited.
In two days I have paid more than 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.
Of course, I broke the speed of light to reach for an axe with which to cancel my account. I also fired off a number of emails challenging their enterprising approach to my money; I finally complained formally (see Current State of Play)
Now, pay attention; if you’re on the app store, your card details are known by apple who pass said details to vendor upon getting your biometric or other permission.
The vendor now has your card details until the end of time, or the heat death of this universe, whichever comes first!
Cancelling my subscription did not cancel the top-up mechanism. Neatly ringfenced from the contract I terminated, it continued to sting my card after cancellation.
Two separate contracts presented as one.
That is not an oversight.
That is the architecture of collusion that crosses a legal and ethical rubicon.
The vendor has your card details!
If you have a decent credit/debit card, you will find it has a recurring payments list, and if you’ve not seen yours, sit down first. Once you’ve identified you have such a list, go to the recent transactions and select the sonofabitch vendor‘s details and include it in your recurring payments list.
There is a method to this madness; once they’re in the list they can be STOPPED DEAD from extracting any more moolah!
The number of steps and confirmations I had to go through to finally, irrevocably, stop payments to misanthropic is a testament to the religious, divine authority that vendor and bank accord their direct relationship at the expense your sovereign authority over your money, which by being held in their system makes a mockery of your ownership. And, there’s the rub.
This is the only mechanism you have in order to control who has access to YOUR money.
You can’t do it to a transaction that‘s ’floating‘ in the main list of transactions.
You have to ring fence and then murder it with extreme prejudice.
Talk to your card agency. You will find it is impossible to stop a continuous extraction process because the vendors and banks collude to take YOU out of the equation of who controls YOUR money.
It isn’t YOU.
The irony of Claude is exquisite: the best AI assistant I have ever used, hobbled by the most dishonest billing mechanism I have ever encountered in 30 years of technology consulting.
Performance Monitoring through
Service Level Agreements & Key Performance Indicators
The logic of the Italian paradigm of employment contracts with no job description has always defeated me; I mean no insult to Italians or their business models; but, how the fuck can you review an employee’s performance when you have no defined metric to measure against?
Buongiorno, Gianni, this is your annual performance review: your time keeping has improved/deteriorated, you have managed to stay sober/drunk/stoned, you’ve avoided most workplace sexual harassment charges, as well as road rage convictions, and we admire your impulse control; as for what you do and that for which we pay you, do continue to stumble along as you have been, fire-fighting, or hindering colleagues admirably. You’re doing a fine/terrible job of being cordless (only work for 2 hours), ET (phoning home all day), kitkat (always on a break), seaweed (float around all day), wheelbarrow (only when pushed).
Catch you on the other side next year.
Ciao, a presto!
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Appendix 1- %
The pedo’s grasp of % leaves me in awe, Awww…
1000% reduction of the cost means the buyer is paid 10 times the price to relieve the vendor of the burden of storage.
That should bankrupt global big pharma in about, oooh! 10 minutes?
It certainly explains why every book the pedo‘s crayoned ends in Chapter 11!!!
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Appendix 2- The 5 9s
The gold standard SLA for availability in any enterprise environment is the 5 9s.
That’s an annual 99.999% uptime, which amounts to no more than 5 minutes down time a year before penalties apply.
Do the math? Yes, please.
Availability formula: MTBF ÷ (MTBF + MTTR)
MTBF — Mean Time Between Failures. The average runtime without failing.
MTTR — Mean Time To Repair. The average time to restore service after a failure.
So if a system runs for 1,000 hours between failures and takes 1 hour to fix each time:
1000 ÷ (1000 + 1) = 99.9% availability — 3 nines.
99.999% uptime = 0.001% downtime per year.
8,760 hours in a year × 0.001% = 0.08766 hours = 5.26 minutes per year.
- 5 nines (99.999%) = ~5.26 mins max downtime/yr before SLA penalties.
∙ 4 nines (99.99%) = ~52.6 minutes/year
∙ 3 nines (99.9%) = ~526.7 minutes a year or 8.76 hours/year
∙ 2 nines (99%) = ~5267.7 minutes a year or 87.6 hours/year
Chasing the next 9 is a holy grail but the trouble with percentages is that the curve is exponential and the cost curve to get there is utterly brutal.
This is why there is a £2m cap for F1 teams; to keep a level playing field despite the massive wealth asymmetry between the teams. Ferrari and Mercedes Benz works teams vs Haas and Alpine.
6 nines = 0.0001% downtime = 0.526 minutes or 31.5 seconds per year maximum.
∙ 3 nines (99.9%) — standard commercial hosting — cheap
∙ 4 nines (99.99%) — roughly 10x the infrastructure cost of 3 nines
∙ 5 nines (99.999%) — roughly 10x again — serious money, redundant everything
∙ 6 nines (99.9999%) — roughly 10x again — the F1 cost cap territory
Each additional nine costs approximately 10x the previous one for roughly 10x less downtime. The marginal return on the last second of availability is astronomically expensive.
Google and Amazon run at approximately 4-5 nines.
Almost every data infrastructure I designed was to 99.999%, and our feet were held to the fire to ensure we never missed it. The exclusion is planned maintenance, which is reasonable -degradation, wear and tear, entropy… the usual reasons.
True, 6 nines is largely theoretical in practice as the failure modes shift from software to physics and somewhere in the 0.001 territory of the boundary conditions for life in this universe; cosmic rays flipping bits, backhoes hitting fibre, acts of God as cloze. (See adjacent ’Life is an emergent feature of the laws of physics‘).
NB: cloze: a gap-fill exercise — God as the missing word, value 0.001.
The F1 analogy is perfect; the last 0.1 seconds per lap costs more than the first 59.9.
Diminishing returns as a law of nature.
Claude Downdetector tells a very different story from the aspirational 5 nines.
Downdetector recorded 88 simultaneous problem reports at 6am on 5 March 2026 - 37% app failures, 30% chat failures, 20% code failures.
MisAnthropic publishes no SLA, no MTBF, no MTTR.
Anthropic is nowhere near 3 nines on current evidence. They’re charging 5 nines prices.
The 5 nines standard:
99.999% uptime, 5.26 minutes downtime per year, is the minimum acceptable in any enterprise environment.
Claude is not an enterprise product. It just charges like one.
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Appendix 3 — The Legal Dimension
In EU consumer law; specifically the Codice del Consumo implementing EU Directive 93/13, contract terms that create a significant imbalance to the detriment of the consumer are potentially voidable.
Anthropic’s top-up mechanism:
Auto-charging at an undefined threshold for an undefined unit of resource, is a strong candidate.
EU consumer law further requires plain language.
“We’ll charge your card when we feel a threshold has been exceeded”, fails that test categorically.
For EU-based subscribers, two authorities are relevant:
- Garante per la protezione dei dati personali — Italy’s data protection authority. Relevant where billing practices intersect with data processing consent.
- AGCM — Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato. Italy’s competition authority. Unfair commercial practices.
You are not without recourse. You are without the energy to pursue it, which is, of course, precisely what they’re counting on.
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Current State of Play
To Anthropic PBC,
I am writing to demand the immediate refund of a charge applied to my payment card after I had cancelled my Claude subscription.
The facts are as follows: I held a paid subscription to Claude (claude.ai). I cancelled that subscription.
Subsequent to confirmed cancellation, Anthropic applied a further charge to my card described as a usage top-up.
I did not authorise any charge after cancellation.
I had no prior notice that such a charge was pending. No opportunity was given to decline it.
LEGAL POSITION
A charge applied after cancellation of a subscription is, on its face, an unauthorised transaction.
There is no valid contractual basis for it: the contract was terminated.
If Anthropic contends that a surviving contractual term permitted this charge, I require that term to be identified and produced in full.
A term that was not brought to my attention at the point of subscription, and is not expressed in plain language, is potentially void under EU Directive 93/13/EEC on unfair contract terms and the Italian Codice del Consumo.
I am an EU-resident consumer based in Italy. EU consumer protection law applies to this transaction regardless of any jurisdiction clause in Anthropic’s terms of service purporting to apply California law.
DEMAND
I require, within 14 days of the date of this letter:
1. Full refund of the post-cancellation charge to my original payment method;
2. Written confirmation that no further charges will be applied to my card;
3. If Anthropic asserts a contractual basis for the charge, the specific term relied upon, in full.
Failure to respond within 14 days, or refusal of this demand, will result in a formal complaint to the Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM) and the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali, both of whom have jurisdiction over Anthropic’s billing practices in respect of EU consumers.
I retain all rights.
Yours faithfully,
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Their response
Hello zenhouse01@gmail.com,
We're writing to let you know that the group you tried to contact (legal) may not exist, or you may not have permission to post messages to the group. A few more details on why you weren't able to post:
* You might have spelled or formatted the group name incorrectly.
* The owner of the group may have removed this group.
* You may need to join the group before receiving permission to post.
* This group may not be open to posting.
If you have questions related to this or any other Google Group, visit the Help Center at https://support.google.com/a/anthropic.com/bin/topic.py?topic=25838.
Thanks,
anthropic.com admins
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Note: their touching concern for why a hidden email account might not be accessible to me is an interesting deflection of the point of my email.
Probably got Claude to write it in one his Alzheimer moments.
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Postscript
This rant was rejected by r/ClaudeAI for ‘insufficient effort.’
“Post appears to contain insufficient information or effort for this subreddit. Try adding more context, evidence, your own helpful insights and guidance and reposting. (Note: this might occur if you do not have enough introductory text in the post body)“
The irony writes itself.
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Anthropic, more like misanthropic.