If you need a debit card, use Mercury https://www.mercury.com. You can create as many as you want. I use a unique card for each subscription. (If you’re thinking "oh, they’re like privacy.com," you’re mistaken. Privacy.com gets blocked by merchants; mercury works. No idea why.)

Since you’re already throwing around $120, I suspect Mercury’s sign up fee won’t be a problem. But if you want to bypass it, you can start an LLC and use your EIN during account setup for free Mercury access. I did it for about $20 total and have been using Mercury for about 5 years. Best bank ever, and I’ll happily shill them all day every day till more people try them out.

In short, just dodge the ban. I used the same name and address on both my accounts, so as long as you use a different card you have a decent chance of bypassing the ban.

I also never keep plans running for months on end. I pause them most of the time relying on free usage and resume them during busy hours when I run out of free usage. writing the code myself is also more fun tbh.

>I couldn't even move to real coding in 1 hour

That sounds... concerning? I would try to manage the context of the work you're doing yourself and only consult it for certain functions.

I don't think you need the very best from Anthropic if you follow these rules, you might also save quite a bit of money.

Sorry If this sounds like a lecture I just wanna give tips to continue your work. Best of Luck in getting your account back!

That gives me a "there's probably more to this story" feeling. Though I understand that there are people without multiple credit cards, getting a second credit card and/or debit card is not difficult under ordinary circumstances.

Most probably because my vpn was on I got banned

This reinforces my "there's probably more to this story."

Try out some of the competitors, they are really good these days.

There are OpenSource versions of CodeX.

For example:

* OpenCode: https://medium.com/codex/kickstart-opencode-with-openrouter-...

* CodeX with OpenRouter: https://openrouter.ai/docs/cookbook/coding-agents/codex-cli

I still lean on Claude for research/chat questions that require going out to the world to get the answer competently, but that's just laziness, and all of their competitors can do that, too.

I don't use OpenAI or Gemini, either. The Chinese models are just that good. If all three of the US majors banned me, I think that'd be just fine.

I spent two days on the phone with Microsoft last year trying to find a way to pay them $700 to renew my lapsed Visual Studio subscription. I live in France and want to pay with a US card (or UK card or even a French card at this point), but because of some combination of physical location, store location, account location, card country, and vpn that I had on the first time I tried the process, the system is in a state where it can never again process a payment for me.

There are like 5 or 6 companies where I'm in this state. You get exactly one try to guess the magic combination of all those things above to get the backend to sail you through smoothly. If you blow it, it'll write everything down and refuse to let you change anything, then drop you into an infinite loop telling you to just change [store|country|card country|hairstyle] and sending you back to the beginning.

I mean sure, it's probably saving me a couple grand a year in services that I wish I could get working. But it baffles me that those companies don't want that money for themselves.

For what it's worth I can just pay for tokens through other providers proxying their API. Still sucks because you end up paying much more.

On the one hand humans are sort of useless without tools. On the other hand if we go limp and abdicate our ownership of our workflows we might as well be dead.

I have my primary rig, a secondary and I’m installing a local model on an old gaming rig with a GPU in it.

I was banned from open ai under similar circumstances, right after they scaled out their payments system. I was paying through Google play, and one day account was banned. The process of appeal was crazy. First, they told me they couldn't tell me what I did wrong. Then, they said, even though they couldn't tell me what I did wrong, if I apologized for doing it they would consider the appeal. Finally, they told me that they confirmed it was due to suspicious payment activity.

Just for shits and giggles, I sent a follow up email once a month for over a year.

What's interesting, is my developer account is tied to a phone number. So, even though I can still pay openai under a different email (same card!) I can't access the developer account because that number is accounted for.

There are a lot of people on this site that want to be skeptical and say, "hmmm there has to be more to this story." There really isn't. Unless you consider that I said disparaging things about Sam Altman in a chat to chatgpt once, maybe that's it.

This is the world these companies are building for us: absolute rent seeking behavior towards the in/put group. And if you're in the out group, you can eat shit.

Computers and LLMs are great at automation of low-level human cognitive tasks like memory, decisions and loops, etc. but struggle enormously with high cognitive tasks like reasoning, deep logic, nuance, etc. Not that it can't be done (Claude platform is proof that it can) - but the cost and scaling advantage in this realm belongs to the human brain, not the LLM.

Googles customer relations were “AI” before LLMs.

Been thinking of switching to a multi model harness anyway.

Learn to code

This is only partly tongue-cheek. If you're using it all the time your coding skills will have declined markedly so it might be good practice to DIY when the is no time pressure or production quota.

In the meantime, I switched to OpenAI. Their latest models and codex are just as good if not better in my experience.

Dust yourself off and open a book.

Kiro.dev, w. cerebras?

Aider, w. groq (with a Q)?

Also, I'll never be grateful enough for all the horror stories about Google accounts getting randomly banned - they were what finally pushed me to make a similar move.

Why the fuck are you renting your hammer, carpenter, from assholes who will capriciously take it away from you when you need it most?!

I hate the idea of government throwing its weight around based on personal vendettas (in the case of this Fable debacle), so it's clear that if this tech is going to be foundation-level important to the economy going forward, we need some sort of laws guaranteeing our access to it.

But authoritarians in government aren't the only party we need to be concerned about. As shown by this post, the actual model companies themselves may have too much centralized power already.

Given all software development has essentially moved to AI-first, an authoritarian-minded Anthropic/OpenAI employee is currently able to pick winners in the economy by granting/withholding access to certain groups. That is the type of thing I think needs to be regulated, not some trivial cyber security abilities in the actual models themselves.

The Google-style B2C blanket ban with zero customer support approach isn't going to cut it if the models continue progressing at this rate and the lead ever widens with open source (which it likely will at some point).