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Hey everybody, how's it going? Hope you're having a lovely day. Welcome to today's episode of How You're Getting [ __ ] I'm your host, Lewis Rossman. One of the things I want to go over today is a strategy for anybody who has been screwed with by this particular move by Anthropic. Anthropic makes Claude AI that a lot of people use because they have a really nice harness for claude code. It just for a lot of people, the reason they enjoy it is it just works. I've noticed that Gemini has the most information on certain things, particularly when it comes to how Google search engine optimization rankings and algorithms work. But when it comes to actually having an agentic workflow that 
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just produces something that works, cloud code is surprisingly good. And I think that they are they are realizing this and that they're realizing that they have a certain market advantage there and they and as people were flocking to claude code, they started us they they started doing this [ __ ] that I just find to be kind of sloppy and underhanded. So in order to explain this, I want to try and make an analogy to something that more of you will understand if you don't use AI regularly. Let's say that your internet service provider charges you $100 a month and you've got 100 gigabytes a month of data, but after you go over 100 
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gigabytes a month, they start charging you $10 a gigabyte. Now, let's say that you have used 70 gigabytes of your 100 gigabyte quota for the month. But once you start using Bit Torrent, they start billing you $10 a gigabyte even though you've only used up 70 gigabytes of your 100 gigabyte quota. And let's say that they don't even [ __ ] tell you that that's why they're doing it. It's only happening when you use Bit Torrent because they associate Bit Torrent with piracy. And let's say you're not even pirating something. Let's say you're using Bit Torrent to download a Linux ISO, but you're still getting build $10 a gigabyte even though you've only used up 70 GB of your 100 GB quota. This is 
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something that Claude Code has been doing if you have certain types of files in your directory and they're just telling you, "Yeah, it may have been an error. We don't care." So, there are people that like Claude, but they also like using their Claude account with other frameworks where it just may work better for their particular use case than Claude's own harness. Some people may want to use it with openclaw and other things. And if people who do that tend to have certain files in their directory. So in this case, this gentleman is talking about how if he has a file called Hermes.md 
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in the directory, instead of being part of his plan, it'll start going what's called extra usage. Now, if you have a Claude Max plan, you pay $200 a month and you're supposed to get a [ __ ] ton of usage. But once you run out of usage for a particular time period, the way it works is it'll stop working. But you have the option to use something called extra usage. And when you start using extra usage, you get build an additional rate, but you're able to continue your project without being interrupted. And what he noticed is that if he had hermes.md as a file in a directory 
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written with capital Hmees and then MD for markdown as an extension, that even if he still had usage left in his account, even if he was only 70 or 80% the way there, it would start billing him for extra usage even though the usage was already there. Now, I may consent to having extra usage in my account. It'll ask you if you want to consent, but that's also under the understanding that you're not going to start billing me at this penalty rate unless I used up all my usage. And he noticed in this case, the only time this was happening is if I had this written in there. And that's only going to be written in there usually if again, but 
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this is slippery, but they're assuming that the people that have this there are people that are using clawed outside of their harness. And the people that are using it outside of their harness, they really want to push to API billing. API billing is where instead of paying $200 a month as a flat rate to get this amount of usage, you're paying every single time you make a query based on how many tokens you're using. And TLDDR, that's way more expensive. The reason that I have a problem with this is if they said upfront, by the way, just so you know, because we see this file in your directory, we are going to start billing you at the higher rate 
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immediately rather than actually allowing you to use the usage that you have for $200 a month. That would be one thing, but they just silently took his money and the response that Claude gave was disgusting. They said the following. I sincerely apologize for the disruption you experienced with the billing routing issue. We take service reliability very seriously. However, I need to let you know that we are unable to issue compensation for degraded service or technical errors that result in incorrect billing routing. That last sentence over there, I need to let you know that we're unable to compensate you for technical errors that resulted in 
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you being build improperly. That's fraud in my opinion. And uh the way that I would respond to this and the way that I would suggest that all of you do instead of simply filing a technical query or a technical support ticket with Anthropic, file a chargeback and then do the ticket. And I'm I'm trying to come at this from the business owner perspective is what would get me most likely to change the way my behavior is. And that's a chargeback. There's a few reasons for it. So when there's a chargeback, I have to respond to it with my argument. Regardless of what the end-user license agreement says, the 
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person that's dealing with a chargeback is usually an underpaid customer support employee. And that person, it may surprise a lot of you, but the person that's doing that is usually the underdog themselves in their personal life. The person that deals with chargebacks at Visa and Mastercard and Discover and Amex is not somebody that makes $250,000 a year. They are not the Epstein class. They are not somebody who is looking to punch down on the little guy. Very often, it's the exact opposite. In my experience, they very often, even as a small business, even when I have all my information correct and I can very clearly show this 
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customer is just trying to milk us, they will find in favor of the customer. Sometimes that maybe because they just fundamentally don't understand the industry. At other times, it's just because again, like if I'm getting paid, you know, [ __ ] $7 an hour, like I give a [ __ ] to defend the trillion dollar company. So, here's what I'm suggesting to all of you. Instead of simply filing a ticket with Anthropic, the best way to teach them a lesson is to file a chargeback prior to filing that ticket with Anthropic for a few reasons. Number one, it creates friction. Instead of just sending this canned response, they don't have to log into their billing system and log in there and have somebody manually create 
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an argument, manually respond to your complaints. If they do a canned response over and over again, the person on the other end is going to start to notice a pattern here and go, "Yeah, you know what? [ __ ] that. No." And more importantly, if a company gets enough complaints, a lot of the times the merchant services provider will be open to just dropping them. And this this comes up as part of the the automated way that many of these business companies do business where if they see that there is a certain rate of credit card transactions to chargebacks, they just say this is not worth the money for us because it actually costs them money 
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in order to process all of these chargebacks. And businesses will respond to this by doing whatever they need to do to not get that charge back. I don't think enough people understand this. And I know that there was a lot of friction in the chargeback process itself. For instance, if you're unfortunate enough to use Chase Bank, when you click report a problem, sometimes it works and sometimes it'll tell you you must call this number. And when you call this number, you are routed to somebody who is reading off of a script and life is miserable. I know it sucks for you may have a good credit card provider, you may have a horrible one, you may not know how to do a chargeback. Just trust me on this. If enough of you stick 
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together, band together, and file a chargeback on anthropic, they will be forced to to stop doing this. And they will learn a lesson from it. I guarantee you, you can't do this. You can't admit in writing that your billing system failed and charged people more money. And here's the thing I've noticed about these bugs. Every time one of these bugs like this comes out, it tends to be in the direction of you paying more money if they suspect that you're using something outside of their ecosystem. If you want people to use API billing, just make it not work. Like, just say this 
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tool doesn't work. Just return an empty query. Just return what happens when you hit a limit. This is sneaky [ __ ] What you're trying to say, oh, you have this file there. That file there, well, maybe it makes me think you're using something you're not supposed to use, so I'm just going, no, [ __ ] that. That that, in my opinion, that is [ __ ] [ __ ] And the way you respond to [ __ ] [ __ ] is by filing chargebacks in mass. If you do that, I think you'll get the result that you're looking for. That's it for today. And as always, I hope you learned something. And I really hope that you'll put in the time to go to your credit card company's website, file that charge back in mass, and get them to change their policy 
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because this this is [ __ ] That's not how you respond to people. I can't respond to somebody and literally say that we [ __ ] build you improperly, but I can't refund you for our technical error that builds you improperly. Suck it. And you may say that's in the end user license agreement or the terms of service. Okay, let's turn that around on you. Now you got to trust somebody that makes three or five dollars an hour that they outsource the chargeback process to in Indonesia or Vietnam or something to read that [ __ ] 200page terms of service. Best of luck with that. I'll see you in the next video. Bye now.