I've spent thousands of dollars on API tokens in the last few months. Out of my own pocket, as an indie contractor. I used the API specifically instead of Pro/Max/Plus/Silver/Gold/Platinum/Diamond to avoid all of the mess there regarding usage resets and potential hidden routing to worse models. It worked great for months, I got a ton of shit done, shipped a bunch of features. I really began to rely on the tech. I was not happy about the cost, but the value proposition was there.

Then within the last few months everything changed and went to shit. My trust was lost. Behavior became completely inconsistent.

During the height of Claude's mental retardation (now finally acknowledged by the creators) I had an incident where CC ran a query against an unpartitioned/massive BQ table that resulted in $5,000 in extra spend because it scanned a table which should have been daily partitioned 30 times. 27 TB per scan. I recall going over and over the setup and exhaustively refining confidence. After I realized this blunder, I referred to it in the same CC session, "jesus fucking christ, I flagged this issue earlier" -- it responded, "you did. you called out the string types and full table scans and I said "let's do it later." That was wrong. I should have prioritized it when you raised it". Now obviously this is MY fault. I fucked up here, because I am the operator, and the buck stops with me. But this incident really galvinized that the Claude I had come to vibe with so well over the last N months was entirely gone.

We all knew it was making making mistakes, becoming fully retarded. We all felt and flagged this. When Anthropic came out and said, "yeah ... you guys are using it wrong, its a skill issue" I knew this honeymoon was over. Then recently when they finally came out and ack'd more of the issues (while somehow still glossing over how bad they fucked up?) it was the final nail. I'm done spending $ on Anthropic ecosystem. I signed up for OpenAI pro $200/mo and will continue working on my own local inference in the meantime.

The thing that irks me the most is that I was paying full price. Literally spreading my cheeks wide open and saying, "here ya go Anthropic, all yours." and for actually close to a year it was great. Looking back I see I began using it in March of 2025. Thats roughly a year of integrating it into my day to day, pairing with it constantly, and as I said shipping really well engineered meaningful work.

They could have just kept doing this - literally printing money. Literally: do absolutely nothing, go on vacation, profit $$$. So why did so much change? I think that the issue is they were trying to optimize CC for the monthly plan folks, the ones who are likely losing the company money, but API users became collateral damage.