ChatGPT wouldn't take my money, so it's back to Claude

A few days ago, I wrote a post venting about Claude's stupidity and said I was canceling my subscription to try Codex and ChatGPT for a month instead. Fate had other plans.

This is peak facepalm behavior, by the way. Publicly declare I'm quitting a platform, then get dragged back within a few days by pure chaos.

I didn't know ChatGPT was running a promo trial, so I figured this was my lucky break. At least I thought so.

Obviously, I wanted the trial, because who turns down free money? Except my payment wouldn't go through. Not even close. I tried eight different cards. Debit, credit, Apple Pay, even a friend's card from a completely different bank. None of it worked.

Turns out I wasn't the only one. Reddit was full of people with the same problem, and I was already thinking, fuck, I need to go back to Claude.

Before I gave up, I asked ChatGPT itself why it wouldn't take my money. Might as well ask the culprit directly. I added a screenshot of its explanation below.

The second I read that, on top of the Reddit threads, I was done. I didn't have the brainspace for it. Maybe the universe was telling me to go back to Claude. That thought came with a heavy fucking sigh and a beer, before I'd even figured out what I was going to do next.

The email from Claude that tilted me

And then fate really struck. Right as I was giving up on ChatGPT, not exactly thrilled about crawling back to Claude either, this landed in my inbox.

It's a small miracle, because Anthropic is famously fucking terrible at customer support. I expected either no response, or one arriving sometime around Christmas.

I was wrong. Here's what happened:

• I posted my blog post about canceling on August 29th.

• That same day, I sent Claude a chat message sharing the post, just telling it to have a read.

• I never once said in that chat that I was canceling my subscription.

So apparently someone at Anthropic read the actual blog post, because the email, screenshot below, says, and I quote from the email:

"I understand your frustration, and I want to assure you that I am committed to resolving this for you as efficiently as possible. However, in order to proceed with your cancellation request, I require a few additional details."

Like what the fuck?

I never asked for a cancellation in the chat. So Anthropic has actual humans working there?

I'm genuinely shocked. I'm also still mad about the stupidity that started this whole thing.

So now I don't know how to feel. Insulted, because they still couldn't answer the actual question I asked. Or honored, because someone replied within a reasonable timeframe for once.

Either way, just like the chat itself, the email missed the point completely. Its response was about as consistent as Opus or Sonnet on a bad day.

Read also: Claude got so dumb, so I stopped relying on it alone

Why I'm not switching, for now

I know there are platforms outside the usual suspects, Codex, Gemini, Claude. I'm not familiar with most of them, but Kimi has caught my eye lately.

Still, I know my limits. Don't forget I only started doing this in May. I went from knowing fuck all, working out of a GitHub web editor, to something that actually resembles a dev stack. This isn't the moment to go switching models or testing new tools for the sake of it.

The real difference with ChatGPT is memory. It already has months of my chat history. It knows what I do, what I need, how I work.

And yes, both Gemini and ChatGPT, on their free tiers, are somehow better at reading my preferences than Claude on Pro. But going back to Claude is still the sensible move.

Claude Code is still connected to Cursor, and for actual coding, the context holds up. I'll either have to work around Claude's screwups or just live with them.

If I swapped platforms entirely, I'd lose my momentum. I just wrote 29 blog posts in August, and my focus is finally where I want it. I can't afford to lose that over a subscription cancellation flow.

Read also: September focus, two builds, everything else is content: update #10

So Claude gets another month. I'll still poke around with Kimi whenever my brain has the bandwidth for it.

No ChatGPT for me unfortunately. It's Claude, 24/7 for now.