30 ms·

Tell HN: Dont use Claude Design, lost access to my projects after unsubscribing

302 points by pycassa 5mo ago

I wanted to try codex after 5 months of claude code max subscription. And then I went back to my previous projects on claude design only to realize I don't have access to them anymore. This is a first. I never lost access to any of my past sessions because I unsubscribed in any of the LLM apps. I actually wanted to try out codex previously, but had similar experience with my credits. They gave extra credits equivalent to my montly subscription price, with some time limit because claude has so many issues that month. And as soon as plan ended. I lost access to the credits. Even after resubscribing, I still don't have access to those credits. I have sympathies towards the engineers, especially the ones that are putting themselves on X. But only when someone with large following has some issue, they sort it out. Having worked at a billing company, I can see how complex contracts sound good for the growth/sales folks but are also horrible for engineers actually implementing those contracts. Their complex rate limiting which is now a norm, identifying other harnesses to count them against extra usage are all probably not easy to implement without very rough edge cases. But all the "bugs" are just where the user gets screwed is what is problematic. I just wanted to post this here, after tagging them multiple times on X to alert other users.

goekjclo 5mo ago
Cannot help but think Claude team are busy adding gimmicky side features instead of doing 'real' RSI and bugfixing.
- 9dev 5mo ago
  The lovely irony of a bleeding edge AI company being afflicted by the most mundane problem of all software engineering—the goldfish attention span of human coders.
  - pycassa 5mo ago
    Have any of you tried their support bot? Its insane bleeding edge AI company gets away with such experience. The bot decides the issue is solved and closes the ticket. WTFFF. similar to claude code, they need to revolutionise customer support. Maybe from a ticket, if the agent decides if its real bug, and legitimate, it will go on and fix it.
  - protocolture 5mo ago
    >The lovely irony of a bleeding edge AI company being afflicted by the most mundane problem of all software engineering—the goldfish attention span of management FTFY Shiny thing syndrome at its finest.
- NiloCK 5mo ago
  I don't think the product people and the RSI-adjacent people are the same people.
- TIPSIO 5mo ago
  This is actually a form of AI psychosis. It's really hard not to especially if you enjoy building.
wiseowise 5mo ago
And AI hypers suggest to build your whole career/identity on this shit. Already foresee "skill issue", "well you should've x, y, z, obviously", etc.
- willsmith72 5mo ago
  People often build their career skills on proprietary tech. Photoshop, Figma, Java, AWS architects
  - codingdave 5mo ago
    Just because people do it does not mean that it is a good idea.
    - platevoltage 5mo ago
      Are you saying that building a career with Adobe Flash wasn't a good idea?
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - wiseowise 5mo ago
    I can still function if any of those are down or gone, unlike LLM addicts.
parliament32 5mo ago
So.. you unsubscribed from a SaaS and expected them not to purge your data? Why would that make sense? Anthropic may be a bunch of skids but it sounds like they did the right thing here. Pretty much all SaaS applications, especially in B2B, are required by compliance to remove customer data within X amount of time at the end of the contractual relationship.
- 05 5mo ago
  You get two years of 'free' (readonly) storage if you unsubscribe from google, it's very unusual to just nuke all access immediately. > are required by compliance to remove customer data within X amount of time at the end of the contractual relationship. that's a very bullshit justification, we're not talking about the 'delete account' button - especially since claude has a free tier.
  - parliament32 5mo ago
    I guess it's not a termination, but a downgrade to the "free" tier. But that still makes sense, given Claude Design is limited "to Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans". He's not on that plan anymore so.. what commercial reason could they possibly have to keep his data? Google Workspace seems to halt access immediately[1] and purge data within 60d[2]. For comparison, Atlassian leaves you access for 15d, and purges data at 60d[3]. 365 gives you 90d[4] before purging. This is a pretty regular thing across the industry. [1] https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/billing/cancel-google-workspace https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/billing/cancel-... [2] https://support.google.com/a/thread/345697828/recovering-data-of-a-deactivate-account?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/thread/345697828/recovering-dat... [3] https://support.atlassian.com/security-and-access-policies/docs/track-storage-and-move-data-across-products/ https://support.atlassian.com/security-and-access-policies/d... [4] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/compliance/assurance/assurance-data-retention-deletion-and-destruction-overview#subscription-retention https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/compliance/assurance/assur...
    - pycassa 5mo ago
      So if I subscribe again? do I expect to have the previous data or it will start afresh? I want to know if I should subscribe again to get this data or shouldn't bother. You can talk about all these rules, but that was my data, when I was subscribed to their product, I'm not asking for access to generate more, just my past sessions.
conception 5mo ago
Backup data that’s important to you.
zuzululu 5mo ago
[flagged]
jjcm 5mo ago
A lot of these things are made fast and loose, and unfortunately this is the reality of using the bleeding edge. Even Figma went through this kind of thing very early on. To add something else to the discussion however, I'd encourage people to skip out on Claude Design for other reasons, and that is the inherent restrictions of LLMs for visual design. LLMs are blind, and spatial relativity is tremendously hard across layers of nested html / css. If you're early on, I'd recommend starting with diffusion first. GPT-Image-2 is phenominal at UI design, and especially if you're just starting out will let you align on a direction more rapidly than an LLM can. The difficulty will be converting from image->html, but you'll be able to explore different directions more cheaply/faster than you could with Claude Design. I will note a bias disclaimer here - I quit Figma to work on my own diffusion-based UI design tool. Not promoting that here, but wanted to at least share my findings in this space.
- semiquaver 5mo ago
  What do you mean LLMs are blind? All frontier models are multimodal, which means they literally consume images as tokens. They can “see” exactly as well as they can “read”. Also, GPT-Image-2 is not a diffusion model, it is based on Transformers, like other LLMs are.
  - slashdave 5mo ago
    Tokens are not a substitute for a numerical measurement. Ask a LLM how much time has passed. Watch it hallucinate wildly. Has anyone noticed that Opus has trouble building ascii diagrams (often leaves out spaces so lines are misaligned)?
    - semiquaver 5mo ago
      Ok? Your comment is in no way responsive to anything I said.
    - arjie 5mo ago
      LLMs are just one mechanical component. One might as well say "Ask your println how much time has passed". That is not a question that makes sense. As an example, I did not construct my agent specifically to answer your question and when I saw your question I queried the agent. And it is correct. https://imgur.com/a/j8j7hL9 https://imgur.com/a/j8j7hL9 As semiquaver said, modern LLMs are multi-modal, they can reason in image-space and audio-space as well as in text-space. It is not a translate then operate kind of situation. Claude Design is not a raw LLM, nor an instruction-tuned LLM. It is an agent harness around an LLM that allows it to do certain things.
Animats 5mo ago
When you lose access to your projects, does Anthropic acquire the intellectual property? It's a real issue when it's in a machine learning system, not passive storage like Github.
- pycassa 5mo ago
  I dont think github is a passive storage system anymore lol. There was an opt-out mechanism we needed to check to not use our code or something like that recently.
- sgc 5mo ago
  There is no intellectual property in ai output, at least as far as legal rulings in the US currently stand. I guess you are asking whether they will use them once you unsubscribe. My cynical take would be probably they will, but read through their fine print ;)
Uptrenda 5mo ago
Aside from OP's post there's another issue with claude design worth mentioning. Yes, it makes absolutely beautiful designs, stunningly so, but the actual code is not something a human could ever maintain. So its like ending up with an opaque blob. Write-once, read-never, or almost disposal code. This is kind of bad because code people aren't going to bother to read might contain vulnerabilities. It's an extreme example of slop code since while normally LLMs can produce code that ranges from some-what-okay to utter garbage, the web code claude makes is awful. On the other hand: you get a single file (even if it is full of 20+ embedded SVGs, javascripts, and other such things.)
- dinkleberg 5mo ago
  Have you actually gotten it to build stunning designs? From what I’ve seen it still falls apart very quickly. They can do a decent job at building blocks but usually not putting them together in a cohesive way in my experience.
  - Uptrenda 5mo ago
    Well subjectively I've been extremely happy with what it built for me. This was all made with claude design: www.warpgate.io. It's the website for my NAT traversal library. Even has different theme for it, kek.
- 9dev 5mo ago
  [dead]
- pycassa 5mo ago
  I dont use the code directly actually. It is just for me to understand how the app looks like initially as a starting point. Previously I have used stitch by google, and even then, it was just to explore product design in the initial stages. Just to ground myself, and see how the product looks end to end. Also mostly I will be doing them in react, so the html code isn't very useful. I would rather share the screenshot directly rather than the html code during development. I actually find, claude models to have superior visual reasoning, in their multi modal llms, im not talking about image generation LLMs. so I just share the picture, to let it undersand the layout and go from there, and just iterate until I like the final look of it.
comboy 5mo ago
Sorry but that one is on you. This sounds like expected behavior and I wouldn't blame any company for doing that.
- pycassa 5mo ago
  I didn't know its expected behaviour until now. Will keep it in mind, but so far the big companies, let us browse our past chats, even after unsubscribing. Praying this will not become norm now.
lucasgw 5mo ago
I have been using Claude Design + Claude Code, and results have been excellent. I have explicit clean-up instructions in Claude Code, and the handoff skill in Claude Design is pretty solid. I've been on product launches many times, so can drive the design side appropriately and keep things focused. Has been a wonderful addition to my workflow. As usual with any agent-driven tool - GIGO. If the human driving has no product experience and is blindly accepting designs, well, that's... a choice.
- pycassa 5mo ago
  DId you read the post? They aren't giving access to my projects, because I unsubsribed from my max subscription to try out codex.
  - coalstartprob 5mo ago
    [dead]
ruguo 5mo ago
It’s pretty outrageous to lock out all your history just for canceling the subscription.
alyxya 5mo ago
I also encountered an issue with my credits. I was previously subscribed to the max plan, claimed credits, then downgraded to the pro plan and noticed I lost my credits. I didn't unsubscribe, just downgraded plans as I wasn't using claude enough to justify needing max.
- pycassa 5mo ago
  yes, their "contract" is insane right now, with so many edge cases. giving poor user experience. when they have so many users, these edge cases also compound. They should simplify things to to give peace to their engineers.
logickkk1 5mo ago
tbh, backups matter. but nobody would accept Word deleting your files when you cancel Office. somewhere along the way we stopped distinguishing backup from custody.
- bandrami 5mo ago
  Isn't that exactly why MS ties O365 to OneDrive like they do?
Topfi 5mo ago
It is still there and you may get it easily. If you export your data [0] all your Claude Design chats are in a design_chats directory along with the code, even if your account currently has no access to Claude Design. It is .json, but converting that into usable code is easily done, either manually or by asking any fairly modern LLM via OpenCode. Just did it myself, it works. I will say that I'd still prefer if they allowed API use of Claude Design, it does have some niceties regarding the way follow up questions have been implemented that I feel make it worth it for very narrow UX experimentation but can't justify a whole sub at the moment, given I for the first time started experiencing regressions up to making Opus unusable via Claude Code with the Max subscription for the first time and the new pretrain in GPT-5.5 is very strong for very specific coding use cases. In fairness though, compaction and task adherence can be inferior compared to GPT-5.4 which did both better than any other model ever, so using both for their specific use cases is my go to. Not feeling like commenting on every statement regarding SaaS and expectations, but I will say that some are mistaken/not considering the law and your rights by just telling you it is your fault and (at least) implying the data is lost. It can't be, think about it. Any temporary subscription cancellation/payment processing issue/bug on Anthropics part/etc. would mean permanent data loss. That'd be less than ideal, not least because Anthropic has in the past had trouble processing payments from verifiably covered accounts. Users in consumer friendly area have the right to export and access their data, including data not exposed via any frontend or API if associated with their account. Doesn't matter whether they pay or not. Course, manual backups are always preferable. A provider could still have a data loss, but as long as they have the data, at least in my neck of the woods they have to give it to you. As it should be. To end, I generally try not to comment on others comments or down outside of actual spam and bad faith, but if more than one comment already was helpful enough to tell OP that they should have exported/backed up, do we really need it repeated? [0] https://claude.ai/settings/data-privacy-controls https://claude.ai/settings/data-privacy-controls
- pycassa 5mo ago
  thanks for letting me know this exists for claude designs as well. yeah.. anyway it will be my coding agent that will be reading these. and if needed, it can show me what they look like. in the ideal world, I know all these things should be in place, but I was not sure, they had the bandwidth to implement all these before releasing these things into the wild. but i will use it to download my sessions. as a dev, building the product is the fun part, implementing entitlements, payment gateway, rate limiting, usage calculation, billing, gdpr stuff, account creation, deletion, export, these are the boring parts. so I wasn't sure they would have implemented this part.
Havoc 5mo ago
>This is a first. I never lost access to any of my past sessions because I unsubscribed in any of the LLM apps. It's not entirely unprecedented - seen these tactics in the google ecosystem. Google music. Unsubscribe killed(kills?) access to see you playlists which of course you only learn once it's done. Give them a credit card again and you can see and export them again. Magic! Resubscribed for 1 month, exported it, unsubscribed, and swore to never trust google music again. idk why they implement patterns like that because sure you extorted $10 in cash out of me but it makes the brand toxic. There is no way that decision has a net positive future value. Hell it even got them a pissed hn post years later
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
Leonard_of_Q 5mo ago
Did you get a warning about your data being /dev/nulled with an admonition to download whatever you wanted to keep before unsubscribing? If you did, well... should'a heeded that warning to make backups, shouldn't you? If you did not get a warning I'd add that it would have been more customer-friendly for Anthropic to warn you about your data disappearing after unsubscription but I still think that you should have made sure you downloaded whatever data you wanted to keep around before `throwing the key in the mailbox'. Don't ever trust third parties to care for your data like you care for it, make sure to keep it somewhere you are sure you can get at no matter what.
- huflungdung 5mo ago
  [dead]
jrumbut 5mo ago
I've lost access to plenty of Claude stuff without canceling anything. I am careful not to leave anything important in there and back up regularly. It's funny because sometimes it will remember stuff that is lost and not be able to reference stuff that is clearly visible. One area where I find ChatGPT superior (and this is just my own experience) is not losing things and also respecting project boundaries. Claude projects just seem to be a way to lose things faster, the model seems to be entirely unaware of projects as a concept.
nateparrott 5mo ago
[dead]
sieabahlpark 5mo ago
[dead]
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
trq_ 5mo ago
Hi there, Thariq from the Claude team here. Sorry this is happening, we'll fix it ASAP. We don't want anyone to feel locked into the tool. Claude's designs are HTML/CSS/JS that any editor can handle; we'll make sure it's possible to download them even after you unsubscribe.
- Topfi 5mo ago
  Don't know why you were initially downed (maybe some thought you were an impersonator), so vouched for your comment. Happy to see you on here and great to hear that you'll address this. As mentioned in my comment, data export let's users get access as it stands, but any improvement in UX is always welcome. Maybe making Design accessible via API credits for occasional use might be something you could bring up too. Thanks for your efforts as an in between the user base and Anthropic. Based on prior personal experience and purely looking in from the outside, I wouldn't be surprising if it can be very challenging and stressful to be in such a position, especially when one may not directly state or say what they think is best in a given situation, so thank you for dealing with a not always very pleasant position where the situation and information you are provided with can change without your say, yet you may be the one to that will be considered responsible in the eyes of the public for a decision you neither made nor could prevent.
coder97 5mo ago
Looks like I need to do a daily backup of the artifacts generated.
DaryaHr 5mo ago
I`m sorry, that`s horrible situation. Coming from IT companies myself, I hope, that most likely they will receive your issue at some point and will act on it. Unfortunately, with all that fast paced development and race after new shiny thing to win user, companies might sacrifice quality. Only users can make an impact here - while we are buying new shiny stuff, things will happened. Investment in quality is expensive.
lum1104 5mo ago
And Claude occationally ban your account, causing the records loss too...
Jinyibruceli 5mo ago
[flagged]
gyigyyf767 5mo ago
What
sqr400 5mo ago
[dead]
sqr400 5mo ago
[dead]
sqr400 5mo ago
[dead]
robeym 5mo ago
I was in the same boat, moving my max subscription to Codex instead of Claude, with a Claude Design project going. I was under the impression that Design was pro plans only, so I downloaded basically everything before cancelling. It could be worth a quick $20 subscription just to grab your stuff, then cancelling. Trying to get support from either Claude or OpenAI seems pretty hopeless. Hopefully this post will get them to see you
theuniverseson 5mo ago
[flagged]
noashavit 5mo ago
I hear you lose access to Claude Design the minute you cancel you subscription.
tdy_err 5mo ago
Who ever thought obots designing human interfaces would be a fruitful endeavor?
ahmazroot 5mo ago
wait, they lock your old projects too after unsubscribing? that’s kinda wild. thanks for sharing this, i was actually planning to cancel my claude subscription too
j_filipe 5mo ago
[flagged]
eddy-sekorti 5mo ago
Ahh sounds bad, hopefully they were not critical.

302 points by pycassa 5mo ago

goekjclo 5mo ago

Cannot help but think Claude team are busy adding gimmicky side features instead of doing 'real' RSI and bugfixing.

9dev 5mo ago
The lovely irony of a bleeding edge AI company being afflicted by the most mundane problem of all software engineering—the goldfish attention span of human coders.
- pycassa 5mo ago
  Have any of you tried their support bot? Its insane bleeding edge AI company gets away with such experience. The bot decides the issue is solved and closes the ticket. WTFFF. similar to claude code, they need to revolutionise customer support. Maybe from a ticket, if the agent decides if its real bug, and legitimate, it will go on and fix it.
- protocolture 5mo ago
  >The lovely irony of a bleeding edge AI company being afflicted by the most mundane problem of all software engineering—the goldfish attention span of management FTFY Shiny thing syndrome at its finest.
NiloCK 5mo ago
I don't think the product people and the RSI-adjacent people are the same people.
TIPSIO 5mo ago
This is actually a form of AI psychosis. It's really hard not to especially if you enjoy building.

wiseowise 5mo ago

And AI hypers suggest to build your whole career/identity on this shit. Already foresee "skill issue", "well you should've x, y, z, obviously", etc.

willsmith72 5mo ago
People often build their career skills on proprietary tech. Photoshop, Figma, Java, AWS architects
- codingdave 5mo ago
  Just because people do it does not mean that it is a good idea.
  - platevoltage 5mo ago
    Are you saying that building a career with Adobe Flash wasn't a good idea?
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- wiseowise 5mo ago
  I can still function if any of those are down or gone, unlike LLM addicts.

parliament32 5mo ago

So.. you unsubscribed from a SaaS and expected them not to purge your data? Why would that make sense? Anthropic may be a bunch of skids but it sounds like they did the right thing here. Pretty much all SaaS applications, especially in B2B, are required by compliance to remove customer data within X amount of time at the end of the contractual relationship.

05 5mo ago
You get two years of 'free' (readonly) storage if you unsubscribe from google, it's very unusual to just nuke all access immediately. > are required by compliance to remove customer data within X amount of time at the end of the contractual relationship. that's a very bullshit justification, we're not talking about the 'delete account' button - especially since claude has a free tier.
- parliament32 5mo ago
  I guess it's not a termination, but a downgrade to the "free" tier. But that still makes sense, given Claude Design is limited "to Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans". He's not on that plan anymore so.. what commercial reason could they possibly have to keep his data? Google Workspace seems to halt access immediately[1] and purge data within 60d[2]. For comparison, Atlassian leaves you access for 15d, and purges data at 60d[3]. 365 gives you 90d[4] before purging. This is a pretty regular thing across the industry. [1] https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/billing/cancel-google-workspace https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/billing/cancel-... [2] https://support.google.com/a/thread/345697828/recovering-data-of-a-deactivate-account?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/thread/345697828/recovering-dat... [3] https://support.atlassian.com/security-and-access-policies/docs/track-storage-and-move-data-across-products/ https://support.atlassian.com/security-and-access-policies/d... [4] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/compliance/assurance/assurance-data-retention-deletion-and-destruction-overview#subscription-retention https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/compliance/assurance/assur...
  - pycassa 5mo ago
    So if I subscribe again? do I expect to have the previous data or it will start afresh? I want to know if I should subscribe again to get this data or shouldn't bother. You can talk about all these rules, but that was my data, when I was subscribed to their product, I'm not asking for access to generate more, just my past sessions.

conception 5mo ago

Backup data that’s important to you.

zuzululu 5mo ago

[flagged]

jjcm 5mo ago

A lot of these things are made fast and loose, and unfortunately this is the reality of using the bleeding edge. Even Figma went through this kind of thing very early on. To add something else to the discussion however, I'd encourage people to skip out on Claude Design for other reasons, and that is the inherent restrictions of LLMs for visual design. LLMs are blind, and spatial relativity is tremendously hard across layers of nested html / css. If you're early on, I'd recommend starting with diffusion first. GPT-Image-2 is phenominal at UI design, and especially if you're just starting out will let you align on a direction more rapidly than an LLM can. The difficulty will be converting from image->html, but you'll be able to explore different directions more cheaply/faster than you could with Claude Design. I will note a bias disclaimer here - I quit Figma to work on my own diffusion-based UI design tool. Not promoting that here, but wanted to at least share my findings in this space.

semiquaver 5mo ago
What do you mean LLMs are blind? All frontier models are multimodal, which means they literally consume images as tokens. They can “see” exactly as well as they can “read”. Also, GPT-Image-2 is not a diffusion model, it is based on Transformers, like other LLMs are.
- slashdave 5mo ago
  Tokens are not a substitute for a numerical measurement. Ask a LLM how much time has passed. Watch it hallucinate wildly. Has anyone noticed that Opus has trouble building ascii diagrams (often leaves out spaces so lines are misaligned)?
  - semiquaver 5mo ago
    Ok? Your comment is in no way responsive to anything I said.
  - arjie 5mo ago
    LLMs are just one mechanical component. One might as well say "Ask your println how much time has passed". That is not a question that makes sense. As an example, I did not construct my agent specifically to answer your question and when I saw your question I queried the agent. And it is correct. https://imgur.com/a/j8j7hL9 https://imgur.com/a/j8j7hL9 As semiquaver said, modern LLMs are multi-modal, they can reason in image-space and audio-space as well as in text-space. It is not a translate then operate kind of situation. Claude Design is not a raw LLM, nor an instruction-tuned LLM. It is an agent harness around an LLM that allows it to do certain things.

Animats 5mo ago

When you lose access to your projects, does Anthropic acquire the intellectual property? It's a real issue when it's in a machine learning system, not passive storage like Github.

pycassa 5mo ago
I dont think github is a passive storage system anymore lol. There was an opt-out mechanism we needed to check to not use our code or something like that recently.
sgc 5mo ago
There is no intellectual property in ai output, at least as far as legal rulings in the US currently stand. I guess you are asking whether they will use them once you unsubscribe. My cynical take would be probably they will, but read through their fine print ;)

Uptrenda 5mo ago

Aside from OP's post there's another issue with claude design worth mentioning. Yes, it makes absolutely beautiful designs, stunningly so, but the actual code is not something a human could ever maintain. So its like ending up with an opaque blob. Write-once, read-never, or almost disposal code. This is kind of bad because code people aren't going to bother to read might contain vulnerabilities. It's an extreme example of slop code since while normally LLMs can produce code that ranges from some-what-okay to utter garbage, the web code claude makes is awful. On the other hand: you get a single file (even if it is full of 20+ embedded SVGs, javascripts, and other such things.)

dinkleberg 5mo ago
Have you actually gotten it to build stunning designs? From what I’ve seen it still falls apart very quickly. They can do a decent job at building blocks but usually not putting them together in a cohesive way in my experience.
- Uptrenda 5mo ago
  Well subjectively I've been extremely happy with what it built for me. This was all made with claude design: www.warpgate.io. It's the website for my NAT traversal library. Even has different theme for it, kek.
9dev 5mo ago
[dead]
pycassa 5mo ago
I dont use the code directly actually. It is just for me to understand how the app looks like initially as a starting point. Previously I have used stitch by google, and even then, it was just to explore product design in the initial stages. Just to ground myself, and see how the product looks end to end. Also mostly I will be doing them in react, so the html code isn't very useful. I would rather share the screenshot directly rather than the html code during development. I actually find, claude models to have superior visual reasoning, in their multi modal llms, im not talking about image generation LLMs. so I just share the picture, to let it undersand the layout and go from there, and just iterate until I like the final look of it.

comboy 5mo ago

Sorry but that one is on you. This sounds like expected behavior and I wouldn't blame any company for doing that.

pycassa 5mo ago
I didn't know its expected behaviour until now. Will keep it in mind, but so far the big companies, let us browse our past chats, even after unsubscribing. Praying this will not become norm now.

lucasgw 5mo ago

I have been using Claude Design + Claude Code, and results have been excellent. I have explicit clean-up instructions in Claude Code, and the handoff skill in Claude Design is pretty solid. I've been on product launches many times, so can drive the design side appropriately and keep things focused. Has been a wonderful addition to my workflow. As usual with any agent-driven tool - GIGO. If the human driving has no product experience and is blindly accepting designs, well, that's... a choice.

pycassa 5mo ago
DId you read the post? They aren't giving access to my projects, because I unsubsribed from my max subscription to try out codex.
- coalstartprob 5mo ago
  [dead]

ruguo 5mo ago

It’s pretty outrageous to lock out all your history just for canceling the subscription.

alyxya 5mo ago

I also encountered an issue with my credits. I was previously subscribed to the max plan, claimed credits, then downgraded to the pro plan and noticed I lost my credits. I didn't unsubscribe, just downgraded plans as I wasn't using claude enough to justify needing max.

pycassa 5mo ago
yes, their "contract" is insane right now, with so many edge cases. giving poor user experience. when they have so many users, these edge cases also compound. They should simplify things to to give peace to their engineers.

logickkk1 5mo ago

tbh, backups matter. but nobody would accept Word deleting your files when you cancel Office. somewhere along the way we stopped distinguishing backup from custody.

bandrami 5mo ago
Isn't that exactly why MS ties O365 to OneDrive like they do?

Topfi 5mo ago

It is still there and you may get it easily. If you export your data [0] all your Claude Design chats are in a design_chats directory along with the code, even if your account currently has no access to Claude Design. It is .json, but converting that into usable code is easily done, either manually or by asking any fairly modern LLM via OpenCode. Just did it myself, it works. I will say that I'd still prefer if they allowed API use of Claude Design, it does have some niceties regarding the way follow up questions have been implemented that I feel make it worth it for very narrow UX experimentation but can't justify a whole sub at the moment, given I for the first time started experiencing regressions up to making Opus unusable via Claude Code with the Max subscription for the first time and the new pretrain in GPT-5.5 is very strong for very specific coding use cases. In fairness though, compaction and task adherence can be inferior compared to GPT-5.4 which did both better than any other model ever, so using both for their specific use cases is my go to. Not feeling like commenting on every statement regarding SaaS and expectations, but I will say that some are mistaken/not considering the law and your rights by just telling you it is your fault and (at least) implying the data is lost. It can't be, think about it. Any temporary subscription cancellation/payment processing issue/bug on Anthropics part/etc. would mean permanent data loss. That'd be less than ideal, not least because Anthropic has in the past had trouble processing payments from verifiably covered accounts. Users in consumer friendly area have the right to export and access their data, including data not exposed via any frontend or API if associated with their account. Doesn't matter whether they pay or not. Course, manual backups are always preferable. A provider could still have a data loss, but as long as they have the data, at least in my neck of the woods they have to give it to you. As it should be. To end, I generally try not to comment on others comments or down outside of actual spam and bad faith, but if more than one comment already was helpful enough to tell OP that they should have exported/backed up, do we really need it repeated? [0] https://claude.ai/settings/data-privacy-controls https://claude.ai/settings/data-privacy-controls

pycassa 5mo ago
thanks for letting me know this exists for claude designs as well. yeah.. anyway it will be my coding agent that will be reading these. and if needed, it can show me what they look like. in the ideal world, I know all these things should be in place, but I was not sure, they had the bandwidth to implement all these before releasing these things into the wild. but i will use it to download my sessions. as a dev, building the product is the fun part, implementing entitlements, payment gateway, rate limiting, usage calculation, billing, gdpr stuff, account creation, deletion, export, these are the boring parts. so I wasn't sure they would have implemented this part.

Havoc 5mo ago

>This is a first. I never lost access to any of my past sessions because I unsubscribed in any of the LLM apps. It's not entirely unprecedented - seen these tactics in the google ecosystem. Google music. Unsubscribe killed(kills?) access to see you playlists which of course you only learn once it's done. Give them a credit card again and you can see and export them again. Magic! Resubscribed for 1 month, exported it, unsubscribed, and swore to never trust google music again. idk why they implement patterns like that because sure you extorted $10 in cash out of me but it makes the brand toxic. There is no way that decision has a net positive future value. Hell it even got them a pissed hn post years later

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

Leonard_of_Q 5mo ago

Did you get a warning about your data being /dev/nulled with an admonition to download whatever you wanted to keep before unsubscribing? If you did, well... should'a heeded that warning to make backups, shouldn't you? If you did not get a warning I'd add that it would have been more customer-friendly for Anthropic to warn you about your data disappearing after unsubscription but I still think that you should have made sure you downloaded whatever data you wanted to keep around before `throwing the key in the mailbox'. Don't ever trust third parties to care for your data like you care for it, make sure to keep it somewhere you are sure you can get at no matter what.

huflungdung 5mo ago
[dead]

jrumbut 5mo ago

I've lost access to plenty of Claude stuff without canceling anything. I am careful not to leave anything important in there and back up regularly. It's funny because sometimes it will remember stuff that is lost and not be able to reference stuff that is clearly visible. One area where I find ChatGPT superior (and this is just my own experience) is not losing things and also respecting project boundaries. Claude projects just seem to be a way to lose things faster, the model seems to be entirely unaware of projects as a concept.

nateparrott 5mo ago

[dead]

sieabahlpark 5mo ago

[dead]

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

trq_ 5mo ago

Hi there, Thariq from the Claude team here. Sorry this is happening, we'll fix it ASAP. We don't want anyone to feel locked into the tool. Claude's designs are HTML/CSS/JS that any editor can handle; we'll make sure it's possible to download them even after you unsubscribe.

Topfi 5mo ago
Don't know why you were initially downed (maybe some thought you were an impersonator), so vouched for your comment. Happy to see you on here and great to hear that you'll address this. As mentioned in my comment, data export let's users get access as it stands, but any improvement in UX is always welcome. Maybe making Design accessible via API credits for occasional use might be something you could bring up too. Thanks for your efforts as an in between the user base and Anthropic. Based on prior personal experience and purely looking in from the outside, I wouldn't be surprising if it can be very challenging and stressful to be in such a position, especially when one may not directly state or say what they think is best in a given situation, so thank you for dealing with a not always very pleasant position where the situation and information you are provided with can change without your say, yet you may be the one to that will be considered responsible in the eyes of the public for a decision you neither made nor could prevent.

coder97 5mo ago

Looks like I need to do a daily backup of the artifacts generated.

DaryaHr 5mo ago

I`m sorry, that`s horrible situation. Coming from IT companies myself, I hope, that most likely they will receive your issue at some point and will act on it. Unfortunately, with all that fast paced development and race after new shiny thing to win user, companies might sacrifice quality. Only users can make an impact here - while we are buying new shiny stuff, things will happened. Investment in quality is expensive.

lum1104 5mo ago

And Claude occationally ban your account, causing the records loss too...

Jinyibruceli 5mo ago

[flagged]

gyigyyf767 5mo ago

What

sqr400 5mo ago

[dead]

sqr400 5mo ago

[dead]

sqr400 5mo ago

[dead]

robeym 5mo ago

I was in the same boat, moving my max subscription to Codex instead of Claude, with a Claude Design project going. I was under the impression that Design was pro plans only, so I downloaded basically everything before cancelling. It could be worth a quick $20 subscription just to grab your stuff, then cancelling. Trying to get support from either Claude or OpenAI seems pretty hopeless. Hopefully this post will get them to see you

theuniverseson 5mo ago

[flagged]

noashavit 5mo ago

I hear you lose access to Claude Design the minute you cancel you subscription.

tdy_err 5mo ago

Who ever thought obots designing human interfaces would be a fruitful endeavor?

ahmazroot 5mo ago

wait, they lock your old projects too after unsubscribing? that’s kinda wild. thanks for sharing this, i was actually planning to cancel my claude subscription too

j_filipe 5mo ago

[flagged]

eddy-sekorti 5mo ago

Ahh sounds bad, hopefully they were not critical.