Ask HN: Why isn't Anthropic eating their own dogfood? A Max subscriber's view
4 comments
Why do you say they are not eating their own dogfood? That phrase seems to suggest something different to me than "crappy support". I'm not condoning crappy support but are there any 'at scale" SaaS platforms that actually have support?
I also don't want to be the bad guys here but:
"I'm paying $200/month for Claude Max on my own dime, not my company's. I'm a Technology Director at a Fortune 50 company, using Claude personally to learn and then advocate for the right tools in our enterprise environment. That context matters for what follows."
No it does not. It makes no difference if you pay or your company pays or if your product is making money or you are self-educating. If you feel that you are not getting a $200/month return on your investment then you should cancel your subscription. I also struggle to understand why you are using a $200/month plan to do investigation and testing when there are $25/month options.
I also don't want to be the bad guys here but:
"I'm paying $200/month for Claude Max on my own dime, not my company's. I'm a Technology Director at a Fortune 50 company, using Claude personally to learn and then advocate for the right tools in our enterprise environment. That context matters for what follows."
No it does not. It makes no difference if you pay or your company pays or if your product is making money or you are self-educating. If you feel that you are not getting a $200/month return on your investment then you should cancel your subscription. I also struggle to understand why you are using a $200/month plan to do investigation and testing when there are $25/month options.
Fair pushback on the framing. "Dogfooding" to me means: does Anthropic rely on their own product under real-world conditions enough that they feel these pain points and prioritize fixing them? It's less about support and more about product reliability signals. On the credentials — you're right, it reads like I'm fishing for VIP treatment. That wasn't the intent; the point was about how enterprise AI adoption actually works (practitioners test, validate, then advocate up the chain). I probably led with it too hard. And on the $200 plan: I'm running multi-agent workflows via Claude Code that are coming close to saturating even Max tier limits — the $25 option isn't a realistic fit for that workload and I was hitting my limits quite a bit. This is to build a couple personal projects but also give it a true test of how it would be used from an enterprise perspective vs. my side projects. No doubt there is some room for me to optimize as I learn more though. Hopefully I won't need to spend $200/month in the future when I'm more skilled with my prompts, use of projects, etc. That is another opportunity to leverage an agentic framework to assist users with adoption though (which might also help to manage their scaling challenges.)
I'm paying $200/month for Claude Max on my own dime, not my company's. I'm a Technology Director at a Fortune 50 company, using Claude personally to learn and then advocate for the right tools in our enterprise environment. That context matters for what follows.
Here's what's broken:
Claude Code OAuth fails repeatedly because the model Anthropic labels "Default (recommended)" — Opus 4.6 with 1M context — has a known OAuth refresh bug. Their own UI is pointing users at the broken option.
Claude Desktop throws "This isn't working right now" constantly. Power users send every other prompt twice, especially during business hours. 127 incidents in 90 days per StatusGator. No SLA, no credits, no advance notice when what's included changes. What I'm paying for seems to shift daily — that's a product management maturity problem, not a scaling problem.
The deeper issue: when errors fire, there's no diagnostic agent, no inline fix, no curated Anthropic knowledge base that Claude searches before hitting Google. No check of the real-time status board so users don't waste time. The tokens I spend troubleshooting their bugs count against my usage limit.
Anthropic is effectively profiting from its own poor support experience — customers pay for the service and then pay again to fix it. They're charging customers for the time it takes to identify the defective product they sold them.
I stopped using OpenClaw because of its instability. I didn't have time for the constant churn. Anthropic is starting to feel the same way — the difference is they're charging me $2,400 a year, which raises the bar considerably.
The people most frustrated right now are technical early adopters actively building on the platform. Anthropic is telling everyone to eat their own dogfood — to demonstrate AI's value by using it internally. They aren't doing it themselves. That's a credibility gap that compounds every outage.
If Claude is frustrating me on personal projects, I'm not going to advocate bringing it into an enterprise environment where the stakes are much higher. That's the retention problem Anthropic should actually be worried about.
Why isn't Anthropic eating their own dogfood?