May 13, 2026
Subscription cancelled, memories deleted
Tell HN: Dont use Claude Design, lost access to my projects after unsubscribing
User quits Claude, comes back, and finds the cupboard bare as commenters split hard
TLDR: A user says they lost old Claude Design projects and credits after canceling, sparking anger over whether paid AI tools can be trusted with important work. Commenters split between blaming the company for rough customer treatment and bluntly saying: if you didn’t back it up, that’s your mistake.
A Hacker News post about a user losing access to old Claude Design projects after canceling a paid plan turned into a full-on comment-section food fight. The original complaint was simple: after stepping away to try a rival tool, the user returned and discovered past work and even old bonus credits were gone. That alone was enough to set off the crowd, with critics painting it as yet another story of a company making life harder for paying customers and only reacting when someone famous complains loudly online.
The spiciest outrage came from people already fed up with AI companies. One commenter grumbled that the Claude team seems too busy shipping flashy side quests instead of fixing basic reliability problems. Another went full doom-post, mocking the idea that anyone should build their career on tools that can apparently lock the door behind you the second you stop paying. The vibe was: you’re renting, not owning, and the landlord just changed the locks.
But not everyone grabbed a pitchfork. A rival camp basically said, hold on, what did you expect? If you stop paying for a software service, some argued, it’s normal for your data to be deleted after a while. That triggered the classic internet survival-mantras: “Backup data that’s important to you” and the brutal, meme-ready “Not your server not your data.” In other words, the real drama wasn’t just the missing projects — it was the eternal online war between people who expect services to remember everything forever and the hardliners who say if you didn’t save it yourself, that’s on you.
Key Points
- •The author says they lost access to previous Claude Design projects after unsubscribing from a Claude Code Max subscription.
- •The post states the user had maintained the Claude subscription for five months before trying Codex.
- •The author says this is the first time unsubscribing from an LLM app caused loss of access to past sessions.
- •The post alleges that bonus credits previously granted during a month with service issues expired at plan end and did not return after resubscription.
- •The author says they posted on Hacker News after repeatedly tagging the company on X to warn other users.