I too was banned. Two key details: 1. I was unbanned via their appeal form, but 2. I had created a new account in the meantime which I’ve used since.
If you need a debit card, use Mercury https://www.mercury.com. You can create as many as you want. I use a unique card for each subscription. (If you’re thinking "oh, they’re like privacy.com," you’re mistaken. Privacy.com gets blocked by merchants; mercury works. No idea why.)
Since you’re already throwing around $120, I suspect Mercury’s sign up fee won’t be a problem. But if you want to bypass it, you can start an LLC and use your EIN during account setup for free Mercury access. I did it for about $20 total and have been using Mercury for about 5 years. Best bank ever, and I’ll happily shill them all day every day till more people try them out.
In short, just dodge the ban. I used the same name and address on both my accounts, so as long as you use a different card you have a decent chance of bypassing the ban.
sillysaurusx
I try not to depend on these AI tools, not having them is inconvenient but I still write every line of code myself, so the speed I work at remains always the same.
I also never keep plans running for months on end. I pause them most of the time relying on free usage and resume them during busy hours when I run out of free usage. writing the code myself is also more fun tbh.
>I couldn't even move to real coding in 1 hour
That sounds... concerning? I would try to manage the context of the work you're doing yourself and only consult it for certain functions.
I don't think you need the very best from Anthropic if you follow these rules, you might also save quite a bit of money.
Sorry If this sounds like a lecture I just wanna give tips to continue your work. Best of Luck in getting your account back!
leothetechguy
I know it’s not ideal, but why not give the main competitor a go? I have great experience of using OpenAI Codex, and frequently switch between it and Claude on a whim, often playing them off against each other to review one another’s PRs.
iamphilrae
In all seriousness, between DeepSeek-V4-Pro, Kimi K2.6 and now K2.7-Code, Xiaomi's MiMo-2.5-Pro, and Qwen3.7 Max, I haven't touched Claude for any sort of programming-related task in months.
I still lean on Claude for research/chat questions that require going out to the world to get the answer competently, but that's just laziness, and all of their competitors can do that, too.
I don't use OpenAI or Gemini, either. The Chinese models are just that good. If all three of the US majors banned me, I think that'd be just fine.
abalashov
Don’t worry about it, Anthropic is banned from releasing new models anyway.
Try out some of the competitors, they are really good these days.
chillfox
Why not using some other coding IDE with OpenRouter? There you can also use the models. You can even switch models easily depending on your needs and spent.
It's amazing that companies still can't handle the concept of somebody moving to a different country but still using a credit card from their original country.
I spent two days on the phone with Microsoft last year trying to find a way to pay them $700 to renew my lapsed Visual Studio subscription. I live in France and want to pay with a US card (or UK card or even a French card at this point), but because of some combination of physical location, store location, account location, card country, and vpn that I had on the first time I tried the process, the system is in a state where it can never again process a payment for me.
There are like 5 or 6 companies where I'm in this state. You get exactly one try to guess the magic combination of all those things above to get the backend to sail you through smoothly. If you blow it, it'll write everything down and refuse to let you change anything, then drop you into an infinite loop telling you to just change [store|country|card country|hairstyle] and sending you back to the beginning.
I mean sure, it's probably saving me a couple grand a year in services that I wish I could get working. But it baffles me that those companies don't want that money for themselves.
jasonkester
The part that would bother me most is not the ban itself, but having no idea what to change. “Policy violation” could mean VPN, billing risk, location, or actual usage.
Littice
Well at least you didn't submit an ID and selfie yet so you could make a new account right, the future is bright.
throwaway2027
Don't have a solution but just to add that I'm the same boat, and I've seen a few others. Something trips their anomaly detection and they don't care about it because it's presumably a low false positive rate.
For what it's worth I can just pay for tokens through other providers proxying their API. Still sucks because you end up paying much more.
comments (10)
If you need a debit card, use Mercury https://www.mercury.com. You can create as many as you want. I use a unique card for each subscription. (If you’re thinking "oh, they’re like privacy.com," you’re mistaken. Privacy.com gets blocked by merchants; mercury works. No idea why.)
Since you’re already throwing around $120, I suspect Mercury’s sign up fee won’t be a problem. But if you want to bypass it, you can start an LLC and use your EIN during account setup for free Mercury access. I did it for about $20 total and have been using Mercury for about 5 years. Best bank ever, and I’ll happily shill them all day every day till more people try them out.
In short, just dodge the ban. I used the same name and address on both my accounts, so as long as you use a different card you have a decent chance of bypassing the ban.
sillysaurusx
I also never keep plans running for months on end. I pause them most of the time relying on free usage and resume them during busy hours when I run out of free usage. writing the code myself is also more fun tbh.
>I couldn't even move to real coding in 1 hour
That sounds... concerning? I would try to manage the context of the work you're doing yourself and only consult it for certain functions.
I don't think you need the very best from Anthropic if you follow these rules, you might also save quite a bit of money.
Sorry If this sounds like a lecture I just wanna give tips to continue your work. Best of Luck in getting your account back!
leothetechguy
iamphilrae
I still lean on Claude for research/chat questions that require going out to the world to get the answer competently, but that's just laziness, and all of their competitors can do that, too.
I don't use OpenAI or Gemini, either. The Chinese models are just that good. If all three of the US majors banned me, I think that'd be just fine.
abalashov
Try out some of the competitors, they are really good these days.
chillfox
There are OpenSource versions of CodeX.
For example:
* OpenCode: https://medium.com/codex/kickstart-opencode-with-openrouter-...
* CodeX with OpenRouter: https://openrouter.ai/docs/cookbook/coding-agents/codex-cli
PinguTS
I spent two days on the phone with Microsoft last year trying to find a way to pay them $700 to renew my lapsed Visual Studio subscription. I live in France and want to pay with a US card (or UK card or even a French card at this point), but because of some combination of physical location, store location, account location, card country, and vpn that I had on the first time I tried the process, the system is in a state where it can never again process a payment for me.
There are like 5 or 6 companies where I'm in this state. You get exactly one try to guess the magic combination of all those things above to get the backend to sail you through smoothly. If you blow it, it'll write everything down and refuse to let you change anything, then drop you into an infinite loop telling you to just change [store|country|card country|hairstyle] and sending you back to the beginning.
I mean sure, it's probably saving me a couple grand a year in services that I wish I could get working. But it baffles me that those companies don't want that money for themselves.
jasonkester
Littice
throwaway2027
For what it's worth I can just pay for tokens through other providers proxying their API. Still sucks because you end up paying much more.
dhoe