Claude is just awful. The fact that there are payment issues with their service from Russia is one thing —everyone has that problem right now, and it's not really Claude's fault (though they could at least accept Monero or BTC by now). But even just registering an account is difficult, and now even existing users are being asked to verify their number via SMS. Fine, you pay, you confirm via SMS. Can you use it then? No. You can’t through a VPN. If you connect through a server they don’t recognize — your account gets blocked for "suspicious activity".

My Gemini subscription is ending soon, and I don't even know what to do next. I won't be able to pay for Gemini anymore (Google is probably the strictest about this, and even though prepaid cards exist, they just block them if you use a VPN). And ChatGPT, while it does generate lots of "good" code, it’s good in the bad sense — something nobody actually asked for.