Feedback from a loyal Max subscriber: OAuth token revocation drove me to switch to Gemini

Who I am

I am a paying Claude Max subscriber and nearly 60 years old. I have been running businesses and observing companies succeed and fail for decades. I am writing this because I genuinely care about Claude and Anthropic future.

What happened

I was running an OpenClaw Telegram bot on my own EC2 server, powered by Claude (Opus/Sonnet) through my Max subscription OAuth token. It was my personal assistant — checking emails, managing calendars, generating content, monitoring servers, all through Telegram.

Then Anthropic revoked OAuth tokens for third-party use. My bot died repeatedly. The 8-hour token expiry combined with shutdown hook race conditions made it fundamentally unreliable. No amount of refresh scripts or workarounds could fix it because the policy itself blocked it.

What I did

I switched entirely to Google Gemini API. My bot now runs on gemini-3.1-pro-preview and gemini-3-flash-preview. It works. No token expiry, no revocation, no cron jobs to refresh tokens every 4 hours. Just an API key that does not expire.

Anthropic lost a loyal paying customer API usage. Google gained one.

My advice (from 60 years of life experience)

I have seen many companies rise and fall. The ones that fail share a common pattern: they prioritize short-term corporate interests over customer needs.

When a customer pays for a service, they should be able to use it the way they want — especially on their own infrastructure, for personal use. Blocking this does not protect revenue; it drives customers away.

I am not asking for free access. I am paying for Max. I just wanted to use what I paid for, in my own way, on my own server.

Please do not dismiss this as just another complaint. This is sincere advice from someone who loves Claude and wants to see Anthropic succeed. Listen to your paying customers before they all leave.

The irony

I am writing this feedback using Claude Code (Opus 4.6) on my local machine — while my server now runs on Gemini because Claude would not let me use it there.

---

A loyal customer who switched not because Gemini is better, but because Anthropic pushed me away.