A few weeks ago, I went back to an AI video editing platform I had used before. I was a returning subscriber. I had paused my subscription for a while because I took a break from video editing, and when I came back, I expected to pick up where I left off.
So I made a great little funny cat video.
The kind of video that makes you think, yes, this is exactly why I pay for this tool.
Then I tried to download it.
And I couldn’t.
While I was away, they had changed their storage policy. Suddenly, I was blocked from downloading my own video unless I first deleted old projects one by one, manually. Not ten. Not bulk delete. One by one.
I contacted support, thinking this would be a quick fix.
It was not.
That is when the battle started.
I spent about three hours online with their support team troubleshooting the issue. No resolution. No real help. Just the same useless direction over and over: delete videos manually, one at a time.
That is insane.
No customer should have to do unpaid manual cleanup just to access the basic feature they subscribed for. I was not asking for something special. I was asking to download a video from a video editing platform.
Then it got worse.
They kept changing support people. Every time, I had to explain the whole story again. Same problem. Same frustration. Same wasted time. After a while, it honestly started to feel like a tactic. Not to solve the problem, but to exhaust the customer until they give up.
And I was getting angry.
Not because the refund amount was huge. It was not. But because of the principle. It felt like they took my money, failed to provide the core feature, and then expected me to do free labor to work around their system.
That kind of thing stays with you.
For almost three weeks, I kept dealing with it. Messages. Explanations. Arguing. Repeating myself. Getting nowhere.
Eventually, I hit a point where something changed inside.
I was done.
I stopped caring for a few days. I stopped messaging them. I stopped thinking about it. And weirdly, the moment I gave up, I felt calm.
Then the light bulb came on.
If they were going to waste my time instead of issuing a simple refund, maybe I should waste theirs.
And yes, I know how that sounds.
First, I tried using Claude in a more agent-style setup. I connected it to email, gave it the background, gave it the goal, and tried to get it to handle the back-and-forth for me.
It didn’t work.
Maybe I was using it wrong. Maybe I did not understand the setup well enough. Maybe it was just the wrong tool for that specific job. Either way, I could not get it to do what I wanted.
So I went old school.
I opened ChatGPT, got API keys for OpenAI and my email setup, and asked it to help me build a Python script that would check my inbox every five minutes and automatically reply with my requirements.
That part was almost funny.
ChatGPT helped me put the code together in minutes. Then it walked me through the setup, the APIs, and how to run it on a schedule. I got it working, tested it, turned it on, and went to sleep.
The next morning, I went to work and honestly forgot about it.
Later that day, I checked my computer.
Refund issued.
And their message basically said: please stop writing to us.
I laughed.
Because the whole thing was so stupid.
They could have refunded me in the first 30 minutes, deleted my account, and moved on. In fact, if they had handled it properly, I would have come back later under a different email and spent more money with them, because their platform actually does something I need.
Instead, they paid support staff to go in circles with me for weeks, frustrated me enough to automate the problem, refunded me anyway, and lost me as a customer for good.
That is terrible business.
And that is the real point of this story.
The first lesson is about AI.
You do not need to be a software developer anymore to solve certain problems. You do need curiosity. You do need patience. You do need to be willing to learn. But the barrier is much lower now. If you can explain what you want clearly enough, AI can help you build surprisingly useful things.
The second lesson is about customer experience.
Some businesses still think arguing with customers saves money. It does not. It burns labor, destroys trust, and turns fixable situations into permanent customer loss.
Customer service is not separate from the product. It is part of the product.
And now, with AI in the hands of regular people, making it hard for customers to be heard may become a much more expensive strategy than companies realize.
A bad refund process taught me two things:
AI gives ordinary people leverage.
And bad customer service is becoming harder to get away with.
