I'm Paying $200 a Month for Claude. Dispatch Has Been Down for Two Days.

I signed up for Claude's $200 plan at the start of this month. First time at that tier. I made the jump because the Anthropic stack — Claude Code, Cowork, Claude in Chrome, Claude in Excel, and especially Dispatch on my phone — had become the way I actually get work done. I have a day job where I can't sit at a computer most of the day, so being able to kick off tasks from my phone and have them keep running on my laptop isn't a nice-to-have. It's the whole point.

Two days ago, Dispatch stopped responding. I'd send it a message and… nothing. No reply, no error, no acknowledgment. Still like that as I'm writing this.

A couple of days before that, Anthropic was throttling me. Hard. I tried to do three different things in one day and all three got throttled. The messages were specific — it wasn't me hitting my usage cap, it was Anthropic themselves being compute-constrained and slowing things down across the board. Went on for most of the day.

First month on the $200 plan. Most of the week lost to things that aren't my fault. That's the context for everything I'm about to say.

The hire that was supposed to help

Back in February, OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger. If you've been anywhere near the AI space lately, you know who he is and what OpenClaw is — it's what made him go viral the past few months. OpenClaw started as a side project Peter was building for fun, then became the fastest-growing open-source project in GitHub's history. He even gave a TED talk about it a few days ago.

Sam Altman announced the hire and said Peter was joining to "drive the next" evolution of OpenAI's agent work. The subtext was obvious. OpenAI was behind on the agentic-stack thing, and they were bringing in someone who'd built one from scratch to help them catch up.

That was two months and one week ago. I've been refreshing their blog ever since, hoping for something I could actually use as a backup.

What OpenAI has shipped, and what it isn't

To be fair, they haven't been silent. The Agents SDK got a pretty big update last week. There's an Agent Execution Layer in early access. They've been pitching a "next phase of enterprise AI" platform. That's real work.

But none of it is something I can download and start using like Claude Code or Claude Desktop. It's developer infrastructure — stuff you plug your company's systems into. No consumer-facing agent that runs on my laptop. No Cowork equivalent. No browser extension. No spreadsheet helper. No mobile app that lets me keep work going when I'm stuck at my day job.

OpenAI does have a ChatGPT desktop app and a mobile app. They have Codex for CLI work. These aren't nothing. But they don't talk to each other the way Anthropic's tools do. You can't kick off a task on Codex and manage it from the ChatGPT mobile app. There's no equivalent to Dispatch — nothing that lets the phone drive the laptop and pick up where you left off.

The problem with having one reliable option

This is the part that's been annoying me. When Anthropic has a bad week, I have a bad week. Not because I'm locked in. I chose to be here because their stack is the only one reliable enough to actually run my day.

There are alternatives. OpenClaw can technically do what Dispatch does. A few smaller open-source projects can too. But none of them are at the level where I'd trust them to handle my real work between shifts at my day job. When I send a message from my phone during a ten-minute break, I need it to respond now, not maybe. That's not something any of the other frontier labs have shipped, and the open-source side isn't quite there yet.

I'm not mad at Anthropic exactly. Compute is real. Demand is real. They're growing fast and they have to manage it somehow. What bothers me is that I paid $200 this month assuming the stack would work the way it has been working. And right now, the piece I rely on most — the mobile piece — just doesn't.

That's not a sustainable spot for anyone. Not for me, not for Anthropic, not for the category.

What I'm actually hoping Peter ships

I'm not rooting against OpenAI. I'm rooting for them, hard. I want Peter Steinberger and his team to ship something real, and soon. I want a backup for Dispatch on my phone. I want a second option for weeks like this one.

But it has to be something I can actually use. Not another SDK update. Not another enterprise platform announcement. Not another demo. Something I can download tonight and use tomorrow on my commute.

Until then, I'm stuck. Watching the OpenAI blog and hoping Dispatch comes back up.