One user's warning is worth paying attention to: cancel your Claude Max subscription, and you may lose access to everything you built in Claude Design.
The report comes from someone who spent five months on Claude Code Max, then paused to try OpenAI's Codex. When they returned to Claude Design to pull up previous projects, the work was inaccessible. Their observation: they have never lost access to past sessions on any other LLM platform simply by canceling a subscription. Anthropic also offered extra credits with a time limit as part of the transition - a different pattern from the standard "downgrade and keep your history" model that most AI tools follow.
This stands in contrast to how nearly every competitor handles subscription data. ChatGPT, Gemini, and most AI tools keep your conversation history and project files accessible after you cancel or downgrade - the baseline assumption being that your data stays yours to view, even without active premium features. If Anthropic's Claude Design ties project access to a paid subscription rather than to account ownership, that's a meaningful policy difference, not just a minor inconvenience.
Anthropologic hasn't publicly addressed this behavior. It may be a bug specific to Claude Design's storage infrastructure, an intentional policy, or tied to how compute-heavy design sessions are stored differently from standard conversations. Until there's clarity, anyone using Claude Design for real project work should export or back up anything critical before making changes to their subscription.