Claude March 2026 usage promotion
support.claude.com105 points by weldu 2 hours ago
105 points by weldu 2 hours ago
Would be cool to have a $5-10/month plan that only works off-peak, for people who want to do the occasional side project after work. Right now it's hard to justify anything but Copilot (because it's cheaper, offers the same models, and I'm nowhere near the usage limits).
Hard to justify? 20/month for like 5x output is a great deal (be it Claude or Codex or whatever)
the $20 pro plan would also have double offpeak limits - just set it to sonnet and you'll get a reasonable level of output
This is a psyop to recruit more Australians I'm sure of it
That is doubled usage between 5AM and 11PM for anyone playing along from Sydney/Melbourne.
Presumably they have unused compute in those hours and figure they may as well enable people to use it and get more invested into their ecosystem.
What I wish Anthropic would do is be a lot more explicit about what windows apply when. Surely they have the data to say "you get X usage from hours A to B, Y usage from B to C"
I just know there has to be some psychology in play with these promos. The promo during December got me to upgrade to the $100 plan, and I know I'm not the only one.
I suspect it’s much more about understanding user behavior, i.e: given more allowance off-peak, do users change when they use Claude? And from there, that will inform how plans are designed long term. If they discover that offering higher off-peak limits meaningfully changes how/when users interact with the service, they can use discounted off-peak plans to flatten usage. I would be very surprised if this promotion had anything to do with encouraging people to upgrade.
Interesting - the first thing my mind went to was the DoD supply chain risk designation, and wanting to boost metrics to calm investors nerves
There's definitely psychology in play, but I think it might be less "trying to get you to spend more" and more "trying to incentivize load-shifting", which (to me at least) is a lot less sinister-- my utility does this too for electricity, and nobody attributes malicious intent to it.
We all know these services see huge load spikes and sometimes service degradation when America wakes up, and I bet they'd appreciate it if as many "chug-and-plug" agent workflows moved to overnight hours as possible.
My assumption was always that the December promo was a combination – they were presumably way under capacity because everyone was on holiday given how enterprise-heavy they are, so giving people a bunch of extra usage with a loud promo meant a whole bunch of people would try Claude and see how good it had gotten at very little cost to Anthropic.
The psychology is to hook you on the usage. A lot of people see a little movement in the usage meter and get cold feet about heavy usage. The prior $70 credit deal and now this offering are to try to get people to dive in, and hopefully retain that usage pattern afterwards.
Anthropic's models are obviously superior at coding right now but using 2-3 $20 accounts between different providers is still a very effective way to get good value. Gemini CLI and Codex seem to be at least 2x more permissive on usage. The models are good enough.
Plus we are technologists, we want to try out different stuff and compare.
That's precisely what I do, with subscriptions to all of them. Gemini almost seems unlimited...like I never hit limits with it. Don't even know how to check my usage for the subscription plans on that.
But increasingly I'm using Claude for basically all real coding. I ask Gemini and Codex questions, but I'm honestly in awe at Opus' ridiculous capabilities.
/stats session shows you the remaining quota in Gemini CLI and when the quota resets, and they dropped the quota badly in the last few days.
Before that I would totally agree with you, it felt really endless
Living in Tasmania as competitive advantage
Dear line manager, I will be taking a very long lunch 12-6pm in London's Chinatown then heading back to the office half cut to vibe code
I guess extra compute opened up after they were canned by Department of War.
So afternoon in Germany or am I misreading?
DST shenanigans aside (we're in the "US has changed but Europe hasn't" window), 10:00 in SF is 18:00 in London. Meaning their peak time window is 13:00–19:00 London time, or 14:00–20:00 Berlin time.
So us European folks get promotional rates during the morning and evening.
EDIT: Actually, because the promo ends at the end of March, it'll all be within DST shenanigans. So peak times are 12:00–18:00 London, 13:00–19:00 Berlin.
I’m trying to figure out how this affects weekly limits, since those overlap peak hours. My observation is that it doesn’t. But I could be wrong.
If they are doing it “right” I think any off peak usage should count 50% toward your weekly limits.
Edit: it does look like they are doing it the "right" way.
> Does bonus usage count against my weekly usage limit?
> No. The additional usage you get during off-peak hours doesn’t count toward any weekly usage limits on your plan.
I just watched my "weekly limit" get used while I ran a claude code command.
I'm not sure how to square that with the quote you gave.
Did you exhaust the five-hour usage limit already? As I understand it, the ”additional usage” refers to anything beyond the standard five-hour usage limit.
> Does bonus usage count against my weekly usage limit?
> No. The additional usage you get during off-peak hours doesn’t count toward any weekly usage limits on your plan.
Is this going to cause another outage?
I didn't understood "your five-hour usage" I thought plans were per interaction or per token, not per hour.
There's a limit that resets every five hours and one that resets every week.
My usage only shows daily and weekly, though. I never got that.
It has "current session" and "weekly". If you notice, "current session" is never more than five hours away from expiration.
Oh, you're right. I don't know why I've always misread "current session" as daily.
Thanks for clearing that up. It'll help me schedule stuff in the future.
For Claude Code, you use up 12% of your weekly allotment every session, so 8 sessions per week.
If you are only using a session a day, you're wasting a session. :)
You can pay either for API usage or a fixed monthly plan (which is way cheaper but you can't use it for applications, just personal use).
This is great, but i guess they are feeling the heat from Codex resetting limits in the last month quite a bit.
I think they're feeling the heat from growing too quickly so they want to incentivize people to spread the load more evenly.
Very much like electric utility time of day pricing, using economic incentives to shift demand to trough periods.
Perhaps an opportunity for them to improve workload scheduling orchestration, like submitting a job to a distributed computing cluster queue, to smooth demand and maximize utilization.
Everything bursty will use economic incentives to smooth the load. I'm not sure how they'd do that with workload scheduling orchestration when you have latency-sensitive loads and there are e.g. twice as many requests at midday as at midnight.
You decouple the workloads from human interaction (ie when you submit the job to the queue vs when it is scheduled to execute) so when they run is not a consideration, if possible. The economic incentives encourage solving this, and if it can’t be solved, it buckets customer cohort by willingness (or unwillingness) to pay for access during peak times.
Sure, but if I ask the LLM a question, I'd like it to respond now, instead of tonight.
The insanely competitive market for LLMs is great for us, but if I were one of the investors in these companies it wouldn't exactly fill me with confidence that my $500 billion spent on datacenters and Nvidia cards is going to get repaid ten times over like they're claiming. I'm still getting very strong "this is a commodity; margins will be driven inexorably to zero" vibes from these products.
I still hate Claude for turning down limits. I use z.ai in Claude code now, haven't hit the limit yet.
Long ago in the ancient days of punchcards and IBM mainframes, you’d write your programs during the day, then submit them to run overnight and pick up your results in the morning. It would be funny and sort of romantic if time-based LLM pricing returned us to that: write your specs all day, run agents on them overnight, check out the results in the morning.
Australia here we come.
Ah crap I was hoping to benefit more of my sub because I'm in an off-hours tz.
These promos should be based on when more renewable energy is available for inference not when less people are likely to be using the AI. We need to adjust usage to when supply is more renewable for both training and inference in order to better protect our grid and the planet.
> After March 27, 2026, usage limits return to their standard levels at all hours. There’s no change to your plan or billing.
Translation: Give the gamblers and vibe coders free $20 bets on a spin at the casino until March 27, 2026.
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I believe Claude is still designated a supply chain risk by the United States government. Whether this affects usage of it or not, that's up to each individual, but it's definitely a curious fact (by HN standards).
That is only relevant if you are in the government/military. The US government has not made using Claude Code a crime, yet.
That sounds to me similar to "Telegram banned by Russian government", more of a seal of approval than anything.