Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers

At first I thought people here were being pretty unsympathetic to an early version of a beneficial program. I could see a company setting a 6-month timeline initially, so they can reevaluate the program and choose how to evolve their support for open source. I expected to see something along the lines of, "at the end of the 6 months we'll evaluate whether to continue your free plan."

But no, they're quite explicit about this being nothing more than a way to try to get paid subscriptions from open source maintainers:

> Your complimentary subscription will expire at the end of the Benefit Period. After expiration, any existing subscription will continue unless you cancel. You may independently choose to purchase a paid Claude subscription at the then-current price through Anthropic’s standard signup process.

So anyone who participates in this will need to remember to opt out six months from now, or suddenly find themselves with invoices at the max 20x level.

That's pretty ugly.

Edit: I believe I misread the terms. As mwigdahl points out below: "If you have an existing subscription, it pauses while the free period is active. After that free period, your existing subscription resumes. As I read it, there is no "auto-subscribe" after the free period ends -- you just revert back to whatever you had before (or nothing, if you weren't a subscriber before)."

https://www.anthropic.com/claude-for-oss-terms

> Maintainers: You’re a primary maintainer or core team member of a public repo with 5,000+ GitHub stars or 1M+ monthly NPM downloads. You've made commits, releases, or PR reviews within the last 3 months.

How many total developers does that cover? 100? How many of them aren't already corporate employees?

And also

> 6 months of free Claude Max 20x

So basically a free trial.

When Github Copilot first launched they gave Pro subscriptions to everyone that regularly committed to a public repo, regardless of the number of stars or downloads, and kept renewing it indefinitely. I don't know if that program is still around but it was amazing to get to try out some early LLM coding tools for open source development.

Considering they trained their model on open-source software, the least they could do is give it to open-source maintainers for free with no time limit. I’m sure they can come up with other ways to prevent abuse. This 6-months-free move just adds insult to injury, like it’s just a move to extract more from those who involuntarily contributed to the training already. And that’s coming from me, a Claude Code fan.

I like what GitHub and Jetbrains are doing, where you get Copilot and PyCharm for free as long as you're a maintainer. They keep renewing my license.

A 6-month trial isn't showing appreciation for OSS any more than "first crack hit's free" is showing appreciation for what a good person you are. It's just "you look like a promising customer".

AI is somewhat helpful but I'm not interested in a company finding a way for me to pay to do my volunteer OSS work. GitHub Copilot offers a permanent free subscription for OSS maintainers.

I previously ignored a free offer when Claude reached out to me as an open source maintainer as it was a glorified free trial. I hope this one continues beyond the listed 6 months, I am not interested in a glorified free trial and if it requires entering credit card details I won't be signing up.

>Maintainers: You’re a primary maintainer or core team member of a public repo with 5,000+ GitHub stars or 1M+ monthly NPM downloads. You've made commits, releases, or PR reviews within the last 3 months.

pour one out for us gitlab users :(

I really appreciate the gesture, but this kind of feels like it’s an attempt to claw (lol) some good will back from devs. The barrier is way too high, imo. And the 6 month cap does make sense given the cost of LLMs but it’s a bad feeling. We like you, but for 6 months.

As a tinnnyy plug, I’ve ran OSS sponsorship programs before for companies. One thing that I always hated was the sales contact process to get it. So, for Vizzly I made it 100% automated. Sign up, connect an OSS public repo, get a free plan. https://vizzly.dev/open-source/ I don’t wanna talk to you and you don’t wanna talk to me (for this :p)

For 6 months? So it's just a fancy, "first one is free" trial?

"Contact the sales"

No, thanks. I decided I don't want to play those games. I get MiniMax unlimited for 10$ per month, and free GitHub Copilot as an open source maintainer and contributor.

I don't need to beg to get some free stuff, only to later realize the only way to use it is through the shitty Claude Code.

I get Copilot for free as an open source maintainer and it's nice. But right now I am also paying for two Claude Max ($200/mo) for my own projects. Would be nice to have one of them covered for at least 6 months! Hope Anthropic accepts my application because I do not track downloads at all.

Open source developers should be paid for their efforts, and for their contributions to LLM models, past, present, and future, rather than be enticed into paying to participate six months down the road.

5000 stars. That's an interesting threshold. I've checked and astropy -- the main python module used by pretty much every python user in astrophysics has 5100 stars. I would guess almost no open source code in science would pass the threshold.

EDIT: Just another test, one of the most used codes in astro -- an ensemble Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo sampler https://github.com/dfm/emcee has 1600 stars. It just shows the 5000 stars is a bit PR, rather than a serious attempt to help open source.

I may sound unthankful here, but it just very strongly smells of Antropic amping up their PR campaigning lately, even the headline on the post reads offputting.

Plus, while 6 months is better than 1 month, why isn't it a recurring deal (or token-limited), which renews after check-ins (like educational discounts do). This sounds like an Apple TV+ offer you get for every Apple product you buy. A hook, more than a treat.

In this case, I guess it's just a slimy approach to building a self-selected lead list of people you can hard-hit with upsells after the 6 months.

Thank you for everything you ship*

*there's a 6 months limit we have on gratitute.

Essentially they want you to use it for 6 months and then hook you up to their paid offerings. Smart

Has Claude become slow and buggy for other users?

Hey that seems pretty cool! No doubt it's gonna be a way to either collect more info of successful devs or maybe just upsell stuff after those 6 months are over, but it's something!

I went for their 100 USD paid tier and it's honestly been immensely useful (Claude Code with the desktop UI with multiple parallel tasks), I've done more and with better quality in the past few weeks than others do in a month - maybe I just got lucky with the domain but it really is a force multiplier and I'm working on like 4 projects in parallel at work and am crushing it, being overworked aside.

Finally I also have enough capacity for various side projects and utility tools/scripts, or at least I will until I burn out, but that's not really the fault of the tool, rather the amount of work.

Being able to throw the latest Opus model at every problem is also really, really nice. Way better than any of the slop before.

Lo, behold how the beast doth roar! From the depths thereof it crieth aloud, saying, “Feed me.”

Sincerely,

Sales & Marketing

Anthropic, your model and marketing teams do great work, but your business leadership keeps making decisions that make you look pretty bad.

5000+ stars proves this is a sales tactic

If you appreciate open source maintainers, detect when users are opening pull requests without human review and stop them. Feel free to keep burning their tokens, just stop making pull requests.

at close to 120 stars within 2 weeks from launch, i hope i make it there!

No thanks, projects are too important for slop. And why would I want to be tracked so you can see my thought process, stupid questions etc.? Will you sell that information later?

Your CEO has bragged multiple times how your tool will make me unemployed. Why would I participate in that?

You stole my code without attribution. Why should I use the services of a copyright infringer?

The cynicism here is crazy. You can get a lot done in 6 months and prices will probably have dropped by then due to competition. There's no lock-in keeping you from switching coding agents if you're not stupid about it.

There's nothing wrong with taking advantage of limited offers.

> Maintainers: You’re a primary maintainer or core team member of a public repo with 5,000+ GitHub stars or 1M+ monthly NPM downloads. You've made commits, releases, or PR reviews within the last 3 months.

Laughable.

This is a tiny, if even unimportant, fraction of the FOSS community that runs the modern tech stack.

5000 stars required? And six months only? What a misleading multilevel clickait scam. But I knew that everything about Anthropic is a scam, from the excessive token usage to the model quality reduction to the various user-hostile actions.

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Don’t worry so much man, give it a try, the first few are on me, give you time to get comfortable /S

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No, thank you.