alt Hacker NewsAt 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)."
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Tons of SaaS companies offer open source projects free periods or a limited hobby plan for free. Claude is offering a professional plan 20x'd for a free period. I don't see anything wrong with that. This is a far more resource expensive service to offer for free than 99% of SaaS companies.
This does not appear to be true if you read the earlier "Activation" section. 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).
If I'm reading it wrong, let me know.
It’s baffling to me that you can frame a $1200 gift to FOSS projects as “ugly”.
I think it’s reasonable to grant humans agency. If they don’t want it they don’t have to take it. It’s pretty obviously a huge net positive.
So put a reminder on your calendar to cancel. It's not hard. That shouldn't be a reason to pass this up.
This does not strike me as an anti-pattern or ugly. Indefinite free period would be unreasonable, and automatically kicking a user off would also probably be bad. A $200 bill shock is not great but it's also at a size that won't cause enormous distress while simultaneously being noticeable enough that you won't pay more than a month over. (As an open-source maintainer already on a Max plan, I still wince every month.) Income-constrained users should not adopt it or should set a reminder well beforehand.
Your suggestion of "we'll evaluate" individually would be a very costly undertaking for Anthropic. Not reasonable. If your suggestion was for Anthropic to evaluate at the end of the 6 months whether to continue the free plan generally, I don't see anything that prevents them from doing so.
I think Anthropic should probably give some notice in the CLI or Claude.ai in the final month of the offer. Not doing that would be a bit ugly.