alt Hacker NewsThis 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.
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> automatically kicking a user off would also probably be bad.
No. "Sorry, subscription has expired, please re-up your account" is an extremely reasonable UX.
The whole "free period but we'll auto bill you after" is a shitty dark pattern that mostly exists to extract value from life admin errors. The people who got enough value to justify the cost would've paid anyway.
A $200 bill from some cloud entity that doesn't have my credit card info would cause nothing but enormous laughter.
What is ugly here is the combination of the free trial (not ugly in an of itself), and they way they are trying to recruit qualified users for it from open source.
>A $200 bill shock is not great but it's also at a size that won't cause enormous distress
How are things from up in your ivory tower ? Should I invoice you next time my car requires a 300€ fix too? Heard it's not enormous distress to you.
The vast, vast majority of open source maintainers that would benefit and want this free sample are the ones without the financial well being. I'm sure everyone at the Aviation Herald is already paying $200 happily, but when you have people like the maintainer of corejs having to beg for money, when you have the underpinnings of open source software struggling to find maintainers, a surprise $200 expense for something that makes you zero money would be a catastrophic expense.
Please get your head out of your ass.
>Your suggestion of "we'll evaluate" individually would be a very costly undertaking for Anthropic.
Oh no, the $380 billion company might have to spend a few tens of thousands of bucks :(
> and automatically kicking a user off would also probably be bad.
Would it? The only way to access Claude is via a CLI or a GUI.
> $ claude --resume
> No subscription active (expired on 6/1/2026). Reactivate at claude.ai/settings.