alt Hacker NewsClaude March 2026 usage promotion
Comments
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).
Very interesting. As I wrote in this article https://martinalderson.com/posts/is-the-ai-compute-crunch-he... a couple of weeks ago:
"One thing I really suspect we'll see a lot more of is much more generous rate limits at 'off peak' times - likely to be early morning UTC - as there is no doubt a lot of "idle" compute sitting there"
I strongly suspect this will end up in the opposite happening - where peak tokens are far more "expensive" (whether that be thru usage limits of API costs) than off-peak.
PS: Anthropic have managed to improve reliability but are absolutely shredding opus tok/s at peak times. It absolutely crawls on the web (maybe 2-3 tok/s?) and I believe that on non-max plans it's also incredibly slow on claude code.
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"
This is a psyop to recruit more Australians I'm sure of it
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.
Using timezone not UTC for a global service is a crime, especially mixed with daylight saving.
That is doubled usage between 5AM and 11PM for anyone playing along from Sydney/Melbourne.
Damn. Please use UTC.
From my understanding: Peak time (non-promo): UTC 12:00–18:00 / KST (UTC+9): 21:00–03:00 Off-peak time (promo): UTC 18:00–12:00 / KST (UTC+9): 03:00–21:00
I guess I’ll need to do more coding during the daytime.
Interesting to see more demand shaping mechanisms applied to LLM inference. Even though the "batch processing" feature is already available. I guess this "promotion" is to test the hypothesis of sliding along the spectrum towards more "real-time" demand shaping.
Travelling salesman problem in 2026 is Travelling Engineer Problem to find optimal location to maximize tokens usage.
I need something in between pro and max (about 2-3x pro not 5x). Really hoping this usage promotion is a permanent fixture. I have Claude through work and more tokens than I know what to do with. But on personal projects, I tend to want a lot of tokens all at once at late hours.
Who are these guys even competing with that they are going so hard with the deals? Like the 1M context window, is Gemini offering that? In any case, they seem to have no real competition today.
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
Nice. I have 18 hours to my weekly reset and 10% left. Can maximize.
This is great, but i guess they are feeling the heat from Codex resetting limits in the last month quite a bit.
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.
This company is clearly on a mission. I would just like to know what that mission is. I mean this in a good way.
Would be happy to utilize but didn't see a promocode or voucher. Do I need more coffee?
I didn't understood "your five-hour usage" I thought plans were per interaction or per token, not per hour.
Have they accounted for time zones? This is my daytime in Australia/Sydney
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.
But the best part is, those usage levels are hidden, arbitrary, and they change them all the time.
So they could “double” your usage by keeping it the same and then simply halving peak usage.
I still hate Claude for turning down limits. I use z.ai in Claude code now, haven't hit the limit yet.
Australia here we come.
I don't really understand why AI providers don't charge like the electric company, or AWS. Instead of increasing usage limits, just charge less for off-hours use.
Wild conspiracy theory: this is targetting to decrease usuage from Indian users.
There is no way 5-11 AM PT is peak traffic
I guess extra compute opened up after they were canned by Department of War.
They are learning from Codex
Ah crap I was hoping to benefit more of my sub because I'm in an off-hours tz.
AI psychosis intensifies
Is this going to cause another outage?
changes sleep schedule
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.
So we now have just pure marketing slop on the HN front page? How is this interesting or "curious" again? The AI slop season is affecting HN in clever ways.
[dead]
[flagged]
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).
Pricing will soon be structured around energy costs and On/off peak power rates, I’m actually surprised it hasn’t happened sooner. Even with Behind the Meter Generation, you’re not completely mitigated from peak (daily) power prices. Being able to shift at least some demand around will help from a pure energy costs perspective.
Most of these Behind the Meter generation projects will be Gas Generation. Guess what happens during a cold snap like the one we experienced in the Northeast US a few weeks ago? Natural gas prices jumped 10X in the daily market. You say that they are hedged? Hedges do not matter during Operational Flow Order(OFO)/Force Majeur/Curtailment pipeline events and they are exposed to the daily market. (I do this for a living)