Claude March 2026 usage promotion

[daemonologist]

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).

[lxgr]

I suspect that any GPU cycle not spent on inference will just be dedicated to training (which as I understand it can “soak up” essentially unlimited compute at constant value per token), and I’d not expect to see time-based billing until that changes.

[matheusmoreira]

Would be better if they simply made it free for open source developers. I can barely justify spending time on my hobby projects. If I paid for this, I'd be paying to work for them since they're using our data for training.

[fullerstackdev]

This use to be the case, but in the last 36 hrs or so, copilot silently kneecapped Claude models and I've been getting rate limited on like every 3rd request. Not only does the call fail mid way, they still charge me for the request.

[Razengan]

A $50-per-week Codex Pro/Claude Max plan would be perfect for solo gamedevs/open-source devs who have existing code that would benefit from an occasional review pass or subsystem experiments/brainstorming with the most powerful models, but don't need to use one for a whole month.

[mavilia]

I canceled my plan today and wrote my reason as: now that I have a job again I don’t have the time or needs for the pro plan. If there was a $5 a month option, I would gladly take it to make use of Opus for my rare side ideas.

[ayayaya]

If $20 a month for a full on powerhouse of a model is hard for you to justify, maybe get a new job?

[salomonk_mur]

Hard to justify? 20/month for like 5x output is a great deal (be it Claude or Codex or whatever), even if it lasts only 2-3 hours per day.

[nycdatasci]

You’re not using Claude Code?

[nikcub]

the $20 pro plan would also have double offpeak limits - just set it to sonnet and you'll get a reasonable level of output

[paulddraper]

Claude Pro is $20/month.

[the__alchemist]

Isn't Co-Pilot tied to VsCode?

[iamflimflam1]

Set up an API key and use that.

[Aboutplants]

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)

[andkenneth]

This is a psyop to recruit more Australians I'm sure of it

[seriocomic]

I was thinking the same, but (and correct me if I'm wrong), the timezone means this is only really useful between 11pm and 5am AEST? - EDIT: yup - I _completely_ missed the "outside" of those US hours. yay!

[prokopton]

Great for me in Japan.

[leothelion_]

Can't complain honestly!

[colingauvin]

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"

[bearjaws]

or see if they can shift some end user workloads to off hours so that they aren't bogging things down during peak hours.

[gslin]

Using timezone not UTC for a global service is a crime, especially mixed with daylight saving.

[JoshGlazebrook]

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.

[pronik]

An anecdote: for a while now I've noticed or imagined Claude Code becoming ever so slightly dumber around 3-4pm CEST, I've been calling it the "Americans are awake" syndrome, because of assumed higher usage while keeping the latency the same (which is something Anthropic surely keeps an eye on) and thus lower quality.

[sevenseacat]

Haha I've been seeing the same thing late in the evening (Australian time), which I attributed to the same reason.

[r2vcap]

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.

[Analemma_]

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.

[jimmytucson]

They have this. It’s called batch pricing and it’s 50% off.

[cyanydeez]

I find that incredibly optimistic.

[AussieWog93]

That is doubled usage between 5AM and 11PM for anyone playing along from Sydney/Melbourne.

[canpan]

JST here, it' basically add day.

[msephton]

Are you sure? It's a 6h window on the page

[michaelhoney]

Living in Tasmania as competitive advantage

[burticlies]

Tassie represent

[walthamstow]

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

[robbrown451]

I'm in their time zone, and was just planning to stop with my bad habit of staying up working till 4 am and waking up at noon.

So much for that plan.

[martinald]

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.

[Aboutplants]

“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.”

This only happens once/if competition eases up. Until then, it’s a race to the bottom

[podviaznikov]

Travelling salesman problem in 2026 is Travelling Engineer Problem to find optimal location to maximize tokens usage.

[twtw99]

This is great, but i guess they are feeling the heat from Codex resetting limits in the last month quite a bit.

[Analemma_]

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.

[stavros]

I think they're feeling the heat from growing too quickly so they want to incentivize people to spread the load more evenly.

[megadragon9]

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.

[MagicMoonlight]

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.

[egeozcan]

So afternoon in Germany or am I misreading?

[pdpi]

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.

[trelbutate]

Outside 4pm to 10pm

[matthewfcarlson]

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.