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Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers

claude.com

61–70 of 246 posts

Re: Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers

#61
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.

Re: Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers

#63
post #19

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 ab…

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.…

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.

Re: Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers

#64
"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.

Re: Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers

#65
post #10

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".

what's the Github program here?

Re: Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers

#66
post #19

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 ab…

Ugly is subjective. I'd happily accept these terms

Agreed, that's a lot of value for a person to pay for themselves!

Re: Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers

#67
post #10

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".

It's a spectrum, right? It would be showing greater higher quality appreciation to offer an ongoing benefit. But there is some benefit to giving maintainers a generous trial length with your offering. 6 months is certainly long enough to see how well it does or does not incorporate into your project. It just so happens we almost all universally love the offering.

> But there is some benefit to giving maintainers a generous trial length with your offering. 6 months is certainly long enough to see how well it does or does not incorporate into your project.

This would be fine in the context of a general sales pitch/marketing deal.

But OSS development and maintenance is special here. It has a budget of $0. As a sales strategy, Anthropic would be better off trying to sell luxury gold plated bindles to hobos.

And there's another question: How exactly does Anthropic see the future of OSS, with this pitch? What are they thinking? Is this the new norm for OSS a $200/month entry fee?

Because adding such a cost to OSS would not only go against everything OSS stands for, and would push the vast majority of maintainers into quitting their projects.

(Now, Anthropic can't mandate maintainers use Claude, though a much-discussed side effect of tools like Claude has been the increased burden on OSS maintainers. And while Anthropic does not raise suggestion that they deal with this by employing AI tools, bystanders most certainly have.)

Re: Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers

#69
> 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.

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