> Your credit expires 90 days after the date you claim it. I am guessing the vast majority of eligible credit will not be claimed or expire unspent. Worth mentioning that normal credit expires after 12 months too, use it or lose it.
Sadly, no: you'll almost certainly burn it, faster than you think. Anthropic recently (within the last few months) gave out what amounted to around $70 CAD im free credit. I rationed it slowly, spending maybe $5 in a month, using it a few dozen times to allow a Haiku-based task to finish past my usage window. When Opus and Sonnet 4.6 released, I made the unfortunate mistake of "experimenting" with them on some work t…
I also really dislike compacting though, and perhaps that is the catalyst for why i never burn unexpected amounts. In my Claude.md i have instructions to wrap up work around 150k tokens, from there i usually have enough of a window of tokens to decide what to do with the work done that session.
sometimes thats a simple ya, in those situations i use the remaining usage to have claude update .claude/ with relevant changes, if i've got more wiggle room for tokens, i might even craft up my next plan which is usually TDD style, and i have it write the failing tests before ending the session and passing the handoff.md which is the finished plan to a fresh context window.
This is probably not the best way for rapidly getting stuff done, but i think its one of the best ways to be effective with less usage at your disposal.