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 about this being nothing more than a way to try to get paid subscriptions from open source maintainers:
> Your complimentary subscription will expire at the end of the Benefit Period. After expiration, any existing subscription will continue unless you cancel. You may independently choose to purchase a paid Claude subscription at the then-current price through Anthropic’s standard signup process.
So anyone who participates in this will need to remember to opt out six months from now, or suddenly find themselves with invoices at the max 20x level.
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.) 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.
This does not appear to be true if you read the earlier "Activation" section. If you have an existing subscription, it pauses while the free period is active. After that free period, your existing subscription resumes. As I read it, there is no "auto-subscribe" after the free period ends -- you just revert back to whatever you had before (or nothing, if you weren't a subscriber before).
You're absolutely right that some individuals will be able to sign up for this program, and remember to cancel at the end of the six months. However, when companies choose to implement a policy like this they're acting on well-established statistics. They know that a meaningful percentage of people will forget to cancel, and the company will end up with increased revenue. There might be a bit of good will here, but in the end a program like this with these clearly-spelled-out terms is not much more than marketing.
This feels especially ugly to me because maintainers of large open source projects will feel pressure to keep using tools that let them work in an AI-assisted world. This really feels like it will make life harder for open source maintainers in the end, rather than easier. That's the opposite of what a meaningful open source campaign should look like.
At the very least, it puts maintainers right back in the position of having to beg giant companies for handouts.
OSS maintainer: I'd like to cancel my subscription!
Claude: Thank you for prolonging your subscription for another year. I'll take the required steps.
OSS maintainer: No, I said CANCEL!
Claude: You are absolutely right! Thank you for your two year subscription.
It should be a reason to criticize them, though. They're tricking people in order to make more money. They know it, you know it, we all know it. They could easily not do this, or if they want to make the argument that it's helpful not to have your subscription suddenly lapse at the end of the period, they could make it an option to have your subscription auto-renew as paid.
I get Copilot for free as an open source maintainer and it's nice. But right now I am also paying for two Claude Max ($200/mo) for my own projects. Would be nice to have one of them covered for at least 6 months! Hope Anthropic accepts my application because I do not track downloads at all.
Open source developers should be paid for their efforts, and for their contributions to LLM models, past, present, and future, rather than be enticed into paying to participate six months down the road.
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 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.
Considering they trained their model on open-source software, the least they could do is give it to open-source maintainers for free with no time limit. I’m sure they can come up with other ways to prevent abuse. This 6-months-free move just adds insult to injury, like it’s just a move to extract more from those who involuntarily contributed to the training already. And that’s coming from me, a Claude Code fan.
AI is somewhat helpful but I'm not interested in a company finding a way for me to pay to do my volunteer OSS work. GitHub Copilot offers a permanent free subscription for OSS maintainers.
I previously ignored a free offer when Claude reached out to me as an open source maintainer as it was a glorified free trial. I hope this one continues beyond the listed 6 months, I am not interested in a glorified free trial and if it requires entering credit card details I won't be signing up.
5000 stars. That's an interesting threshold.
I've checked and astropy -- the main python module used by pretty much every python user in astrophysics has 5100 stars. I would guess almost no open source code in science would pass the threshold.
Yeah, I was going to come here to say this. Apart from a) stars are a dubious metric b) 5000 stars is an insanely high bar, there is the issue that there are definitely lots of projects that choose not to partake in GitHub at this point.
That said, they do have a "contact us" line in there which implies some flexibility.
You can easily buy stars in bulk, like you can buy social media “likes” so they are kind of measuring the wrong thing and incentivizing the wrong behaviors.
>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.
I may sound unthankful here, but it just very strongly smells of Antropic amping up their PR campaigning lately, even the headline on the post reads offputting.
Plus, while 6 months is better than 1 month, why isn't it a recurring deal (or token-limited), which renews after check-ins (like educational discounts do). This sounds like an Apple TV+ offer you get for every Apple product you buy. A hook, more than a treat.
In this case, I guess it's just a slimy approach to building a self-selected lead list of people you can hard-hit with upsells after the 6 months.
I'm guessing that this is an initial trial and they're intending to extend it further; 6 months is a reasonable trial period given the very rough metric for deciding who qualifies.
> Your complimentary subscription will expire at the end of the Benefit Period. After expiration, any existing subscription will continue unless you cancel. You may independently choose to purchase a paid Claude subscription at the then-current price through Anthropic’s standard signup process.
If you appreciate open source maintainers, detect when users are opening pull requests without human review and stop them. Feel free to keep burning their tokens, just stop making pull requests.
5000 stars required? And six months only? What a misleading multilevel clickait scam. But I knew that everything about Anthropic is a scam, from the excessive token usage to the model quality reduction to the various user-hostile actions.
The cynicism here is crazy. You can get a lot done in 6 months and prices will probably have dropped by then due to competition. There's no lock-in keeping you from switching coding agents if you're not stupid about it.
There's nothing wrong with taking advantage of limited offers.
> 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.
Laughable.
This is a tiny, if even unimportant, fraction of the FOSS community that runs the modern tech stack.
No thanks, projects are too important for slop. And why would I want to be tracked so you can see my thought process, stupid questions etc.? Will you sell that information later?
Your CEO has bragged multiple times how your tool will make me unemployed. Why would I participate in that?
You stole my code without attribution. Why should I use the services of a copyright infringer?
But no, they're quite explicit about this being nothing more than a way to try to get paid subscriptions from open source maintainers:
> Your complimentary subscription will expire at the end of the Benefit Period. After expiration, any existing subscription will continue unless you cancel. You may independently choose to purchase a paid Claude subscription at the then-current price through Anthropic’s standard signup process.
So anyone who participates in this will need to remember to opt out six months from now, or suddenly find themselves with invoices at the max 20x level.
That's pretty ugly.
https://www.anthropic.com/claude-for-oss-terms
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.
If I'm reading it wrong, let me know.
This feels especially ugly to me because maintainers of large open source projects will feel pressure to keep using tools that let them work in an AI-assisted world. This really feels like it will make life harder for open source maintainers in the end, rather than easier. That's the opposite of what a meaningful open source campaign should look like.
At the very least, it puts maintainers right back in the position of having to beg giant companies for handouts.
It may or may not be worth playing their game depending on whether you use the product or not, but there are opportunities for people who do play.
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 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.
I previously ignored a free offer when Claude reached out to me as an open source maintainer as it was a glorified free trial. I hope this one continues beyond the listed 6 months, I am not interested in a glorified free trial and if it requires entering credit card details I won't be signing up.
That said, they do have a "contact us" line in there which implies some flexibility.
pour one out for us gitlab users :(
Sincerely,
Sales & Marketing
Plus, while 6 months is better than 1 month, why isn't it a recurring deal (or token-limited), which renews after check-ins (like educational discounts do). This sounds like an Apple TV+ offer you get for every Apple product you buy. A hook, more than a treat.
In this case, I guess it's just a slimy approach to building a self-selected lead list of people you can hard-hit with upsells after the 6 months.
Thank you for everything you ship*
*there's a 6 months limit we have on gratitute.
https://www.anthropic.com/claude-for-oss-terms
There's nothing wrong with taking advantage of limited offers.
Laughable.
This is a tiny, if even unimportant, fraction of the FOSS community that runs the modern tech stack.
Your CEO has bragged multiple times how your tool will make me unemployed. Why would I participate in that?
You stole my code without attribution. Why should I use the services of a copyright infringer?