The only listed qualification is "You’ve subscribed to a Pro, Max, or Team plan by April 3, 2026 at 9 AM PT", however I am not getting the banner for this credit. I suspect that there's an unstated additional qualification: that your account hasn't previously received an extra usage credit.
I don't know if they should be handing out more credits right now considering that my Sonnet requests in Claude Code are routinely delayed by several minutes, presumably due to capacity issues...
I previously received one and was able to activate this one too. I agree it seems like there's more to this, just wanted to add another anecdote to further confuse things. :)
Dunno, maybe there is a bug. I was both a subscriber, and had the extra usage enabled, and paid for extra usage before, and didn't get the extra credits. I am on the max plan, so was rather looking forward to the extra $100 to burn on /fast mode.
I agree. I happened to see Boris' tweet about it as soon as it posted, and the endpoint for redeeming the credits (the one that fires when you click it on the usage page) was already returning sporadic 400s for everyone.
I wouldn't be surprised if they pulled it back so they could spread out the load.
edit: whoops, meant to leave this as a reply to the (now-sibling) comment from 'flutas.
That's not really a qualification so much as a required step, as you can do it anytime in the next two weeks to get the credit. And I have, but no credit.
TBH, it looks to me as a trick to enable extra usage by baiting me with $20 credit by toggling on the feature that lets me burn another $20 without realizing it.
Toggling it again to turn it off immediately after (which I assume most people will miss) seems to guard against this.
That's not the purpose of the trick. The purpose is to soften the blow for turning off support for OpenClaw and other third party connectors. Now to use OpenClaw et all you'll have to pay at extra usage pricing, it won't count against your normal quota.
I'd actually be happy with this if they turned OpenCode support back on.
I don't believe so. I'll explain how I think it works.
[x] Turn on extra usage to keep using Claude if you hit a limit.
^^^ This toggles whether it will automatically spend from your pre-paid balance when you hit limits.
$20
Monthly spend limit
^^^ I'm not actually sure which this toggles, but I think it is either a maximum amount to reload per month, OR I think it is a maximum amount of your balance to spend per month. I think it's how much to auto-reload but it is a confusing setting.
Auto-reload off
^^^ This toggles whether it auto-reloads. It accepts a trigger balance and how much to top it off to. This setting shows the following text, which is
You agree that Anthropic will charge the card you have on file in the amount above on a recurring basis whenever your balance reaches the amount indicated. To cancel, turn off auto-reload.
By contrast, OpenAI simply multiplied your subscription usage by 0.5x for the past month. For all the shit they’re rightfully getting, Codex is so nice it’s actually weird.
Yes, I did have it enabled. Though the terms say you "must have it enabled", not "must not have had it enabled". Perhaps there is a roll-out difference.
Well this feels scammy, or at least annoying AF. I tried toggling it on to see if that would make the credit appear, even though I'd never had it on before and never needed to use it, and since my balance was under $5, it auto-charged me $15. All I wanted to do was try to make the free $20 banner appear, and I didn't get that either.
That's a nice gesture after they seemingly changed the rate at which my credits were being used to like less than half of what I was getting a week ago. But I'm getting tired of all of this changing all the time.
Pretty sure I was hit by that caching bug because there was a few hours where I immediately hit my session limit and then shortly after I hit it again all while the system wasn't even working because of downtime, likely due to the increased token usage...
But I think it only lasted for a short period of time.
Did Anthropic run Claude in a loop and tell it "work on our pricing and usage strategy", or something?
As far as I can tell, they now have Free, Pro, Max x5, Max x20, Team, and Enterprise tiers. Plus session usage, weekly usage, extra usage (up to a spend limit (set by you) and/or a monthly cap (set by Anthropic)), and now usage bundles, which are extra usage but with a lower price and a fixed amount.
I don't know, but it really feels like there's an LLM churning away somewhere, endlessly tinkering on a PRICING.md file that is gradually accreting strategic slop.
On a pro account and tried to claim it yesterday (had to turn on extra usage). First it wanted to bill me $50 - but the text entry for the amount only showed $5, slight bug there. I closed that dialog and the settings showed a current balance of zero. Looked at it again today and its the same. So I guess I failed to claim 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 $5 in a month, using it a few dozen times to allow a Haiku-based task to finish past my usage window.
When Opus and Sonnet 4.6 released, I made the unfortunate mistake of "experimenting" with them on some work that couldn't be thrown away. I hit my timed usage cap, allowed Claude Code to consume 'extra usage' credits, and... nearly vaporized the entire credit balance within a couple tasks.
I understand that Opus and Sonnet are (considerably) more expensive than Haiku, but watching money burn by the dollar, in real-time, was enough for me to turn off extra usage entirely.
i've still got about 9$USD left from that last free credit round, I am a poor example though. I think i keep a strange amount of discipline compared to most when it comes to usage. I see why it happens to people where stuff is just burned fast, and I've even caught myself a few times in moments where i wasn't monitoring properly and COULD have destroyed my usage and perhaps just got lucky that whatever i asked wasn't causing loops.
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.
At least for european consumers the 12 month limit is probably illegal, as it is equivalent to cash and probably also needs to be refundable (similar to prepaid phone cards).
Sales tax is charged at the "top up" point - guessing that renders the cash into non-refundable disney dollars that vanish to the balance sheet after 1 year and 1 nano second.
I'm honestly curious who on these plans that's not working with an unlimited enterprise budget would even choose to burn real dollars like this beyond the subscription? What is the personal use case? It seems exorbitantly expensive after you've exhausted your subscription.
My interpretation: they're kicking the OpenClaw, OpenCode, etc. users off and telling them they can use extra usage for third-party tools, and they're softening the blow by offering free and discounted usage, and they're offering it to everyone else too to avoid the appearance of unfairness.
I don't know if they should be handing out more credits right now considering that my Sonnet requests in Claude Code are routinely delayed by several minutes, presumably due to capacity issues...