Claude March 2026 usage promotion(support.claude.com)
165 pointsby weldu4 hours ago41 comments
  • martinald6 minutes ago
    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.

  • daemonologist2 hours ago
    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).
    • lxgr2 hours ago
      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.
      • pgwhalenan hour ago
        Isn't this post an announcement of time-based billing? Just in a kind of indirect way (not billing, rather than billing).

        Also, my (extremely naive) understanding is that at the cutting edge, hardware is diverging for training vs inference. That might not be true for Anthropic though.

      • AntiRushan hour ago
        This is an announcement of time-based billing.
    • mavilia2 hours ago
      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.
      • szatkusan hour ago
        Pay as you go. I never spent more than $10/month working on my side project (usually a few evenings per month).
    • salomonk_mur2 hours ago
      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.
    • iamflimflam1an hour ago
      Set up an API key and use that.
    • nycdatasci2 hours ago
      You’re not using Claude Code?
    • nikcub2 hours ago
      the $20 pro plan would also have double offpeak limits - just set it to sonnet and you'll get a reasonable level of output
    • paulddraperan hour ago
      Claude Pro is $20/month.
    • sieabahlpark2 hours ago
      [dead]
  • colingauvin3 hours ago
    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"

  • andkenneth3 hours ago
    This is a psyop to recruit more Australians I'm sure of it
  • JoshGlazebrook3 hours ago
    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.
    • sigmar2 hours ago
      You're probably right. I've been thinking about why anthropic's revenue keeps soaring. I think in terms of "new users trying the product" we're definitely somewhere in the slowing part of the S-curve (at least in the US), but there are other growth contributors. Two bigs ones are people finding new use-cases and people figuring out how to scale up current use-cases to use more tokens. Perhaps little temporary-usage-boosts like this give people permission to attempt new use-cases or more scale and realize they could use a higher tiered plan.
    • 3rodents2 hours ago
      I suspect it’s much more about understanding user behavior, i.e: given more allowance off-peak, do users change when they use Claude? And from there, that will inform how plans are designed long term. If they discover that offering higher off-peak limits meaningfully changes how/when users interact with the service, they can use discounted off-peak plans to flatten usage. I would be very surprised if this promotion had anything to do with encouraging people to upgrade.
    • samdjstephens2 hours ago
      Interesting - the first thing my mind went to was the DoD supply chain risk designation, and wanting to boost metrics to calm investors nerves
    • Analemma_3 hours ago
      There's definitely psychology in play, but I think it might be less "trying to get you to spend more" and more "trying to incentivize load-shifting", which (to me at least) is a lot less sinister-- my utility does this too for electricity, and nobody attributes malicious intent to it.

      We all know these services see huge load spikes and sometimes service degradation when America wakes up, and I bet they'd appreciate it if as many "chug-and-plug" agent workflows moved to overnight hours as possible.

      • sobjornstad2 hours ago
        My assumption was always that the December promo was a combination – they were presumably way under capacity because everyone was on holiday given how enterprise-heavy they are, so giving people a bunch of extra usage with a loud promo meant a whole bunch of people would try Claude and see how good it had gotten at very little cost to Anthropic.
    • llm_nerd2 hours ago
      The psychology is to hook you on the usage. A lot of people see a little movement in the usage meter and get cold feet about heavy usage. The prior $70 credit deal and now this offering are to try to get people to dive in, and hopefully retain that usage pattern afterwards.
      • operatingthetan2 hours ago
        Anthropic's models are obviously superior at coding right now but using 2-3 $20 accounts between different providers is still a very effective way to get good value. Gemini CLI and Codex seem to be at least 2x more permissive on usage. The models are good enough.

        Plus we are technologists, we want to try out different stuff and compare.

        • llm_nerd2 hours ago
          That's precisely what I do, with subscriptions to all of them. Gemini almost seems unlimited...like I never hit limits with it. Don't even know how to check my usage for the subscription plans on that.

          But increasingly I'm using Claude for basically all real coding. I ask Gemini and Codex questions, but I'm honestly in awe at Opus' ridiculous capabilities.

          • hermanzegerman2 hours ago
            /stats session shows you the remaining quota in Gemini CLI and when the quota resets, and they dropped the quota badly in the last few days.

            Before that I would totally agree with you, it felt really endless

    • UltraSanean hour ago
      I found the $250 in free credit for Claude Code hard to actually use before it expired. I think I got down to less than $50
  • gslin2 hours ago
    Using timezone not UTC for a global service is a crime, especially mixed with daylight saving.
    • Terrettaan hour ago
      This is how they say Wall St is all using Anthropic without saying Wall St is all using Anthropic.

      Regular price window around the world: https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/?qm=1&lid=5368361,5128581,316...

      • nemonemo35 minutes ago
        Yes, it overlaps well with the market open time. But I thought Claude was good with coding... Does this mean major trading agents write code using Claude to make trading decisions? Or Claude models are relatively better than other models in non-coding trading work?
  • r2vcap36 minutes ago
    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.

  • AussieWog932 hours ago
    That is doubled usage between 5AM and 11PM for anyone playing along from Sydney/Melbourne.
    • msephtonan hour ago
      Are you sure? It's a 6h window on the page
      • nemonemo32 minutes ago
        Not sure what you mean by "it", but the doubled usage would be 18h a day.
    • canpan2 hours ago
      JST here, it' basically add day.
  • matthewfcarlson36 minutes ago
    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.
  • megadragon9an hour ago
    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.
  • podviaznikovan hour ago
    Travelling salesman problem in 2026 is Travelling Engineer Problem to find optimal location to maximize tokens usage.
  • michaelhoney3 hours ago
    Living in Tasmania as competitive advantage
  • timcobban hour ago
    Who are these guys even competing with that they are going so hard with the deals? Like the 1M context window, is Gemini offering that? In any case, they seem to have no real competition today.
    • lavezzi8 minutes ago
      pretty sure Gemini has shipped with a 1m context window for a long time
    • wahnfriedenan hour ago
      codex offered the 1m context window (without markup, and via subscription) first, and is now wrapping up a 2 month promo of 2x usage rate. they've also provided free tier access which claude code lacks, and have shipped a desktop app (unlike claude code) for mac and windows. codex is also beating them on many benchmarks and has influencers like @steipete (before they hired him) proclaiming that he uses codex exclusively for code, after having been a cc user.

      codex is still in minority use but has taken many customers from them over a short period.

      • timcobban hour ago
        Ah gotcha, thanks
  • walthamstow2 hours ago
    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
  • skeledrewan hour ago
    Nice. I have 18 hours to my weekly reset and 10% left. Can maximize.
  • egeozcan3 hours ago
    So afternoon in Germany or am I misreading?
    • pdpi2 hours ago
      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.

      • 2 hours ago
        undefined
    • trelbutate2 hours ago
      Outside 4pm to 10pm
  • twtw993 hours ago
    This is great, but i guess they are feeling the heat from Codex resetting limits in the last month quite a bit.
    • stavros3 hours ago
      I think they're feeling the heat from growing too quickly so they want to incentivize people to spread the load more evenly.
      • toomuchtodo2 hours ago
        Very much like electric utility time of day pricing, using economic incentives to shift demand to trough periods.

        Perhaps an opportunity for them to improve workload scheduling orchestration, like submitting a job to a distributed computing cluster queue, to smooth demand and maximize utilization.

        • stavros2 hours ago
          Everything bursty will use economic incentives to smooth the load. I'm not sure how they'd do that with workload scheduling orchestration when you have latency-sensitive loads and there are e.g. twice as many requests at midday as at midnight.
          • toomuchtodo2 hours ago
            You decouple the workloads from human interaction (ie when you submit the job to the queue vs when it is scheduled to execute) so when they run is not a consideration, if possible. The economic incentives encourage solving this, and if it can’t be solved, it buckets customer cohort by willingness (or unwillingness) to pay for access during peak times.
            • stavros2 hours ago
              Sure, but if I ask the LLM a question, I'd like it to respond now, instead of tonight.
              • toomuchtodo2 hours ago
                Certainly, interactive workloads aren’t realistic for time shifting, but agentic coding likely is. Package everything up and ship it as a job, getting a bundle back asynchronously.
                • stavros2 hours ago
                  I don't know, my agentic coding is pretty interactive. Maybe once the plan is done, sure. That would be interesting, though OpenAI already does this with batch workloads.
    • Analemma_3 hours ago
      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.
  • timmg3 hours ago
    I’m trying to figure out how this affects weekly limits, since those overlap peak hours. My observation is that it doesn’t. But I could be wrong.

    If they are doing it “right” I think any off peak usage should count 50% toward your weekly limits.

    Edit: it does look like they are doing it the "right" way.

    • linolevan3 hours ago
      > Does bonus usage count against my weekly usage limit?

      > No. The additional usage you get during off-peak hours doesn’t count toward any weekly usage limits on your plan.

      • lxgran hour ago
        So the first 100% of 5-hour usage are billed against weekly usage at normal rates, but the second additional 100% are not counted?
      • timmg3 hours ago
        I just watched my "weekly limit" get used while I ran a claude code command.

        I'm not sure how to square that with the quote you gave.

        • jakubadamw3 hours ago
          Did you exhaust the five-hour usage limit already? As I understand it, the ”additional usage” refers to anything beyond the standard five-hour usage limit.
    • itsyonas3 hours ago
      > Does bonus usage count against my weekly usage limit?

      > No. The additional usage you get during off-peak hours doesn’t count toward any weekly usage limits on your plan.

      • linolevan3 hours ago
        Oops! Looks like we posted at the same time.
    • yokoprime3 hours ago
      all weekend is off-peak
  • rokhayakebe2 hours ago
    This company is clearly on a mission. I would just like to know what that mission is. I mean this in a good way.
  • peterweiszan hour ago
    Would be happy to utilize but didn't see a promocode or voucher. Do I need more coffee?
  • estebarb3 hours ago
    I didn't understood "your five-hour usage" I thought plans were per interaction or per token, not per hour.
    • stavros3 hours ago
      There's a limit that resets every five hours and one that resets every week.
      • rmi_3 hours ago
        My usage only shows daily and weekly, though. I never got that.
        • stavros2 hours ago
          It has "current session" and "weekly". If you notice, "current session" is never more than five hours away from expiration.
          • rmi_2 hours ago
            Oh, you're right. I don't know why I've always misread "current session" as daily.

            Thanks for clearing that up. It'll help me schedule stuff in the future.

            • minimaxir2 hours ago
              For Claude Code, you use up 12% of your weekly allotment every session, so 8 sessions per week.

              If you are only using a session a day, you're wasting a session. :)

    • bpodgursky3 hours ago
      You can pay either for API usage or a fixed monthly plan (which is way cheaper but you can't use it for applications, just personal use).
  • geefmcshanean hour ago
    Have they accounted for time zones? This is my daytime in Australia/Sydney
  • Analemma_2 hours ago
    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.
    • jimmytucson2 hours ago
      They have this. It’s called batch pricing and it’s 50% off.
    • cyanydeez2 hours ago
      I find that incredibly optimistic.
  • MagicMoonlightan hour ago
    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.

  • tiku2 hours ago
    I still hate Claude for turning down limits. I use z.ai in Claude code now, haven't hit the limit yet.
  • candeira3 hours ago
    Australia here we come.
  • phendrenad22 hours ago
    I don't really understand why AI providers don't charge like the electric company, or AWS. Instead of increasing usage limits, just charge less for off-hours use.
    • lxgran hour ago
      LLM inference is much more geographically fungible than electricity, so maybe it’s just not worth the complexity yet and there is enough (not highly latency sensitive) load on average globally.
  • arjunchintan hour ago
    Wild conspiracy theory: this is targetting to decrease usuage from Indian users.

    There is no way 5-11 AM PT is peak traffic

    • gnabgiban hour ago
      It's basically the whole time Wall Street & stock markets run. And the entire afternoon and early evening of Europe. Plenty of usage in this window, AWS-East|Azure-East max usage window.
  • qwertyuiop_2 hours ago
    I guess extra compute opened up after they were canned by Department of War.
  • dist-epoch2 hours ago
    They are learning from Codex

    https://hascodexratelimitreset.today

  • delduca2 hours ago
    Wtf is ET? Is an alien time?
  • unglaublich2 hours ago
    Ah crap I was hoping to benefit more of my sub because I'm in an off-hours tz.
  • johnhamlinan hour ago
    AI psychosis intensifies
  • speakbits2 hours ago
    Is this going to cause another outage?
  • Footprint05212 hours ago
    changes sleep schedule
  • blondie9x2 hours ago
    These promos should be based on when more renewable energy is available for inference not when less people are likely to be using the AI. We need to adjust usage to when supply is more renewable for both training and inference in order to better protect our grid and the planet.
  • caaqilan hour ago
    So we now have just pure marketing slop on the HN front page? How is this interesting or "curious" again? The AI slop season is affecting HN in clever ways.
  • themarogee2 hours ago
    [dead]
  • rvz2 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • reilly30002 hours ago
      This. The best way to win a net promoting customer is to show them that given more tokens, you can do more amazing things, by giving them something they want that looks amazing (at first glance). They then feel indebted and grateful, and go off to show what they have made. Paying greater sums feels to them like gaining greater leverage.

      I dunno y’all; feels like free drug samples. Who would ever think of coding without it?

  • vtestAI9872 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • Freedom22 hours ago
    I believe Claude is still designated a supply chain risk by the United States government. Whether this affects usage of it or not, that's up to each individual, but it's definitely a curious fact (by HN standards).
    • embedding-shape2 hours ago
      That sounds to me similar to "Telegram banned by Russian government", more of a seal of approval than anything.
    • minimaxir2 hours ago
      That is only relevant if you are in the government/military. The US government has not made using Claude Code a crime, yet.