5 ms·
Claude March 2026 usage promotion
- colingauvin 7mo agoPresumably 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"
- bearjaws 7mo agoor see if they can shift some end user workloads to off hours so that they aren't bogging things down during peak hours.
- timmg 7mo agoI’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.
- itsyonas 7mo 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.
- linolevan 7mo agoOops! Looks like we posted at the same time.
- linolevan 7mo 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.
- timmg 7mo agoI 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.
- jakubadamw 7mo agoDid 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.
- lxgr 7mo agoSo the first 100% of 5-hour usage are billed against weekly usage at normal rates, but the second additional 100% are not counted?
- yokoprime 7mo agoall weekend is off-peak
- speakbits 7mo agoIs this going to cause another outage?
- twtw99 7mo agoThis is great, but i guess they are feeling the heat from Codex resetting limits in the last month quite a bit.
- stavros 7mo agoI think they're feeling the heat from growing too quickly so they want to incentivize people to spread the load more evenly.
- toomuchtodo 7mo agoVery 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.
- stavros 7mo agoEverything 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.
- toomuchtodo 7mo agoYou 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.
- stavros 7mo agoSure, but if I ask the LLM a question, I'd like it to respond now, instead of tonight.
- estebarb 7mo agoI didn't understood "your five-hour usage" I thought plans were per interaction or per token, not per hour.
- stavros 7mo agoThere's a limit that resets every five hours and one that resets every week.
- rmi_ 7mo agoMy usage only shows daily and weekly, though. I never got that.
- stavros 7mo agoIt has "current session" and "weekly". If you notice, "current session" is never more than five hours away from expiration.
- rmi_ 7mo agoOh, 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.
- minimaxir 7mo agoFor 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. :)
- bpodgursky 7mo agoYou 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).
- michaelhoney 7mo agoLiving in Tasmania as competitive advantage
- burticlies 7mo agoTassie represent
- ray_kay777 7mo agoLiterally dozens of us on here!
- JoshGlazebrook 7mo agoI 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.
- Analemma_ 7mo agoThere'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.
- sobjornstad 7mo agoMy 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_nerd 7mo agoThe 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.
- operatingthetan 7mo agoAnthropic'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.
- candeira 7mo agoAustralia here we come.
- egeozcan 7mo agoSo afternoon in Germany or am I misreading?
- trelbutate 7mo agoOutside 4pm to 10pm
- pdpi 7mo agoDST 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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- andkenneth 7mo agoThis is a psyop to recruit more Australians I'm sure of it
- leothelion_ 7mo agoCan't complain honestly!
- prokopton 7mo agoGreat for me in Japan.
- marak830 7mo agoI was thinking the same thing. Would be interesting to see their usage over timezones.
- seriocomic 7mo agoI was thinking the same, but (and correct me if I'm wrong), the timezone means this is only really useful between 11pm and 5am AEST? - EDIT: yup - I _completely_ missed the "outside" of those US hours. yay!
- Freedom2 7mo ago[flagged]
- minimaxir 7mo agoThat is only relevant if you are in the government/military. The US government has not made using Claude Code a crime, yet.
- embedding-shape 7mo agoThat sounds to me similar to "Telegram banned by Russian government", more of a seal of approval than anything.
- blondie9x 7mo agoThese 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.
- Analemma_ 7mo agoLong 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.
- cyanydeez 7mo agoI find that incredibly optimistic.
- jimmytucson 7mo agoThey have this. It’s called batch pricing and it’s 50% off.
- walthamstow 7mo agoDear 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
- unglaublich 7mo agoAh crap I was hoping to benefit more of my sub because I'm in an off-hours tz.
- rvz 7mo ago[flagged]
- reilly3000 7mo agoThis. 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?
- tiku 7mo agoI still hate Claude for turning down limits. I use z.ai in Claude code now, haven't hit the limit yet.
- themarogee 7mo ago[dead]
- daemonologist 7mo agoWould 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).
- nycdatasci 7mo agoYou’re not using Claude Code?
- port11 7mo agoTBF it’s not palatable to everyone. I found Claude Code hard to use, but willingly pay for Opus and Sonnet used with a different tool.
- nikcub 7mo agothe $20 pro plan would also have double offpeak limits - just set it to sonnet and you'll get a reasonable level of output
- salomonk_mur 7mo agoHard 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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- sieabahlpark 7mo ago[dead]
- mavilia 7mo agoI 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.
- dist-epoch 7mo agoThey are learning from Codex https://hascodexratelimitreset.today https://hascodexratelimitreset.today
- AussieWog93 7mo agoThat is doubled usage between 5AM and 11PM for anyone playing along from Sydney/Melbourne.
- canpan 7mo agoJST here, it' basically add day.
- msephton 7mo agoAre you sure? It's a 6h window on the page
- nemonemo 7mo agoNot sure what you mean by "it", but the doubled usage would be 18h a day.
- msephton 7mo agoWhat I mean is that "it" - the advertised window during which the offer applies - is not 5am to 11pm as mentioned by the poster above.
- AussieWog93 7mo agoThe advertised window is peak time (6h per day). The doubled usage applies off-peak (18h per day).
- msephton 7mo agoAh! Yes, I got tripped up by the negation. Cheers
- vtestAI987 7mo ago[flagged]
- qwertyuiop_ 7mo agoI guess extra compute opened up after they were canned by Department of War.
- rokhayakebe 7mo agoThis company is clearly on a mission. I would just like to know what that mission is. I mean this in a good way.
- gslin 7mo agoUsing timezone not UTC for a global service is a crime, especially mixed with daylight saving.
- Terretta 7mo agoThis 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=5368361,5128581,3169070,1277333,2147714,2192362&h=5128581&date=2026-3-16&sln=8.0-14.0&hf=0 https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/?qm=1&lid=5368361,5128581,316...
- nemonemo 7mo agoYes, 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?
- dboreham 7mo ago"Claude" is their chat bot product, so a peer of ChatGPT and used for everything. It by default uses their "Claude Sonet" models. "Claude Code" is their code-writing client application, which uses "Claude Opus" models. https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/models/overview https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/models/over...
- ac29 7mo agoThe US trading day overlaps well with the US business day in general (and to a lesser extent, European demand).
- tchalla 7mo agoThere's only one country in the world.
- mococa 7mo agoWtf is ET? Is an alien time?
- CharlesW 7mo agoMy fellow Californians would agree that, yes, ET is an alien time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Time_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Time_Zone
- Terretta 7mo agoNow is the window of our discontent*: https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/?qm=1&lid=5368361,5128581,3169070,1277333,2147714,2192362&h=5128581&date=2026-3-16&sln=8.0-14.0&hf=0 https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/?qm=1&lid=5368361,5128581,316... * This is the regular price window, the rest is the promo usage.
- Footprint0521 7mo agochanges sleep schedule
- phendrenad2 7mo agoI 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.
- lxgr 7mo agoLLM 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.
- podviaznikov 7mo agoTravelling salesman problem in 2026 is Travelling Engineer Problem to find optimal location to maximize tokens usage.
- johnhamlin 7mo agoAI psychosis intensifies
- MagicMoonlight 7mo agoBut 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.
- megadragon9 7mo agoInteresting 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.
- arjunchint 7mo agoWild conspiracy theory: this is targetting to decrease usuage from Indian users. There is no way 5-11 AM PT is peak traffic
- gnabgib 7mo agoIt'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.
- geefmcshane 7mo agoHave they accounted for time zones? This is my daytime in Australia/Sydney
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- gnabgib 7mo agoJust open the page, they specify the UTC-4 band.. you can adjust accordingly (you'll be fine)
- Terretta 7mo agoAround the world, the regular price window: https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/?qm=1&lid=5368361,5128581,3169070,1277333,2147714,2192362&h=5128581&date=2026-3-16&sln=8.0-14.0&hf=0 https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/?qm=1&lid=5368361,5128581,316...
- caaqil 7mo agoSo 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.
- peterweisz 7mo agoWould be happy to utilize but didn't see a promocode or voucher. Do I need more coffee?
- timcobb 7mo agoWho 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.
- wahnfrieden 7mo agocodex 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 claude code user and popularizing openclaw initially on top of claude code (but never for writing openclaw, only running it). codex is still in minority use but has taken many customers from them over a short period.
- timcobb 7mo agoAh gotcha, thanks
- lavezzi 7mo agopretty sure Gemini has shipped with a 1m context window for a long time
- skeledrew 7mo agoNice. I have 18 hours to my weekly reset and 10% left. Can maximize.
- matthewfcarlson 7mo agoI 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.
- r2vcap 7mo agoDamn. 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.
- martinald 7mo agoVery interesting. As I wrote in this article https://martinalderson.com/posts/is-the-ai-compute-crunch-here/ 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.
- Aboutplants 7mo ago“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.” This only happens once/if competition eases up. Until then, it’s a race to the bottom
- Aboutplants 7mo agoPricing will soon be structured around energy costs and On/off peak power rates, I’m actually surprised it hasn’t happened sooner. Even with Behind the Meter Generation, you’re not completely mitigated from peak (daily) power prices. Being able to shift at least some demand around will help from a pure energy costs perspective. Most of these Behind the Meter generation projects will be Gas Generation. Guess what happens during a cold snap like the one we experienced in the Northeast US a few weeks ago? Natural gas prices jumped 10X in the daily market. You say that they are hedged? Hedges do not matter during Operational Flow Order(OFO)/Force Majeur/Curtailment pipeline events and they are exposed to the daily market. (I do this for a living)
- nojito 7mo agoIt's eerie how similar these trends are to early phone/text usage limits.
- nuker 7mo agoConverted to AEDT (Australian Eastern Daylight Time): Peak hours (normal usage): 8 AM – 2 PM ET → 12 AM (midnight) – 6 AM AEDT (next day) Off-peak hours (2x usage): All other times → 6 AM – 11:59 PM AEDT
- robbrown451 7mo agoI'm in their time zone, and was just planning to stop with my bad habit of staying up working till 4 am and waking up at noon. So much for that plan.
- ymaws 7mo agoinb4 they get people addicted to this new level of usage, and offer a 1k/month tier. I know I'm one of the addicts who will pay what they want :|
- pronik 7mo agoAn anecdote: for a while now I've noticed or imagined Claude Code becoming ever so slightly dumber around 3-4pm CEST, I've been calling it the "Americans are awake" syndrome, because of assumed higher usage while keeping the latency the same (which is something Anthropic surely keeps an eye on) and thus lower quality.
- sevenseacat 7mo agoHaha I've been seeing the same thing late in the evening (Australian time), which I attributed to the same reason.
- pepeseidl 7mo ago[dead]
- thestack_ai 6mo ago[dead]