[HN Gopher] Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers
___________________________________________________________________
Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers
Author : zhisme
Score : 374 points
Date : 2026-02-27 09:08 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (claude.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (claude.com)
| reconnecting wrote:
| No, thank you.
| OskarS wrote:
| For 6 months? So it's just a fancy, "first one is free" trial?
| stavros wrote:
| Yep, looks like it. Plus they only count NPM downloads, because
| apparently no other language matters.
| nDRDY wrote:
| Looks like the most-popular NPM packages are about to get
| even harder to maintain.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| leftpad developer finally receives due recognition!
| bicx wrote:
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| The double standards are so obnoxious. Corporations bent over
| backwards to lobby intellectual property into law, then they
| invent AI and suddenly everything turns into fair use.
| amatecha wrote:
| "Rules for thee, but not for me" relevant pretty much every
| week at this point.
| julianlam wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Why? The resulting code generated by Claude is unfit for
| training, so any work product produced after the start of the
| subsidized program should be ignored.
|
| Therefore it makes sense to charge them for the service after 6
| months, no? Heh.
| lambda wrote:
| What do you mean it's unfit for training? It's a form of
| reinforcement learning; the end result has been selected
| based on whether it actually solved the need.
|
| You need to be careful of the amount of reinforcement
| learning vs continued pretraining you do, but they already do
| plenty of other forms of reinforcement learning, I'm sure
| they have it dialed in.
| nitinreddy88 wrote:
| Essentially they want you to use it for 6 months and then hook
| you up to their paid offerings. Smart
| sigmar wrote:
| >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.
|
| pour one out for us gitlab users :(
| bee_rider wrote:
| Other comments indicate that it's just a free trial that
| converts to paid at the end. So, don't worry, you are just
| excluded from an ad basically.
| Mattwmaster58 wrote:
| It converts back to paid automatically if you had an existing
| paid subscription before. No other cases. In any case, this
| is still a valuable service they are providing for 6mo for
| free, which many will appreciate even if the goal is to
| recruit more users.
| lkbm wrote:
| I wish more ads offered me $1200 of usage followed by the
| option to either pay to keep using the product or just stop
| at no cost.
| Foxboron wrote:
| > 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.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| 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".
| lanyard-textile wrote:
| It's a spectrum, right?
|
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| Eh, no, I'd like it much more if it were an ongoing offering
| of the $20 plan than a one-off of the $200 plan. The latter
| just screams of sales tactic.
| pigpop wrote:
| The 20x plan is much more useful if you use it full time.
| Trying to put a full 8 hour workday in on the $20 plan is
| painful since you have to stop when you reach your usage
| limit and that comes up quickly at that tier. The 20x plan
| is enough to have multiple independent Claude Code sessions
| running in parallel working on different features or bugs
| without hitting limits (unless you've got a lot of sessions
| going).
| stavros wrote:
| That's the problem, it's a "get hooked on the useful plan
| for six months and then pay us" vs "here's a little
| something so you can get a little help every day, but
| forever".
| SlinkyOnStairs wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This would be fine in the context of a general sales
| pitch/marketing deal.
|
| But OSS development and maintenance is special here. It has a
| budget of $0. As a sales strategy, Anthropic would be better
| off trying to sell luxury gold plated bindles to hobos.
|
| And there's another question: How exactly does Anthropic see
| the future of OSS, with this pitch? What are they thinking?
| Is this the new norm for OSS a $200/month entry fee?
|
| Because adding such a cost to OSS would not only go against
| everything OSS stands for, and would push the vast majority
| of maintainers into quitting their projects.
|
| (Now, Anthropic can't _mandate_ maintainers use Claude,
| though a much-discussed side effect of tools like Claude has
| been the increased burden on OSS maintainers. And while
| Anthropic does not raise suggestion that they deal with this
| by employing AI tools, bystanders most certainly have.)
| lanyard-textile wrote:
| That's a very compelling argument, I see what you mean. It
| is an attempt to raise the budget bar for OSS -- We do not
| want that.
| mostlyk wrote:
| what's the Github program here?
| univrsal wrote:
| Github gives Copilot Pro to open source maintainers but they
| don't really tell you what the requirements are. I have it
| and I just get a notification every month that it's been
| renewed and I never even applied for it. I assume it's a
| combination of activity on github and popularity of your
| repositories.
| lambda wrote:
| I mean, there's also the whole GitHub free tier. It used to
| only be for public repos, so mostly OSS plus "shared source",
| but now they allow it for private as well. But it still costs
| them money to host your code and provide CI minutes.
| lostmsu wrote:
| GitHub also does it fully automatically (but they don't share
| explicit criteria).
| smashah wrote:
| 5000+ stars proves this is a sales tactic
| mittermayr wrote:
| 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.
|
| Thank you for everything you ship*
|
| *there's a 6 months limit we have on gratitute.
| cperciva wrote:
| 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.
| mittermayr wrote:
| > 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.
|
| https://www.anthropic.com/claude-for-oss-terms
| cperciva wrote:
| Sure. They're still figuring out exactly how to decide who
| qualifies for this -- seriously, 5000 github stars or 1M
| monthly NPM downloads? -- and they don't want to make long-
| term promises to people who might not qualify under future
| better-thought-out rules.
|
| That doesn't mean they're not going to continue this, it
| just means they're being careful not to make promises which
| they'll want to roll back later.
| evolve2k wrote:
| Don't worry so much man, give it a try, the first few are on me,
| give you time to get comfortable /S
| rhr-qlap wrote:
| 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?
| sega_sai wrote:
| 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.
|
| EDIT: Just another test, one of the most used codes in astro --
| an ensemble Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo sampler
| https://github.com/dfm/emcee has 1600 stars. It just shows the
| 5000 stars is a bit PR, rather than a serious attempt to help
| open source.
| isodev wrote:
| Number of stars also excludes self hosted forges. Stars is more
| of a GitHub-wants-to-be-a-social thing than actual measure of
| popularity.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| jefftk wrote:
| It also strongly favors older projects, since stars don't
| expire and they've had longer to accumulate them.
| andersmurphy wrote:
| On the bright side it means mostly JS/TS libraries will get
| slopified (as they tend to have the most stars thanks to
| ecosystem size). Small mercies.
| limagnolia wrote:
| I don't even star the vast majority of packages I use... I
| usually only star repos I don't use but find interesting and
| may want to refer back to in the future.
|
| And completely excludes projects not hosted on Microsoft's
| GitHub or NPM (Though they do say you can contact them if you
| don't meet their insane criteria).
| japhyr wrote:
| 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.
|
| That's pretty ugly.
|
| Edit: I believe I misread the terms. As mwigdahl points out
| below: "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)."
|
| https://www.anthropic.com/claude-for-oss-terms
| skybrian wrote:
| So put a reminder on your calendar to cancel. It's not hard.
| That shouldn't be a reason to pass this up.
| ashtonshears wrote:
| Dont accept this subscription dark pattern
| skybrian wrote:
| I got a cheap Washington Post subscription for years by
| threatening to cancel every year.
|
| 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.
| 18275142 wrote:
| 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.
| NewJazz wrote:
| Someone in my hoa association recently failed to pay their
| dues. Why? Because they were in the hospital for several
| weeks.
| lkbm wrote:
| What % of the time do you think that failure mode comes up?
| NewJazz wrote:
| Non-zero.
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.
| japhyr wrote:
| 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.
| skybrian wrote:
| It seems like the average payoff is not so relevant if you
| have good reason to believe you can do better than average.
| Also, I'm not so sure Anthropic would profit from this
| particular offer in the average case.
|
| I recently downgraded from Opus to Sonnet because it's 40%
| cheaper and it needs a bit more guidance but seems doable.
| There will likely be better deals.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| That never works for me. I try to only sign up for things
| that I can cancel immediately and continue to use for the
| rest of whatever time period I signed up for.
|
| Instead of potentially getting billed for some trial I forgot
| about, I would rather pay for a month, immediately cancel,
| and then repeat every month when I realize it's not working.
|
| Besides helping me keep my expenses under control, it doubles
| as an evaluation of the company. If they make it difficult to
| cancel, or do not let me use the rest of my paid time, I know
| they are not a company I want to do business with.
| skybrian wrote:
| That seems like a decent strategy too.
| hugh-avherald wrote:
| 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.
| easton wrote:
| > and automatically kicking a user off would also probably be
| bad.
|
| Would it? The only way to access Claude is via a CLI or a
| GUI.
|
| > $ claude --resume
|
| > No subscription active (expired on 6/1/2026). Reactivate at
| claude.ai/settings.
| Ntrails wrote:
| > automatically kicking a user off would also probably be
| bad.
|
| No. "Sorry, subscription has expired, please re-up your
| account" is an extremely reasonable UX.
|
| The whole "free period but we'll auto bill you after" is a
| shitty dark pattern that mostly exists to extract value from
| life admin errors. _The people who got enough value to
| justify the cost would 've paid anyway_.
| flaviolivolsi wrote:
| Or you can just add a reminder before the free period
| expires
| recursive wrote:
| You can do that, but that's a dark pattern.
| yunwal wrote:
| Or they could just not autocharge people, or allow people
| to decide whether to autorenew or not when they sign up.
| The fact that they don't do that shows that they're
| trying to pull one over on people.
| piokoch wrote:
| Exactly, this is one step from selling older people
| overpriced pots and rugs.
| kazinator wrote:
| A $200 bill from some cloud entity that doesn't have my
| credit card info would cause nothing but enormous laughter.
|
| What is ugly here is the combination of the free trial (not
| ugly in an of itself), and they way they are trying to
| recruit qualified users for it from open source.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| 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).
|
| If I'm reading it wrong, let me know.
| japhyr wrote:
| I think you are right. I'll edit my comment to point to this.
| kazinator wrote:
| Even if they did let the free users continue using, and
| then preesnted them with invoices, those would mean nothing
| without a registered, up-to-date payment method on file.
|
| I mean, pay this invoice ... or else what?
| soperj wrote:
| > I mean, pay this invoice ... or else what?
|
| Or else they send it to collections.
| beastman82 wrote:
| Ugly is subjective. I'd happily accept these terms
| KronisLV wrote:
| Agreed, that's a lot of value for a person to pay for
| themselves!
| lkbm wrote:
| My calendar is littered with the occasional "Cancel Wired
| subscription", "Cancel Amazon Unlimited", "Cancel Fitbit
| premium". This is a standard promotional offer, and it's
| trivial to not get bitten by it. We have the technology to
| set reminders for future dates.
| recursive wrote:
| It's not trivial for me. All my life I've struggled to
| attend to scheduled events that are not regularly
| recurring. I've missed midterm exams in college. I've
| missed band gigs I was scheduled to play in. I've
| accidentally stood people up in social outings. I've missed
| credit card payments. (solved that one with auto-pay) I
| have calendars and email accounts, and they _usually_ work,
| but sometimes I miss the notification or forget to check
| the calendar.
|
| For me, if I was going to plan to cancel something in the
| future, then instead of scheduling it, I'd just do it _now_
| before the thought goes out of my head.
| dmix wrote:
| Tons of SaaS companies offer open source projects free periods
| or a limited hobby plan for free. Claude is offering a
| professional plan 20x'd for a free period. I don't see anything
| wrong with that. This is a far more resource expensive service
| to offer for free than 99% of SaaS companies.
| startupsfail wrote:
| This potentially can be a supply chain attack at a massive
| scale.
| CreepGin wrote:
| Yes, at the very least, it's a no-brainer for OS maintainers
| who are already paying for Max 20x.
| theptip wrote:
| It's baffling to me that you can frame a $1200 gift to FOSS
| projects as "ugly".
|
| I think it's reasonable to grant humans agency. If they don't
| want it they don't have to take it. It's pretty obviously a
| huge net positive.
| Balinares wrote:
| Ugly may be a strong word, but upon reading the title, the
| first thought that came to me was that they'd done some self-
| examination and decided to finally do the ethical thing about
| all the open source training data without which their
| proprietary product would plain and simply not exist.
|
| In comparison, a program that grants time-limited credits to
| a few high-visibility projects reads like a self-serving
| marketing move no matter how you slice it.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| What baffles to me is the people who think that "gifts"
| should never be criticized.
|
| I mean, suppose Adobe decides to gift "$1200" value in Adobe
| products/subscriptions to all subscribers of the gimp-users
| mailing list. Can I criticize that?
| vntok wrote:
| What would you find deserving to be criticized about such a
| gift?
| theptip wrote:
| I'm sure you can; grumpy people can criticize anything.
|
| I just think it's a waste of emotional energy to get worked
| up about what's very obviously a net positive.
|
| And I did not say gifts should never be criticized; "here
| have this free crack cocaine" would obviously be immoral.
| Don't do the HN overgeneralization thing.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| It is disgusting. I just use "fake" credit cards from online
| services to end-around this. Obnoxious for sure, but it saves
| me the headache of tracking this kind of shit.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > 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.
|
| There's nothing about this "for open source". This is for the
| celebrities of the open source world. "Use our product and let
| us advertise that you're using it." Nice try, but this is a
| pretty common marketing strategy, so no point pretending it's
| about supporting open source. A big name open source project
| adopting their products provides massive value to the company.
| Actual support would be giving access to the non-celebrities of
| the open source world.
| deckar01 wrote:
| 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.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Yeah, I think a lot of open-source maintainers would rather
| have some kind of an anti-slop filter than a six-month trial.
| All of my GitHub projects are tiny so I haven't had to
| encounter it, but I've heard that some projects are absolutely
| swamped in crap.
| david_allison wrote:
| As an eligible maintainer: absolutely.
|
| In the past week (besides the constant slop), there are
| models which have misattributed the copyright of new files to
| me, and stripped my copyright from existing files. It's
| sapping up time, energy and motivation.
| jpease wrote:
| Lo, behold how the beast doth roar! From the depths thereof it
| crieth aloud, saying, "Feed me."
|
| Sincerely,
|
| Sales & Marketing
| skybrian wrote:
| 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.
| ashtonshears wrote:
| Most people are sick of free trial scams, its incredibly
| pervasive. Its only a gift if there is no automated renewal, a
| scummy ad otherwise
| kazinator wrote:
| But the application form isn't asking for credit card info.
| (Does anyone know whether they ask for that later in the
| approval process?)
|
| In any case, the fine print says that participants have to
| purchase after the expiration of the free period in order to
| to continue. Nothing is mentioned about having to give
| payment info upfront, such that the account automatically
| transitions to payment.
|
| Participants who are already paying customers will have their
| payments suspended for that period, so I think for them it
| will automatically lapse back to paid, at least if their
| payment method is up-to-date.
| 18275142 wrote:
| The cynics are in the AI companies who want to get rich by
| making everyone unemployed and sloppifying the Internet after
| stealing the entire human IP.
| vivzkestrel wrote:
| at close to 120 stars within 2 weeks from launch, i hope i make
| it there!
| notatallshaw wrote:
| 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.
| xantronix wrote:
| 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.
| lasgawe wrote:
| I agree with your points btw
| zhisme wrote:
| OSS developers driven by something else than just money I
| believe. They are proud of their work of giving something to
| the community with their name on it. So such respect as giving
| free subscription to them I think matters, as they were
| mentioned and respected.
| blibble wrote:
| the pride aspect is gone though
|
| even if you've got an outstanding project, now everyone has
| to wade through no much noise it'll never be found
| latexr wrote:
| > They are proud of their work of giving something to the
| community with their name on it.
|
| And then Anthropic (and others) comes along, files off the
| name, and repackages that gift to sell to someone else for
| money. That's not respectful.
| shimman wrote:
| Nah, I know open source devs that would rather tax these
| companies into paying actual open source devs.
|
| Maybe get out of your SVG bubble and realize that people
| don't like companies that rat fuck the commons for a quick
| buck. It's disgusting.
|
| There should be a penny tax per prompt that funds open source
| development through grants.
| zhisme wrote:
| no, I'm not against them to be paid by Anthropic too. But
| this symbolic action is also cool and respectful imo
| mohsen1 wrote:
| 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 ($200/mo)
| for my own projects. Would be nice to have one of them covered
| for at least 6 months! Hope Anthropic accepts my application
| because I do not track downloads at all.
| Robdel12 wrote:
| I really appreciate the gesture, but this kind of feels like it's
| an attempt to claw (lol) some good will back from devs. The
| barrier is way too high, imo. And the 6 month cap does make sense
| given the cost of LLMs but it's a bad feeling. We like you, but
| for 6 months.
|
| As a tinnnyy plug, I've ran OSS sponsorship programs before for
| companies. One thing that I always hated was the sales contact
| process to get it. So, for Vizzly I made it 100% automated. Sign
| up, connect an OSS public repo, get a free plan.
| https://vizzly.dev/open-source/ I don't wanna talk to you and you
| don't wanna talk to me (for this :p)
| KronisLV wrote:
| Hey that seems pretty cool! No doubt it's gonna be a way to
| either collect more info of successful devs or maybe just upsell
| stuff after those 6 months are over, but it's something!
|
| I went for their 100 USD paid tier and it's honestly been
| immensely useful (Claude Code with the desktop UI with multiple
| parallel tasks), I've done more and with better quality in the
| past few weeks than others do in a month - maybe I just got lucky
| with the domain but it really is a force multiplier and I'm
| working on like 4 projects in parallel at work and am crushing
| it, being overworked aside.
|
| Finally I also have enough capacity for various side projects and
| utility tools/scripts, or at least I will until I burn out, but
| that's not really the fault of the tool, rather the amount of
| work.
|
| Being able to throw the latest Opus model at every problem is
| also really, really nice. Way better than any of the slop before.
| miroljub wrote:
| "Contact the sales"
|
| No, thanks. I decided I don't want to play those games. I get
| MiniMax unlimited for 10$ per month, and free GitHub Copilot as
| an open source maintainer and contributor.
|
| I don't need to beg to get some free stuff, only to later realize
| the only way to use it is through the shitty Claude Code.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Anthropic, your model and marketing teams do great work, but your
| business leadership keeps making decisions that make you look
| pretty bad.
| paxys wrote:
| > 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.
|
| How many total developers does that cover? 100? How many of them
| aren't already corporate employees?
|
| And also
|
| > 6 months of free Claude Max 20x
|
| So basically a free trial.
|
| When Github Copilot first launched they gave Pro subscriptions to
| _everyone_ that regularly committed to a public repo, regardless
| of the number of stars or downloads, and kept renewing it
| indefinitely. I don 't know if that program is still around but
| it was amazing to get to try out some early LLM coding tools for
| open source development.
| mickael-kerjean wrote:
| A lot more than a 100, for once I'm one of those
| https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
| flaviolivolsi wrote:
| Github is Microsoft. MS has a war chest big enough not to care
| if they throw away money for customer acquisition
| dude250711 wrote:
| Yeah, their thing is more making products worse over time and
| wasting billions. You will see this in action shortly with
| XBox. I think they will do both this time.
| Volundr wrote:
| GitHub is cagey about the criteria, but yes this is ongoing. It
| doesn't appear to be tied to active contributions though. I'm a
| maintainer on paper of a moderately large open source project
| that I haven't been involved with in years, and they still
| renew my free copilot monthly.
| zhisme wrote:
| I think there's plenty of them. I know at least 3 guys eligible
| for such requirements (but this guys aren't some public persons
| giving tech-talks and so on, just some niche libs for others to
| use). If Claude would ask for 100k stars repos, then yeah. I
| guess there would be even less than 100
| lkbm wrote:
| Github search gives me 11 300 results for 5000+ stars[0]. Dunno
| if they all qualify as open source, but that's also repos, not
| contributors. Presumably there's an average of > 1 per repo.
|
| NPM probably adds a lot. I can't find any recent sources, but
| NPM packages get downloaded _a lot_ (e.g., every Github Action
| run.) And to get such a download, an NPM package just has to be
| _somewhere_ in the dependency tree, which are famously
| enormous. (Though many might not be updated in the past 3
| months, though.)
|
| [0]
| https://github.com/search?q=stars%3A%3E5000+sort%3Astars&typ...
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| > a public repo with 5,000+ GitHub stars
|
| This is going to get abused so fast, it will make your head
| spin.
|
| EDIT: I just look up the highest-ranking "buy GitHub stars"
| page (which I will obviously not link here), and it looks like
| you would have to pay a little over $1000 to get the required
| amount of stars. So I suppose it might not get abused as easily
| as I thought.
|
| On the other hand, someone with the gumption and elbow grease
| to abuse this process themselves could still easily do so, I'd
| wager.
|
| All that being said, I still think that GitHub stars are
| effectively worthless, and attempting to assign value to them
| like this is, at best, a fool's errand.
|
| I can imagine this will invoke Goodhart's law, increasing the
| amount of people shilling their AI-generated shovelware onto a
| Web already greatly suffering from the consequences of the
| plummeting cost of intelligent-sounding text generation.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Shucks, I'm only 1000 stars singlehandedly. Curse my woeful
| irrelevance :D
|
| I guess I will just have to NOT sign on to this nonsense and
| allow it to atrophy my ability to think of things
| independently, thus ending up completely dependent on an
| outside tool of ever-increasing price.
|
| Gosh darn it, of all the luck.
| oulipo2 wrote:
| Has Claude become slow and buggy for other users?
| gaigalas wrote:
| That's nice.
|
| It also makes sense to give tools for open source developers.
| Sometimes we need to test compatibility (does my repo play nice
| with that harness/ide/etc?). This in turn makes that repo be more
| solid for the paid tool, which is a potential way of attracting
| users for both. It has been done by others (like JetBrains IDEs).
| asim wrote:
| I'll take it! I've been using Opus 4.6 with GitHub Tasks
| sparingly but any sort of continued usage is very expensive. This
| would be handy, like 10x my efforts.
| iberator wrote:
| Now suddenly everyone's gonna become a 'maintainer'. People are
| gonna abuse it and just use it for everything else BUT proper(not
| fake and AI GENERATED) open source projects.
|
| Sad day. I hope so they are gonna change the TOS and punish
| anyone with a 1 million $ fine if someone lies.
|
| That's the only way: criminal charges for students using AI(when
| forbidden such as academia) and people who plan to abuse it
| (stealing tokens against TOS).
|
| it's impossible to compete with cheaters and with cheaters who
| stole money
| iberator wrote:
| Now suddenly everyone's gonna become a 'maintainer'. People are
| gonna abuse it and just use it for everything else BUT proper(not
| fake and AI GENERATED) open source projects.
|
| Sad day. I hope so they are gonna change the TOS and punish
| anyone with a 1 million $ fine if someone lies.
|
| That's the only way: criminal charges for students using AI(when
| forbidden such as academia) and people who plan to abuse it
| (stealing tokens against TOS).
|
| it's impossible to compete with cheaters and with cheaters who
| stole moneyl
| blitzar wrote:
| Can I add a line like this to my robots.txt and pick up 1
| million $ from each of the Ai companies?
| obahareth wrote:
| Kind of strange that it's only for npm?
| koinedad wrote:
| Sorry we stole all your src code that you labored over for hours
| and hours of your life. Here's a few bucks for 6 months to help
| train our model even more.
| guntars wrote:
| People on a tech forum making "copying is theft" arguments lol
| amatecha wrote:
| I mean that's what's been shoved in our faces for decades,
| every time we load any piece of software or play any video
| game
| epiccoleman wrote:
| on _open-source licensed code_ , no less
| chroma_zone wrote:
| The terms of those licenses are still relevant...
| hadlock wrote:
| If richard stallman were dead (he's not), he'd be rolling over
| in his grave right now
| FiberBundle wrote:
| I'm kind of sceptical about the altruistic motives here. Giving
| this to open source maintainers also solves the problem of
| identifying high quality feedback/rewards for their rlvr models.
| With everybody using Claude code it might be difficult for them
| to find a robust way to tell apart good reward signal from
| mediocre or below average feedback.
| randusername wrote:
| Scraping data, well that's just okay...
|
| What if we get proven code some other way?
|
| Give our tools for free to prove their worth
|
| No one will guess this is astroturf
|
| A special program, with a special account
|
| To get labeled data worth a big amount
| Thrymr wrote:
| "free as in cocaine", for 6 months.
| kyle-rb wrote:
| Cocaine? The Yandex PaaS?
|
| https://github.com/cocaine
| tempest_ wrote:
| They will need CC in order to deal with the slop that is
| constantly thrown at their repos.
| unvalley wrote:
| Anthropic's models have almost certainly gorged on an enormous
| amount of OSS, and if they think they can settle that debt with
| only six months of perks for the maintainers who've kept that
| ecosystem alive, it comes across as pretty arrogant.
| cloverich wrote:
| Uncharitably, I think this is a strategy to gorge further
| especially if they select for higher quality open source. They
| are embracing the best to train off iteration patterns of the
| best, and have a semi self correcting slop mechanism.
|
| Charitably this will be great for open source software so... so
| long as they never moat up and lockdown.
| _flat20 wrote:
| Can't they just keep scraping these repositories for new data
| anyway? Or has that changed?
| LaurensBER wrote:
| It's amazing how quickly Anthropic is turning into the "bad"
| guys.
|
| First we couldn't use our Claude subscription with anything but
| Claude code, then the limits seemed to change every week
| without any communication, then they banned a bunch of people
| (including some prominent names). Then they complain about the
| Chinese distilling using their API (which I'm partly
| sympathetic to but let's not pretend that Antrophic invented
| their training data from scratch).
|
| Then there's this half-baked offer. I mean sure, it looks nice
| on paper but given how incredibly valuable opensource has been
| for them and given their budget it does seem a bit tight.
| upmind wrote:
| 6mo is so low, from the title I thought it'd be unlimited tbh
| especially considering they'll continue to crawl the content
| 6mo in the future
| w10-1 wrote:
| They do require that you allow them to use your name publicly.
|
| They are silent on whether you can prohibit them from training on
| your input, so I assume you can.
|
| My guess is, if even 10% of maintainers forget to disable
| training, then Anthropic will have a most excellent source of how
| really good developers approach problems that can be fed back
| into the model. That could improve things for everyone.
|
| Of course, the whole purpose of a trial is to induce dependence
| on the service. Let's hope that doesn't reduce the skill of those
| maintainers. If open source code gets better as a result, that's
| good for all.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Of course they're going to train on open-source input (not like
| you could stop them).
|
| And of course they're also going to train on your private
| inputs. It's right there in the TOS.
| lostmsu wrote:
| > And of course they're also going to train on your private
| inputs. It's right there in the TOS.
|
| Anthropic actually says they won't train on your private
| inputs on paid plans as long as you opted out. Unlike Google
| and OpenAI.
| TuxSH wrote:
| > By accepting a Program subscription, you grant Anthropic
| permission to identify you publicly as a Program recipient,
| including by referencing your name, GitHub username, and
| associated open source project(s).
|
| I was tempted about applying but that part is everything but
| nice and I think I'll just pass
| saulpw wrote:
| There's no non-disparagement clause, so how about you left
| them use your name etc, and then you can come out in public
| and say those mean things and shame/embarrass them.
| TuxSH wrote:
| Sure, but what I'm slightly worried about is people easily
| resolving my username to my real name. Maybe I worry too
| much, dunno
| bravetraveler wrote:
| The first taste is free, eh
| shimman wrote:
| Gotta boost up those user numbers before dumping the stock in an
| IPO, I'd respect it more if it wasn't what every other tech IPO
| has done over the previous decade.
| jaredcwhite wrote:
| "It's a trap!"
|
| -Ackbar, open source software maintainer
| nickjj wrote:
| It's weird to make it 6 months only because it sends a message
| of, "Thank you for dedicating 5-10+ years building up a very
| popular open source project. In return we believe this is worth
| exactly $1,200 (6 x $200) in credits". Especially since they are
| scraping all of our work and profiting from it directly without
| acknowledgement or compensation -- past, present and future
| indefinitely.
| upmind wrote:
| Yep agreed, this isn't a nice thing they're doing, it's just a
| ploy for more customers. Shame.
| marcandre wrote:
| I don't get these negative comments for them giving free
| credits. Either it's "Not many people fit these criteria" or
| "A ploy for more customers". It can't be both, and I believe
| it's neither. It's a nice gesture, in line with Github
| Copilot and JetBrains. Disclosure: I have free Copilot and
| just applied for 20x Pro.
| elxr wrote:
| This isn't anymore of a "ploy" then releasing new features
| for claude code, or acquiring bun, or any other random
| improvement or promotion that essentially boils down to
| offering more value to claude users.
|
| All the big LLM labs do promos constantly. Sure, this one's
| on the stingy side considering the amount of work OSS
| maintainers just give out, but there's nothing wrong with
| promotions.
| yunwal wrote:
| No, giving a "free" subscription that autorenews and
| charges you $200 if you forget to cancel is definitely a
| ploy
| elxr wrote:
| > If you have an existing paid Anthropic subscription,
| your current billing will be paused for the duration of
| the Benefit Period and will resume at your then-current
| plan and rate at the end of the Benefit Period, unless
| you cancel. If you have an existing free Anthropic
| account, the Program subscription will be applied to that
| account and your free subscription will resume at the end
| of the Benefit Period, unless you cancel.
|
| Wrong. They've explicitly stated it won't autorenew at
| the Max 20X tier.
| babarock wrote:
| > You're a primary maintainer or core team member of a public
| repo with 5,000+ GitHub stars or 1M+ monthly NPM downloads.
|
| I've been an open source maintainer of one of the biggest open
| source projects in the world[1], and it wouldn't fill any of
| these requirements. Anybody else hates it that now "open source"
| is conflated with Github (a private company, itself not open
| source) popularity?
|
| [1]: https://www.openstack.org/
| johnfn wrote:
| This seems pretty explicitly to fit your case:
|
| > Don't quite fit the criteria If you maintain something the
| ecosystem quietly depends on, apply anyway and tell us about
| it.
| upmind wrote:
| Interesting that they didn't read a single sentence below
| their quoted one... Or they just wanted an excuse to hate on
| GitHub
| elefanten wrote:
| Maybe worth asking for anyway? They might just be setting
| metrics based on the most popular ways of measuring but if they
| care about the spirit of the offer it would make sense for them
| to be flexible with the letter of the requirements.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| why is only the JavaScript package system eligible?
| _giorgio_ wrote:
| I can't believe that people can't simply accept gifts.
| itomato wrote:
| Is this what it feels like to be slapped by an LLM?
| arjie wrote:
| Made a mistake reading this thread on Safari where I don't have
| the usual suspects blocked. Some guy read that this converts to
| paid and then a bunch of people just kept repeating it. A real
| lesson in how many people are simply repeating things without
| knowing anything.
| dizhn wrote:
| One guy had a misunderstanding and it was corrected. The rest
| is saying that it's like a time limited trial at the end of
| which they are hoping to have you as a paid customer, which
| seems accurate.
| giobox wrote:
| Right? People worry about the amount of LLM slop comments
| appearing on hn, we humans often do an even better job of
| writing nonsense. Would be fascinating to see what percentage
| of hn users only ever read the post title and never the
| contents of the link.
| elxr wrote:
| How do you block on HN?
| arjie wrote:
| I have a Chrome extension here https://overmod.org/ with some
| lists of likes/dislikes. But these days you can trivially
| reimplement it yourself without the server and just using
| Chrome sync (or use the extension, it has local sync as
| well). If you want, point Claude Code at this repo of mine
| https://github.com/TechnologyBrotherhood/overmod-extension
| and it can pretty quickly write you a copy (it doesn't
| actually need the reference, but it might help skip some
| questions).
| elxr wrote:
| Thanks, this'll be very useful.
| ramon156 wrote:
| So open source contributors are not eligible? I know it's kind of
| petty to look at free stuff and go "but what about me?" But I got
| excited for no reason.
| jonchurch_ wrote:
| Folks saying this offer is in bad faith or not generous enough
| dont seem to understand how low the bar is here for rewarding
| maintainers.
|
| I maintain Express.js and Lodash, as well as a number of express
| direct deps (as a TC member of both Express and Lodash).
|
| OSS has been my fulltime focus for over a year (aka Im
| unemployed). In 2025 I made $10 from open source, in the form of
| an amazon gift card for fixing a bug in another random open
| source project (I think they have VC money).
|
| Call it skill issue on my part, sure valid. But having a form
| that says "give us your email and handle, we can easily verify
| your contributions, and in exchange you get $200/month of value
| and we ask nothing of you" is the most generous gift Ive seen.
|
| Is it enough to fix the well known power dynamics of OSS? Of
| course not. Is it cheap PR for Anthropic? Yes, as is every other
| corporate OSS fund initiative. Im not going to give them a
| standing ovation and a key to the city bc they cleared the
| extremely low bar.
|
| My point is that, regardless of motives, from this maintainer's
| perspective this is a kind offer which is respectful of me and my
| time. If you fall into the camp that training on OSS is stealing,
| I can see why youd think that this is a slap in the face. I
| personally do not see it that way, as my work is a conduit for me
| to serve millions Ill never meet, and what they do with my labor
| is not a personal concern. I do what I do because the process
| itself has value to me.
| hinkley wrote:
| I might sign up just to stay on top of a market change that I
| don't have an employer paying me to learn.
|
| But the two concerns I have are, what happens when someone uses
| it to make the projects I work on again but with one design
| change, and it this pulling up the ladder behind us? Will
| someone still be able to start a project five years from now
| and do what you've done? Or come into existing projects like I
| have?
| jonchurch_ wrote:
| I dont want to misrepresent, I am not the original author of
| any of these projects. I am not JDD of lodash (who is still
| involved and part of the TC) nor TJ Holowaychuk of express.
|
| I dont know what the future will look like, but IMO open
| source is the intersection of code and community (aka the
| squishy bits) and for that reason I dont think AI will make
| it obselete, not now nor in the future.
| timbowhite wrote:
| > I maintain Express.js and Lodash
|
| Thank you!
|
| > In 2025 I made $10 from open source
|
| Slightly off-topic, but I wish more OSS projects and
| maintainers would advertise cryptocurrency donation addresses.
| It's probably the easiest way for end users to donate.
| DauntingPear7 wrote:
| What's wrong with ko-fi?
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I have done that for years, and so far have received the
| equivalent of $25 (through three mBTC transactions) on my
| Bitcoin address, and maybe $90 through whatever the token is
| Brave uses (BAT?).
|
| I still get random donations through an old PayPal email
| address that's listed on the same page as my bitcoin address,
| and that totals more like $100 (a year, not over the
| lifetime).
| themeiguoren wrote:
| I wonder how much of this is in response to the MJ Rathbun
| debacle.
| slantedview wrote:
| "or 1M+ monthly NPM downloads"
|
| Right, because Node is the only package ecosystem.
| 2001zhaozhao wrote:
| It seems to me that they genuinely are trying to do a good thing.
| Giving away $200 subs probably will cost more than what they will
| earn from continued subscriptions, given that the top library
| authors have an extremely low chance of being gullible consumers
| who forget to cancel their free trials. They could be aiming for
| other benefits as well such as generally improving the open-
| source tools that they depend on as well as getting some well-
| respected people to talk about how good Claude is, but if they
| even think that far ahead that's pretty reasonable and
| commendable behavior.
|
| But it's funny how their methods end up appearing so close to the
| loss-leader tactics that everyone (including themselves with the
| double holiday Opus limits and $50 extra usage) is doling out to
| ultimately selfishly make more money.
| marcandre wrote:
| It won't need to be cancelled, it won't charge $200 to
| unwilling customers, don't spread false rumors. They'll even
| pause whatever plan we already are on and paid for.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-02-27 23:00 UTC)