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Original: Simon Willison · 27/02/2026

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Summary

Anthropic is offering their $200/month Claude Max 20x plan for free to open source maintainers for six months, with specific eligibility criteria.

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Key Insights

“You’re a primary maintainer or core team member of a public repo with 5,000+ GitHub stars or 1M+ monthly NPM downloads.” — Eligibility criteria for the free Claude Max plan.
“Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis. We accept up to 10,000 contributors.” — Details about the application process for the offer.

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Topics

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Full Article

27th February 2026 - Link Blog Free Claude Max for (large project) open source maintainers (via) Anthropic are now offering their $200/month Claude Max 20x plan for free to open source maintainers… for six months… and you have to meet the following criteria: 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. Don’t quite fit the criteria If you maintain something the ecosystem quietly depends on, apply anyway and tell us about it. Also in the small print: “Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis. We accept up to 10,000 contributors”.

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Originally published at https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/27/claude-max-oss-six-months/#atom-everything.