Recently, the Claude Code team announced a promotion for the open source community. The main maintainers or core members of open source projects whose projects reach 5,000 stars can receive a 6-month Claude Max 20x subscription for free. During the subscription period, they can use various permissions that come with Claude Max for free.
Of course, if it is not a particularly popular project, it may be difficult to reach the 5,000-star threshold, so Anthropic has also developed a special plan. That is, if developers maintain projects that have a significant impact on the open source ecosystem, or contribute to major projects (other than main maintainers or core members), they can also submit applications for manual review.
Claude Max 20x subscription means that developers can get extremely high usage quotas. Claude Max subscription is normally $200/month, and the number of requests in 5 hours can reach more than 4,000. The context window is the same 200K.
Application address:https://claude.com/contact-sales/claude-for-oss
Here is an overview of the project:
Activity quota: A maximum of 10,000 activity quotas are provided, but Anthropic may adjust the upper limit due to the number of applications.
Deadline: The application deadline for this project is June 30, 2026. Anyone who submits before then will have a chance to receive a free subscription.
Quantity limit: Each qualified applicant can only receive 1 free subscription, duplicate applications will not be entertained.
Regional restrictions: This activity is only available in supported regions. Applications will not be accepted in regions where it is prohibited or restricted by law.
The application conditions are as follows:
Lead maintainer or core team member of a repository hosted publicly on GitHub
The project has 5,000 or more GitHub stars or 1 million monthly downloads on NPM
Applicants must have merge permissions (write or admin permissions) for this project
The applicant has actively participated in the development of the project within three months prior to submission of application
Discretion for small scale projects:
If the applicant does not meet the above application conditions, but maintains projects that have a significant impact on the open source ecosystem, or makes significant contributions to projects that the open source ecosystem relies on, they can also submit an application for manual review.
These projects may include widely used infrastructure libraries, developer tools, or basic software packages that serve as transitive dependencies for a large number of downstream projects, etc. When applying, you need to explain the importance of your contribution to the project.