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Since beginning his writing career, he has written for many different publications such as WorldStart, Listverse, and MakeTechEasier. However, after finding his home at MakeUseOf in February 2019, he would eventually move on to its sister site, XDA, to bring the latest and greatest in Windows, Linux, and DIY electronics.
Summary
- Paid Claude plans get a dedicated monthly programmatic credit for Agent SDK, claude -p, Claude Code GitHub Actions.
- Subscription interactive credits no longer cover programmatic use; programmatic calls draw from the new pool.
- Many view it as a regression, not a free credit, after past billing bugs like a $200 erroneous API charge.
It has been pretty confusing keeping track of what you can and can't use with your Claude subscription right now. Anthropic tried removing Claude Code from new Pro tier subscribers as part of an A/B test, and then we caught wind about the company potentially locking Opus behind a minor paywall, which ended up being just some unupdated documentation.
Anthropic has just announced that it's giving users a new pool of credits dedicated to programmatic usage. The idea is that anything you perform with the Agent SDK, third-party apps running off of it, claude -p, and Claude Code's GitHub actions will use credits separate from your subscription's pool. There's just one problem: Agent SDK and claude -p used to draw from your subscription pool, which gave you more tokens than you paid for due to subsidization. Now, subscribers get a fixed pool of credits for programmatic use with no subsidization, and once it runs out, Anthropic will charge full API rates for additional use.
Anthropic announces a new programmatic credit pool separate from your subscriptions
Agent SDK and claude -p will no longer use subsidized allowances
Over on the ClaudeDevs account, the company has announced that Claude plans will get a "dedicated monthly credit for programmatic usage" starting June 15th. The idea is that you claim the monthly credit once, and Claude will draw from it when you use it for programmatic tasks.
Here's how much each tier will get:
- Pro: $20
- Max 5x: $100
- Max 20x: $200
- Team Standard: $20/seat
- Team Premium: $100/seat
- Enterprise: Varies by seat type
Anthropic says that, once this pool of credits dries up, you can continue with usage credits. If you don't have them enabled, your usage will pause until the next credit reset. Your subscription's rate limits are now reserved strictly for "interactive use."
People accuse Anthropic of dressing up a regression as a good thing
Agent SDK and claude -p will soon burn through credits faster than before
The change is the newest development in Anthropic's attempts to separate programmatic from interactive usage. We previously saw Anthropic block third-party tools like OpenClaw from using subscription rate limits and asked its users to move to API billing instead. This caused someone to rack up $200.98 in API usage fees while 86% of their quota went untouched, simply because the string "HERMES.md" appeared in a git commit message. It wasn't actually being used, but Anthropic's detection logic flagged it as proof of third-party usage and billed it as such.
Anthropic originally did not intend to refund the $200.98, but after the case went viral, the company gave the user their money back. Now, it seems this new separate credit pool for programmatic usage is Anthropic's new method of properly billing users for third-party tool usage without the sudden shock of a huge bill landing in people's inboxes.
However, not everyone sees Anthropic as the good guy here. Theo, the person who managed to reproduce the billing bug on a test repository, replied to the @ClaudeDevs X post stating that Anthropic's framing of giving people free credit was "wild" and that he now "[has] to make the Claude Code experience on T3 Code significantly worse" to continue using it now that the 25x subsidization has been removed. Because this new pool of credits does not use the subscription plan's subsidization, Theo's old code would burn through his new credit plan a lot faster, meaning he now has to pull it back just to stop it from devouring his credits.
Whether this was Anthropic doing the right thing, or it was a tactic to get people paying for their extra programmatic use, one thing's for certain: in this new world of agentic use and how to bill it, what we get for free now may be an additional fee later.
