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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

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".

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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.

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.

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).

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".

Yup. I have the $20 plan, and I've been focusing full time (and then some) on my open source projects. I usually hit the limit 2-3 hours into the 5-hour limit window, and have to wait for it to reset.

In a way it's kinda nice, because it forces me not to rely on it too much, and I mostly use it for more mechanical changes, nothing that I'd consider "creative" (because I enjoy that part of programming!). But it's also frustrating if I'm, say, building a planning document or getting suggestions or help with debugging, and suddenly I hit the limit and have to context switch.

So if I get into this program, I will probably enjoy Max 20x a lot, and then be really bummed when the 6-month period is over. Not sure if I'll be bummed enough to fork over the cash for it to continue, but I'm sure I will be very tempted to do so.

> 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.)

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.

It's a marketing/sales tactic. I already have a Claude Pro subscription. I use it quite a bit, and do hit the limits often enough (sometimes needing to wait 2-3 hours before it resets), but I'm not convinced I want to spend more on the Max subscription, even though I do get a ton of value out of it.

Giving me Max 20x for 6 months would just get me hooked more on it to the point that I'd likely upgrade my subscription after the free period is over. Or I'd just go back to Pro and feel shittier about it.

If they were giving it away for free indefinitely, then that would actually be generous and altruistic. I don't think it's a spectrum; I think nothing free is one thing, some defined period of free is a sales tactic, and free indefinitely/forever is actual generosity.

But hey, I applied anyway; we'll see.

I like Jetbrains pricing model in general. Basically you get a discount that increases each year based on how long you have been a customer, to the point where it caps out at I think 50% off.

GitHub also does it fully automatically (but they don't share explicit criteria).

what's the Github program here?

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.

I work for a commercial open source company, working on the open source product. I applied for it way back in the day and got it, and i still get the emails every month saying that they renewed my free grant.

This is all despite the company also paying for Github Copilot.

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.

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