Anthropic is offering a dedicated monthly credit to Claude plans for programmatic usage starting June 15.
In April, Anthropic announced that the Claude subscription will not cover third-party tool usage
Photo Credit: Anthropic
The artificial intelligence (AI) space has started moving away from an “unlimited free buffet” pricing model for programmatic and agentic automation. After Microsoft announced that GitHub Copilot will move to a metered credit allotment calculated on token consumption instead of premium requests, Anthropic is moving towards a similar model. The company said that a monthly fixed credit will now be provided for programmatic use. However, the upside to the change is that it now reverses the AI startup's older decision not to allow third-party agentic tool usage via Claude plans.
In a post on X (formerly known as Twitter), the official account of ClaudeDevs announced, “Starting June 15, paid Claude plans can claim a dedicated monthly credit for programmatic usage.” This covers usage across Claude Agent SDK, Claude-p, Claude Code GitHub Actions, and third-party apps built on Agent SDK. The latter also opens the door to getting usage for OpenClaw tied into Claude subscriptions.
Each plan gets a different monthly credit. Pro subscribers will get a credit of $20 (roughly Rs. 1,921), while Max 5x and Max 20x users will get $100 (roughly Rs. 9,606) and $200 (roughly Rs. 19,210), respectively. Similarly, the Team Standard plan will fetch $20 (roughly Rs. 1,921) per seat, while the Team Premium plan will get the organisation $100 (roughly Rs. 9,606) per seat.
Credits are replenished after every billing cycle. Anthropic stated that credits do not roll over. Once a user has claimed the monthly credit, any programmatic usage will be charged directly from that allowance. Usage is billed at application programming interface (API) rates.
On one hand, this reverses the company's decision from April, where Anthropic stopped including third-party agentic tools usage via Claude subscriptions. Those who still wanted to use tools such as OpenClaw had to purchase extra usage bundles or an API key and be charged on the basis of token consumption.
While the new rule lets users get some value out of their existing subscription when it comes to programmatic usage, it also takes away the Agents SDK's unmetered consumption and replaces it with the same API-style charges. This will impact tools such as Claude Cowork, which surged in popularity in recent months.
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