Claude Max 20x free for 6 months through Anthropic's Claude for Open Source program

Anthropic's Claude for Open Source program is still taking applications. Approved maintainers and contributors get 6 months of Claude Max 20x for free. It's the top individual Claude plan, normally $200 a month, and it covers Claude on the web, the desktop apps, and Claude Code. The criteria changed in July 2026: GitHub stars no longer count, and the program now looks at how much the ecosystem depends on your work and how much you actually contribute.

What you get

If you're approved, you get an email with a unique activation link. You have 90 days to activate, and the 6 months start on the day you activate. If you already pay for Claude, your subscription is paused and then resumes at your previous plan and price after the 6 months, so cancel beforehand if you don't want to keep paying. Free accounts simply go back to the free plan.

This is a personal subscription, not API credit. Each person can receive one, and it can't be transferred or shared. The program is capped at up to 10,000 approved recipients, there's no published closing date, and applications are reviewed on a rolling basis. Anthropic only contacts applicants who are approved.

Who can apply

You can apply if you meet any one of these:

• Packages you maintain have 500+ dependent repos, 100+ dependent packages, or 200,000+ combined monthly downloads on npm, PyPI, crates.io, RubyGems, or a similar registry
• You're a listed committer or maintainer on a recognized foundation or language project, such as CPython, Rust, Node.js TSC, Apache PMC, CNCF, Kubernetes, the Linux kernel, Django, or Rails
• You've authored 100+ pull requests merged into repos you don't own in the last 12 months
• One of your repos has had 20+ unique external contributors with merged pull requests in the last 12 months
• A repo you maintain has an OpenSSF criticality score of 0.4 or higher

If none of these quite fits but you maintain something the ecosystem quietly depends on, you can still apply and explain why.

You also need to be at least 18, apply as an individual, and live where Claude is available. Your GitHub account must be at least two years old with public open-source activity in the 90 days before you apply, and you need to maintain or contribute to at least one project under an OSI-approved license.

How to apply

1. Open the Claude for Open Source application page and sign in with GitHub
2. Enter your email, how you plan to use Claude, and which criterion you meet (up to 500 words)
3. When the approval email arrives, activate the subscription with your unique link within 90 days