Claude Max and Team plans now include monthly API credits: who gets them and how to claim

Who gets the credits, and how much?

Max and Team subscribers, once they have been on the plan for 7 days. Free, Pro and Enterprise plans are not eligible.

• Max 5x: $100 a month. Max 20x: $200 a month².
• Team: $20 per Standard seat and $100 per Premium seat, pooled into 1 monthly balance and capped at $500. Anthropic’s example: 3 Standard seats and 2 Premium seats come to $260 a month².
• Who claims: on Max, the subscriber. On Team, an Owner or Primary Owner, once for the whole team².
• When: after 7 days on an eligible plan³. Anthropic is switching the offer on over a few days, so it may not show in your settings yet².

What do the credits pay for?

Software you build or run yourself on Claude: apps, automations and agents that call Claude directly (through its API). They do not pay for your everyday use of the Claude apps.

Covered²:

• the Claude API, which is how your own software or a workflow tool sends work to Claude;
• Claude Managed Agents and the Claude Agent SDK, Anthropic’s tools for building agents;
• the Playground in the Claude Console, for trying prompts.

Not covered²:

• interactive Claude Code;
• extra usage in Claude, Claude Code or Claude Cowork;
• Claude bought through Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI or Microsoft Foundry.

Anthropic says the credits are there so subscribers can “experiment with building tools, apps, and agents”¹. We’d read them the same way: room to try something, not a budget to run the business on.

How do you claim them, and what should you watch?

Claim once at claude.ai, under Settings > Billing, by linking a Claude Console account. Then watch 3 things: the link is hard to change, the balance is shared, and requests stop when it runs out.

To claim, go to Settings > Billing (on Team, the billing page of the team’s own settings) and choose “Link organization” in the API credits section. No payment card is needed².

• Choose the account carefully. You can link only 1, and changing it later means contacting support².
• The balance is shared. Everyone with an API key in the linked account draws on it. A spend limit per workspace keeps 1 project from using it all².
• When it runs out, requests stop. If nothing else has been purchased, API requests stop until the next monthly credit arrives. Nothing is charged to your plan². That is fine for a trial and risky for anything customers rely on, unless purchased credits or auto-reload stand behind it.

So start with something small and useful that can pause without harm: a weekly summary of a report, or first drafts of routine replies for a person to check. The timing helps too. Anthropic says its new small model, Claude Haiku 5.5, costs around 75% less to run on average than the one before it¹, so a small credit now goes further. Before you start, decide how you will know it worked.