Claude Programs: Free Max for Open Source, $0 Team Seats for Scientists, Nonprofit Pricing

The Claude for Open Source Program gives eligible maintainers and contributors 6 months of Claude Max 20x free.

You qualify through any one of these: packages with 500+ dependent repos, 100+ dependent packages or 200,000+ combined monthly downloads; a listed committer or maintainer role on a recognized foundation or language project; 100+ merged pull requests into repos you don't own in the last 12 months; a repo with 20+ unique external contributors in the last 12 months; or a repo with an OpenSSF criticality score of 0.4+. Anthropic also invites maintainers of quietly critical projects to apply.

When the 6 months end, a previous paid plan resumes at your prior rate unless you cancel; otherwise the account returns to the free plan. Anthropic emails you before it ends.

Verified principal investigators at accredited universities and nonprofit research institutes can get a discounted Claude Team plan for their research group: Standard seats at $0/month (regularly $20) and Premium seats at $15/month (regularly $100, 5x more usage).

The plan includes Claude Science, Claude Code and Cowork, connectors to scientific databases, shared projects, file creation, SSO and central billing. Groups can have 1 to 25 seats, and annual billing is $0 / $180 per seat per year.

Promotional pricing lasts 12 months from sign-up and has limited availability; final pricing is confirmed after verification, which usually takes 5 to 7 business days. Groups idle for 90 days may be moved back to standard Team pricing.

Capacity note (October 2026): Anthropic's sign-up page says promotional pricing has reached capacity for labs in Computer Science, AI/ML, Data Science and Informatics, and Software, Computer and Electrical Engineering. Labs in those fields can check back later; other fields (such as biology, chemistry, physics, math and materials science) can still apply.

Key terms: the promo is capped at an initial 10,000 verified scientists, one Plan per lab, and needs a valid payment method. Only the seat fee is discounted: extra usage is billed at standard rates and the API is not included. After 12 months the Plan auto-renews at the then-current price unless you cancel, and charges are non-refundable.

Nonprofits get Claude Team at $8 per user per month, or $3 per user per month for nonprofits based in low- or middle-income countries (World Bank list, which includes Indonesia). Team covers 2 to 150 seats with Claude and Claude Code, file creation, nonprofit connectors such as Blackbaud, Benevity and Candid, SSO and central billing.

Eligible: registered 501(c)(3) organizations and international equivalents, K-12 public and private schools, and certain mission-based healthcare providers. Organizations under 20 people verify through Goodstack in about 2 to 3 minutes; larger ones go through Anthropic's sales team. Anthropic also offers a free AI Fluency for Nonprofits course.