Toggling it again to turn it off immediately after (which I assume most people will miss) seems to guard against this.
As in, what you're toggling on is "use my extra usage balance" not "automatically spend money by adding to my extra usage balance".
I am guessing the vast majority of eligible credit will not be claimed or expire unspent.
Worth mentioning that normal credit expires after 12 months too, use it or lose it.
Anthropic recently (within the last few months) gave out what amounted to around $70 CAD im free credit. I rationed it slowly, spending maybe $5 in a month, using it a few dozen times to allow a Haiku-based task to finish past my usage window.
When Opus and Sonnet 4.6 released, I made the unfortunate mistake of "experimenting" with them on some work that couldn't be thrown away. I hit my timed usage cap, allowed Claude Code to consume 'extra usage' credits, and... nearly vaporized the entire credit balance within a couple tasks.
I understand that Opus and Sonnet are (considerably) more expensive than Haiku, but watching money burn by the dollar, in real-time, was enough for me to turn off extra usage entirely.
EDIT: I guess that means they are indeed running out of cash.
I don't know if they should be handing out more credits right now considering that my Sonnet requests in Claude Code are routinely delayed by several minutes, presumably due to capacity issues...
As far as I can tell, they now have Free, Pro, Max x5, Max x20, Team, and Enterprise tiers. Plus session usage, weekly usage, extra usage (up to a spend limit (set by you) and/or a monthly cap (set by Anthropic)), and now usage bundles, which are extra usage but with a lower price and a fixed amount.
I don't know, but it really feels like there's an LLM churning away somewhere, endlessly tinkering on a PRICING.md file that is gradually accreting strategic slop.
jeremymcanally•1h ago
evbogue•1h ago