Anthropic's March Usage Promotion: How Off-Peak Hours Double Claude Limits

How the Promotion Actually Works

Anthropic's current promotion runs through March 27 at 11:59 PM PT and operates differently than simply increasing your total usage allowance. According to monitoring with the open-source tool onWatch, during off-peak hours, Claude treats your consumed usage as half of what it would normally count.

This means your standard 5-hour limit effectively doubles during promotion hours - not by giving you a separate usage pool, but by halving how your consumption is tracked. The off-peak usage also doesn't count against your 7-day rolling limit.

Off-Peak Schedule Details

• Weekends are entirely off-peak (all day)
• Weekday evenings/nights after 2 PM ET are off-peak
• Peak hours are 8 AM-2 PM ET on weekdays

Practical Impact

Users who regularly hit their limits are seeing significant benefits. Conversations that would normally consume 80-90% of the 5-hour limit during peak hours only use 40-50% during off-peak promotion hours. This effectively doubles your available usage time during the specified periods.

Monitoring Tool

The analysis was conducted using onWatch, an open-source Claude quota monitor available at https://github.com/onllm-dev/onWatch. Version 2.11.21 shows the promo status in both the dashboard and macOS menubar.